It's all about the community

Michael Rosen from Tacticsoft talked about creation of his game “Battle dawn” in a letcure titled “putting yourself out there”. Michael single handedly created a game PBBG (Persistent Browser Based Game) called Battle Dawn, which is an online MMO RTS that is played through your browser.

Michael started very small, and developed the game in his spare time in parallel to his studies. He released it for free and increased and improved it according to feedback he got from games.

Battle Dawn makes its revenue from micropayments where people pay real money for various upgrades in the game, be it visual upgrades for their units, or actual tactical upgrades.

Tacticsoft's employs over 12 people worldwide, none of which ever met Michael in person. Michael hires people by “promoting” them from within the community. For example, all the artwork in the game was done by gamers who played the game and offered to contribute to enhance it visually.

Michael emphasized the importance of building and maintaining a community and spoke about few of the methods he use to do so, from organic growth, to volunteering community managers, and about personally posting links to his game in all the other game communities.

Starting From An Empty Canvas – Casual Game Design

Ofir Katz, founder of Sandhill games, know he was up to a challenge. His lecture was scheduled to be in the afternoon, an hour or more after lunch, but before the afternoon's coffee break.

Sandhill games made a bunch of casual games, amongst is Ring pass not which got very popular and was no.1 game on Kongregate for a while. Ofir who comes from a background in art gave a stunning lecture about how to design a casual game, from scratch.

He demonstrated and showed a few examples, and created a casual game on the spot, with the help of four volunteers from the audience.

The game that was created featured two “players” - and two “pawns” - each owned by a player. The pawns were given colored paper hats, and blindfolds, and the game was constructed step-by-step with suggestions by the audience for rules.

Ofir talked about the difference between core mechanics and “extras” like power-ups and the importance of keeping the basic rules of he game interesting enough before adding artificial game elements that don't effect the gameplay itself.

Ofir kept the audience alert and laughing as the two players moved their game pieces on a stage filled with obstacles in effort to capture the flag of each others.

At the end – Ofir talked about games as an artform and appropriately, raised more questions than answers.

The GameIS 2008 awards.

To top everything off, GameIS 2008 conference concluded by giving away awards to the best achievements in game development in the Israeli game industry during 2008.

The winners were:

Funtactix – Slider Party
Slider party is a futuristic casual shooting game

Compedia – Peleland
Peleland is a online social game world for kids

Ido tal and Hen Maloski – Portal, The Flash Version
Portal : TFV is an adaptation of Valve's game of the year “Portal” into a 2D flash game.

And the Student's award: Office Warz by Bob Productions.
Office warz is a casual shooter game where you use various office supplies to attack your co-workers.

Conclusion:

In overall, GameIS 2008 was by far, the best game developer conference Israel have seen so far. We're have great inspirational lectures, a large attendance, and beneficial networking opportunities.

We hope that GameIS 2009 will be even better, will include multiple international speakers, and many more great Israeli developed games will be presented and talked about.

I've had a blast volunteering to organize it, and hope this year's baby steps will become next year's giant leaps.

Oded Sharon
CEO, Corbomite Games
IGDA Israel Chapter co-coordinator