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The New York Games Conference is focused very heavily on the business aspects of mobile and social game development. Given the prevalence of techniques from mobile and social migrating to console gaming, it is useful for game developers of all interests to learn the terms and acronyms common in this space, such as MAU, DAU, ARPU, K-factor and many more, as well as learn how game developers are shaping ongoing relationships with their players in social and mobile games.

To summarize several of the main points discussed during the day: the sector is maturing and there is less room for small start-ups, major industry players have staked out territory in social and mobile game development, there is a large difference between the skillset needed to make the game initially and to manage the ongoing game design tasks and metric analysis after launch, the task of having potential players discover your game is difficult given the state of the app stores and recent limitations of viral promotion of games, and the choice of which platform for which to develop your game needs to be driven by factors deeper than a summary statistic such as adoption rate.

Acronyms and terms

Metrics – data collected to inform the effectiveness of design decisions and to drive ongoing feature development of games deployed on social networks

MAU – monthly active users - a measure of how popular a game is. At its peak Zynga’sCityville had over 100 million MAU as compared to World of Warcraft’s11.4 million active subscribers in May 2011

DAU – Daily active users – a measure of the ‘stickiness’ of the game play, drawing players back to the game repeatedly as well as a way to examine the effectiveness of viral touch points and marketing campaigns

ARPU – Average revenue per user – a measure of how well the company is monetizing the game play across the user base. ARPUs in the range of 4 to 8 cents are commonplace

K-factor–A measure of a game’s success at viral marketing as a means of expanding its userbase. A K-factor of 1 designates that each register user will bring 1 new registered user in to the game (who will in turn bring in another user and so on.) For more details see http://www.stateofse...xt-web-economy/

Touch points–These are areas in your game design that utilize the interaction between the player, your game implementation and the social features allowed by the underlying platform API to help drive notifications about the player’s achievements out to her social graph

Discovery–The process by which a potential player learns of, searches for and finds your game. Current app stores are very bad at this.

Virality–A measure of how well the attracts new users by the game play either causes the player to advertise the existence of the game to her friends or how well the game utilizes the platform API to advertise the existence of the game to its friends

Cloud gaming–A new game distribution paradigm where the game runs completely on servers, including video frame rendering, and the client is used simply to handle input reads and displaying video streams

Mid-core–A game genre emerging on social network platforms that utilizes the social media platform but incorporates higher strategic demands upon its players

UDID – Unique Device Identifier. Deprecated by Apple for future iOS game development, leading mobile developers to seek new methods of tracking players for metrics collection..


Notes from the sessions

The State of the Games Industry - View From The Top

The first session attended was titled “A View from the Top” and was designed to let mobile and social game company executives discuss what the perceived as the direction the industry was headed. The panel was made up of Matt Hulett, GameHouse (Real Networks); OwaisFarooqui, Atari; Julie Shumaker, RockYou; Sean Spector, GameFly; Omar Abdelwahed, Ubisoft Entertainment and was moderated by Eric Goldberg, Crossover Technologies.

The discussion was lively as Goldberg kept the panelists on their toes. He started by asking if there was still room for start-ups to be successful in the social network games space. The panel advised that the bar has been raised quite high for a game entering this market. They thought there is still room for small developers to find a niche market and serve it well, but that the gold rush years were behind us. The panelists mentioned that there are still under-served markets in the social network games space, and that oddly enough, it is the market of 18-34 year old males that is so well served in other sectors of the industry. The game company, Kabam!, has emerged as a leader in the newly emerging mid-core game space by building games on Facebook that require more strategic decisions of their players.

Goldberg also asked the panel about the choice of mobile platform development and whether there was more opportunity in the emerging Android market. Across the board the panel agreed that no matter which mobile device you choose to develop for, the prime hurdle to overcome is discovery, getting players to find your game. The game stores serve developers quite poorly in this regard. Short of being in the top ten for the category that your game is in, it is very difficult to build awareness of your masterpiece with potential buyers. Farooqui drew a comparison with traditional game retail saying that in this environment there is no way to buy prime locations. There are no aisle ‘end-caps’ in a virtual store, just a single very long shelf. The volume of products available makes it extremely difficult for any game to rise up to become an industry standard. And once one does, such as Angry Birds, it tends to stay at the top, reducing the likelihood of other games drawing players.

When asked to compare the development opportunities on iOS versus Android, the panel was surprisingly cautious about Google’s platform. Everyone acknowledged that Android has momentum, but the challenge from a development perspective is the lack of a unified hardware platform and single store. From a development perspective, these leaders see the Android platform as bringing back the ‘bad old days’ of mobile development with developers needing to cut deals with multiple distribution channels and to support a multitude of hardware specifications.

They acknowledged that Google’s handling of Android was what the platform needed at this time, an openness that allows content to easily be developed, but predicted that it is likely that the search giant will need to shift gears in the future to a more curated market place. However, the panel was also interested to see how Google would act as a publisher. Both Facebook and Apple take a portion of every sale. Shumaker bemoaned the fact that this was the only business model those companies were set up to do. The idea of Google potentially offering a greater share of income to developers by leveraging its impressive ad serving capabilities clearly is keeping these executives from discounting a future with Android.

When Goldberg asked about the apparent lack of innovation in the space Abdelwahed (Ubisoft) was unapologetic. For these leaders the perceived future in the social network space is going to be traditional industry players bringing their IP over from consoles and PC gaming. Shumaker was quick to point out that the innovation is taking place after launch, not necessarily in the initial development. While it is important to have a solid game, she stated that the skillsets needed before launch and after launch, where the game is running as a persistent service, are significantly different. Before launch there are all of the needs for designing game play and infrastructure but once the game is in the players’ hands, there is a greater need to focus on how users are playing the game and to tune the game play and to introduce features to increase retention and to monetize the player experience.

If the perceived closing of the space is discouraging, there is a silver lining for developers looking to carve out a business for themselves. The market is still young and the infrastructure to make these products easy to implement and manage is yet to be built. There is tremendous opportunity for those looking to build the core technologies for this market segment. All of the panelists were interested in seeing greater use of HTML5 to drive discovery and if someone can create a better virtual store-front, there will a huge market for your product.

Finally, it is useful to remember that Social and Mobile game production techniques are moving in to other game segments as publishers and developers outside of this space look to capitalize on the monetization models that have proven successful and produced industry juggernauts over the past three years.

Debate Club: Is there a need for portable consoles like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS after the meteoric rise of iOS and Android smartphones?

The next session pitted Gene Hoffman, CEO, Vindicia and Alex. St. John, CEO, Hi5 supporting the need for portables against Andrew Schneider, President, Live Game rand Teemu Huuhtanen, EVP, Sulake Corporation (Habbo) who argued the supremacy of the smartphone and eventual demise of the dedicated portable.
An informal poll was taken before the session with half of the respondents supporting the pro console side and half coming down on the smartphone side of the debate.

Arguing for the pro side Hoffman and St. John scored points by playing to parents’ fears, stating that as long as they are used as digital babysitters, there will be a market for devices that are a safe sand box. They asked “Do you want your child to possess a device that is constantly connected to everything the internet has to offer?” Furthermore, they posited, “aren’t there some things on your phone you would rather your children not see.”

Gaining momentum and seriousness, they also argued that some games shouldn’t be controlled via a touch interface. Dedicated control buttons and sticks still have a place in the world of 3D navigation and shooter style gameplay. They then returned to the reality of the business of game development and pointed out that targeting a known hardware specification was much easier than dealing with the severe fragmentation in the Android market and that there was not a clear path to successfully earning a living on the smartphone platforms for the majority of developers.

They closed their time by turning their attention to the difference between the focus of a dedicated device versus the multiple purposes of a smartphone. St. John was adamant that a notification from other apps interrupting game play was as bad as game notifications interrupting his other uses of his smartphone.

Speaking in favor of the position, Schneider and Huuhtanen pointed out that smartphones are near ubiquitous. The adoption graphs of the two technologies show a definite decline in the purchase of dedicated portable consoles that is directly offset by the rise of in smartphones. Furthermore, the technical advantage of the dedicated consoles is being reduced by high quality graphics chips and fast processors being released for mobile devices. As more games are made for mobile with engines like Unreal, gamers will come to expect the same experience from mobile as console.

With regards to the question of whether children should have cell phones, Schneider pointed to the ‘pass-back’ effect where a parent will pass the phone to a child in the back seat to keep them amused while traveling. The argument is that with the parents having the device on them at all times, it will inevitably become to be seen as a game console. Furthermore, the diversity, quality, convenience and cost of games will be a major driver for adoption of the technology within families.

Huuhtanen rounded out the argument by pointing out that Sony has been relatively unsuccessful with its portable devices and that Nintendo, while successful in the past, has stumbled with the release of the 3DS. The physical fatigue of 3D for some users limits its appeal, and he further pointed out Nintendo’s over reliance on re-purposing its catalog of intellectual property.

In the end, both sides managed to convince some of the supporters from their opponents. The debate ended, and the moderator swears he didn’t rig the results, in a tie.

Sifteo – Special presentation by David Merrill, President and co-founder of Sifteo

For me, the quote of the day was made in this session: “Bad interface design violates the Human Spec Sheet”

Merrill is an MIT interface guru/entrepreneur who has commercialized his research and started a company named Sifteo. The focus of his company is leveraging new user interface mechanisms to get computers to work more in the way that we work as humans. The Sifteo cube set is interesting in that it allows us to interact with physical objects that have a digital core.

The reason this should be interesting to you is because Sifteo is a new platform for game development. It is made up of blocks with a processor, display and sensors that can detect which blocks are next to each other. The platform was just released to the public and there is an SDK based on C# and the MonoDevelop platform for interested developers.

Visit Sifteo.com/developers for more information.

Cloud Gaming – Evolution or Revolution?

The next panel in the track I attended was with panelists David Wilson, GameStop;Tom DuBois, OnLive; Sean Kane, Counsel, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; Eric Anderson, Samsung Electronics; Chris Lee, Publishing VP, En Masse Entertainment and moderated by Michael Cai, Vice President of Video Games, Interpret.

We already do a lot of our work in the cloud, email, document production, video sharing with friends, keeping up with one another’s lives. How about playing games? You could claim we are already there through matchmaking services like Xbox live and digital distribution platforms like Steam. But this session was about moving the game processing and rendering in to the cloud as well and the production and legal implications for this shift.

Wilson stated the central thesis for this panel, “It is important to keep in mind that cloud is a tool, not the tool. It is good for some things and not for others.” As such, it will end up as a part of a larger corporate strategy for distribution of games.

From a developer’s standpoint, one advantage of cloud processing is that it places PC gaming on an even footing with console development. It will allow programmers to target a single spec on the server side and know that the system is consistent. Lee stated that it’s important to maintain a flexible stance from a development and a publishing end. While there is no guarantee the cloud will be successful for every developer of in distributing for every platform, there will be some combinations that will be profitable. He concluded that there are advantages to targeting that single hardware specification because “right now developing for the PC is like developing for Android. It’s hard to be successful.”

Anderson stated that Samsung is investing in cloud infrastructure because the projected growth of smart TVs is high. This might provide a development and distribution path for a percentage of the market segment that do not want to purchase a console, but still want to play a wide array of games in the living room. The path is yet to be blazed in this regard, but electronics manufacturers are forming strategic partnerships based on cloud distribution of casual games.

Cai asked the panel “Is cloud gaming a way to render existing games or is it a way to change the way games get designed?” The panelists initially agreed that the focus is distribution rather than new game play possibilities. There are hurdles to overcome first such as multiple input devices within a single binary. But upon further prompting one proposed extension of Cloud computing is the ability to take a single game and play across the same game across multiple devices. You could start playing a game on your TV, leave the home and the same game is being played, appropriately scaled back for mobile device/tablet, or even showing up on the embedded screen in your refrigerator. It sounds pie in the sky, and I don’t know that I want to play a game in my kitchen, but it’s interesting in theory.

A major limitation to adopting this method as the sole means of distribution is broadband policy in the United States. In order to stream the video for a HD data stream the client needs 3Mbps download, but there is still a significant percentage of households at less than 2Mbps. In this emerging sector the question is market timing. Finally, the logical place to experiment with this is game trials with digital distribution to consoles, PCs for full game, or episodic content in the cloud.

Smart phones and handhelds – latest in games for portable devices

The next session was with panelists Sean Vanderdasson, SVP, Wildtangent; Volker Hirsch, Research In Motion (RIM); Charles Yim, Google; Stanley Kwon, CBS Interactive; Nathan Camarillo, Freeverse and moderated by Billy Pidgeon, Senior Analyst, M2 Research

The session opened with the panelists mentioning the rise of mid-core gaming and marveling at the ARPU being generated by Kabam!which was significantly higher than other players in the social space. The major point raised here is the migration of console style game play to both social and mobile, markets that are traditionally dominated by more casual game mechanics.

When asked if introducing new people to gaming led to higher revenues, the panelists skirted the issue, instead focusing on platform growth and usage patterns. Kwon was quite optimistic about tablets as an emerging media entertainment device and predicted significant growth in the larger format.Echoing comments made in the portable console/smartphone debate from earlier in the day, Vanderdasson was adamant that game play on smart phones needs to be easily interruptable; arguing that developers should not assume their game is the primary application being used. Tablets, though, have a different usage pattern. The greater screen size and the ability to focus on a single task on a tablet for a longer period of time allows for deeper experiences to be created. The business side note is that the price point for these products could conceivably stabilize at a $20-$30 price point instead of the unsustainable for creators$2.99 – free price point.Finally returning to the question, Hirsch noted that except for Angry Birds, there are no huge franchises that started on this platform. The conclusion he drew is that in this area it is quite difficult to make money.

An interesting side comment bubbled up through the panelists with regard to UI in touch games. The panelists agreed that a very large challenge facing developers is the creation of new user interface paradigms. There was general disapproval for the virtual joystick interaction on screen. It is likely that a creative developer who finds a new interaction paradigm on touch will have an advantage in the near term.

Pidgeon asked if ads were going to help developers monetize more players. Yim drew an interesting parallel of the current state of the games industry to the early days of cable television. The fracturing of the media space into multiple channels allows for there to be more niche content, but that getting the content to the player does not equate with successfully getting them to pay for the game.Yim went on to state that the challenges facing developers in this area continue to grow as more potential revenue channels emerge. For example in 2008/09 the main drivers of revenue for iOS platform offerings was paid download and advertisements. Now the main driver is in app purchases. He wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what might be the next revenue model. The warning is that developers need to be nimble in thinking how they are going to keep the revenue stream flowing so that they can keep creating new games. He concluded that “Being a game developer is much more complex than it was just two or three years ago.”

The moderator then set his sights on the opportunities in the android market, and asked “is it just numbers?”

This brought up a lively discussion. The overall feeling in the room was that right now, Android is too fragmented a platform to develop for if you are serious about surviving as a developer.Yim began by arguing that the question comes down to distribution and monetization. Just because you acquire a user does not mean you can monetize the user. He offered that the most attractive deployment option might be the Barnes & Noble app store for the Nook. Hirsch followed on with the question every publisher needs to be asking , “Is Google going to go Apple route?” and develop a single Android store. Google has been a hands off partner, allowing for many different stores to exists from different providers. But the flip side is that this makes some industry players remember the “bad old days” of an unfavorable development environment of different platforms, different handsets and most importantly different publishing and distribution deals.

Viral gaming – trends in discovery and promotion

Closing the day out was a panel with Jeff Anderson, Majesco Entertainment; Mihir Shah, Tapjoy; Douglas Yellin, Large Animal Games; Daniel Cheng, Greystripe; and moderated by Brad Hargreaves, General Assembly.

The panel started by examining what had happened with recent changes in patterns of discovery of new games after Facebook changed the manner that developers could push notifications to users’ walls. Facebook users loved that they stopped getting new notification from games, but for developers a major viral channel for discovery had been removed.

Anderson noted that games are driving revenue for Facebook.Accordingly, Facebook will be likely be adding back in some features that developers can use to attract customers through either the ticker of possibly sponsored stories.

With the changes on the Facebook platform, developers have had to innovate to overcome the limitations imposed upon virality. Yellin argued that as a result developers have needed to up the quality of the game to allow the developer to ‘own’ the customer, to make them willing to share their accomplishments in the game with their friends rather than push the notifications out to their news feed from the game directly.The panel agreed that they had witnessed ‘notification fatigue’ with players willing to pay directly rather than spam friends for in game benefits. Yellin went on to give the example of an in game ‘re-mix’ station that Large Animal created which allows their players to generate new content and then to share that with their social network. He stated that this one viral touch-point accounted for 57% of their new traffic generation.

As a group, all panel members agree that there has been a shift away from incentivized campaigns. They wondered if there are certain ads that it makes sense for a player to interact with to unlock content? The general feeling of the panel was that using ads to drive player acquisition was a losing proposition. However, this panel also acknowledged the great difficulty relying on users finding your product in the infinite shelves of an online store. At present they suggested that the best hope for the future is to use ‘vertically striped’ HTML 5 sites to drive traffic toward your game. This could leave companies like Facebook, Apple and other hub owners starving for revenue as stores diminish in importance as the place new products are discovered.

The panel concluded with a final question – is there room for small developers in the social games space? There was agreement across the panel that the land grab days of social game development are over. The bar for content is set too high and the likelihood of gaining an 50 million MAU level is low. Given that USA Today recently reported that Zynga’s next title, Castleville, boasts movie quality production and a soundtrack recorded with a 75 piece orchestra and a choir, I am inclined to agree with the panel. But the panelists also stressed that there are still plenty of opportunities in mobile development. Developers wading in to those waters will need to keep in mind that the development cycles are brutally short, with development complete in one to two weeks and patches delivered in a single day.

Written by Bill Crosbie, photos and editing by Drew Sikora

(Images courtesy: MeeGoexperts.com @Geekonomics)

Looking at the devices

Take a look at Acer’s Iconia M500. With a 10” screen, 1280x800 resolution and powered by the Intel® Atom™ processor, the M500 is equipped to be versatile enough to handle gaming, entertainment, and productivity. Read reviews on Engadget, AllaboutMeeGo, SlashGear, Gottabemobile, MeeGoNews, MeeGoExperts and UMPCportal.com

(Images courtesy: Engadget.com)

Not to be left out, MeeGo netbooks were also present. Here are some standouts:

• Asus Eee PC X101. This model in particular got lots of attention in the media. Reviews on Engadget, Netbooknews, and liliputing.com
• Lenovo IdeaPad S100 with MeeGo: Review from PC World here and netbook news here
• Acer Aspire One Happy 2. More here
• Samsung N100. More here

Conference Background

Within this area you will find dozens of game development companies, with a heavy focus on middleware development from companies like Epic Games and Emergent. The area also hosts many universities that have game development programs like North Carolina State and University of Chapel Hill. What you have here is pretty much a self-contained and sustaining game development ecosystem as the schools and companies work closely together to foster development of the next generation of game developers.

Helping in this endeavor is the Triangle Game Initiative, which is also the driving force behind the TGC. The Initiative is a group of local developers not only looking to foster development at the education level, but the government level as well with tax breaks for local companies, for example. TGI is showing the rest of the industry what is possible if local developers band together for a common goal.

When TGI sought out sponsorships from local colleges/universities for the conference, they decided there was no reason to go with just one, but form a group program involving all that included some form of digital media education, which is pretty much all of them – NC State and Chapel Hill in particular have been investing in computer graphics since the late 1960s. NC State also has a Digital Games Research Center which is the primary focus for students attending for the Game Development and other related Bachelor degrees from the college. Wake Tech Community College, the largest community college in the region, offers an AAS degree in Simulation and Game Development. Chapel Hill, as mentioned, runs a computer graphics program and Duke University boasts strength in computational geometry and AI, with a fully-enclosed, six-sided virtual reality environment.

All these schools are participating in support of the Game Development University, which were targeted sessions that can be attended by those who have purchased a discounted Student Pass ($25/day) and provide students knowledge they can apply to their students and continued growth in game development.

Conference Overview

The venue for the event was primarily located in the Marriott hotel’s ballrooms and conference rooms clustered together on the main floor. A few panels and the keynotes were held across the street at the convention center in one of two rooms. Despite the rather small size of some of the Marriott rooms, I didn’t have much trouble getting in to any of the sessions I was looking to attend when arriving reasonably early (~15 minutes). I do wish they had been able to set up registration in the convention center lobby rather than the hall outside the Marriott ballrooms, as that made things a bit crowded and confusing (“are you standing in line?” “no, just chatting with some friends, go ahead”). Also the signs for the conference were not readily apparent, at least to me. I must be too used to big banners with huge conference logos ? While I didn’t mind traveling between the convention center and hotel for sessions (it's not a long walk or anything) it would be nice to have it all in one place.

TGC had a pretty sizeable expo thanks to all the companies in the area. I didn’t spend much time in there but the stalls were all set up well and there was still plenty of room for people to mill about. Exhibitors ranged from schools to indie developers to robotics clubs to large companies. There was a networking lounge towards the center that had beanbags and chairs (and lollipops!) that hosted gatherings for students and pros alike to partake in various activities like resume reviews. Companies on the floor were also taking resumes from students as well.

Obviously it’s not a game development conference without some parties, and TGC did not disappoint. The local IGDA chapter hosted an opening party at a private bar for anyone to attend, which was a wonderful networking event for any students that happened to stop by (I met a few). The parties the two following nights were reserved only for VIPs and premium pass holders, but that served the purpose of allowing the industry pros a nice tight gathering in which to power network over Mediterranean food one night and yummy appetizers the next.

Select Session Coverage

Breaking into the Games Industry (Gaiiden)
Go Procedural: A Better way to make games (dgreen02)
Practical Direct 3D 11 Tessellation (dgreen02)
How to Qualify your Game Publisher (dgreen02)
Raising Capital to Build a Game (dgreen02)

Breaking into the Games Industry

I’ve listened to a countless number of panels like these, and they all generally spout the same stuff – generally. Yes, this panel was no different, but there are always some new things that crop up here and there that make me sit up and go “hey, haven’t heard that one before!”. Sometimes it’s even as simple as being worded differently but in a way that makes way more sense. The panel for this talk was huge – with seven people on it. Given that panels can quickly digress into la-la land, I wasn’t holding out much hope for an hour long session. But I was pleasantly surprised at the ability of each panel member to stay focused, on topic and succinct. So that’s mainly where a lot of the greatness comes from in this session.

The panelists were John Austin (VP Tech, Emergent); Keith Friedly (Designer, Insomniac); Sandy Dockter (HR, Atomic Games); Paul McLaurin (Red Storm); Tim Johnson (Recruiting Manager, Epic Games); Ryan Stradling (Sr Dev Dir, EA); Suzanne Meiler (Dir Design & Game, Vaco). Each started by describing how they got into the industry:

Keith graduated from the second class of DigiPen in 1997 and actually took a job over in Belgium as a programmer. Yes, he was so dedicated at wanting to get into games he actually left the country. He returned to the US as a designer to work for Sony around 2000 before ending up at Insomniac.

Sandy did an unpaid internship to get the experience she needed. She recommends you do anything you can to show what you can do, HR people love that.

Paul graduated University of Chapel Hill with a Masters in Computer Science, but it was a summer internship that gave him the experience he needed to land a job out of college, stating specifically that he learned more in that one summer than his entire college career (but still recommends going to school!)

Tim simply had the connections, knowing people at Black Storm when they were growing their company and asked to help.

Ryan had to take a round-about approach, having no luck submitting resumes out of college with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. He took a job outside the industry in 3D hardware until he was offered a position at EA 11 years ago. Now he runs the local EA studio in Raleigh. He says to keep the passion alive and always have something playable ready to show.

Susan went to school in Raleigh for communication and was out at SIGGRAPH where she made contacts, including the president of a local Raleigh company. Upon returning home she sent in her resume and landed the job.

John took up Susan’s story and reminded everyone that networking opens a door, a demo gets you in.

Resume tips

Sandy: I spend about 10 seconds on a resume. “Will work for free" is a gamble, sometimes does not match your actual worth. There is a fine line between persistence and peskiness, do not nag companies for a response, but don’t let them think you’re uninterested. Don’t call, email first. Then call once. Show your work!

John: The purpose of a resume is to get you a phone interview, not a job. Relevant information only, no longer than a page

Tim: Make sure your demo works! No HR or recruiter will bother trying to troubleshoot a demo that does not work

Paul: Experience is key. Internship at big company or group project during school. School is important but experience is more so

Ryan: Do not use acronyms the HR person can't understand from out of industry positions. In general, no acronyms at all. Wants to see completed work

Susan: Portfolio of a few really great images vs. pages upon pages of stuff is key

Artist demo reel tips

Tim: List out what exactly you did when showing stuff from group work, don’t take credit for the whole work

Breaking from testing into development

Sandy & Ryan: However, don't focus too much on that higher-level position that you forget that you're supposed to be testing a game and finding bugs - i.e. your current job!!

Paul: Keep up side projects so that Q&A doesn't degrade your skills over time

Interview tips

Go Procedural: A Better way to make games

First we were shown a demo of a user-created real-time bullet simulation including- fracturing wall particles, smoke effects, the works. Then he revealed the author of the demo was only 15 years old, which professed the technologies’ ease of use.

When it comes to creating procedural content, they used the analogy of baking a cookie – instead of focusing on the end result (the actual cookie) the focus is on the recipe and the creation process. The first example was a demonstration of a fracturing cube. A cube was created and placed in the world, and then a node was attached to the geometry using the real-time node based modifier list which generated random points on the cube. Finally a fracture node was then attached to the list – after creating the ground plane in the world, and enabling collision detection they started the simulation the cube would fall and fracture on the specified points, like magic. Changing individual elements of the nodes and restarting the simulation would yield different procedural results.

The benefits of procedural content are numerous – smaller teams, higher throughput, higher quality, parallel work flow, more iterations, increased usability and ease of tool creation. The whole mantra of procedural content creation seems to be “explore, create, refine”. The practical in-game uses for these types of procedural effects are also numerous with applications ranging from visual effects, level design/construction, to character customization and animation.

At the end of the presentation Dr. Salvini showed us real-world examples of the technology at work in “Killzone 2” for Playstation 3. Anybody interested in procedural content should jump over to the Side Effects Software homepage and see what they have to offer.

Practical Direct 3D 11 Tessellation

The talk started off with a quick overview of the changes in Direct3D. In Direct3D 9 (D3D9) the pipeline is relatively simple with Vertex and Pixel shaders. In Direct3D 11 (D3D11) the pipeline gets quite a bit more complicated. We have Vertex, Hull, Tessellation, Domain, Geometry and finally Pixel shaders. Confused yet? Yea, this is a sort of complicated topic so I’ll leave the task of teaching D3D11 to somebody else, the main thing I took away from this session ( being a D3D9 developer with no D3D11 experience ) was the large number of technical and art-creation issues raised by this new technology. At the very least we have to change some core aspects of the D3D9 art creation pipeline to get satisfactory results from D3D11.

Ok enough of that, so what is with this whole tessellation thing? With the addition of the tessellation stages to the pipeline we can computationally add geometric detail to rendered models in real-time. I suppose the best example would be a cobble stone surface such as the ones used in the demo shown to us.

Using D3D9 we could do things like normal mapping, relief mapping, etc. to simulate depth/height of the surface. In D3D11 we can dynamically add more geometry in the shader to achieve this effect even better than before. The geometry is best tessellated using distance based level-of-detail, also the angle of the surface (EyeVector (dot) SurfaceNormal ) is useful to modify the amount of a tessellation applied to a piece of geometry.

When it comes to actual creation of art assets for use in a D3D11 game engine with tessellation, you’ll need to take care to assure the mesh is “uniformly quadrafied”, this is hard to explain, but because of the way the tessellation works, if you want consistent results, your geometry will need to be just about uniformly broken into evenly sized quads. Gridded input surfaces are the best food for the tessellation pipeline it seems. You have to be careful with the way the texture UVs are setup, there are certain limitations in addition to careful consideration of smoothing groups and removal of height displacement on geometry seams. Fading in the displacement map heights should go some way to alleviating tessellation artifacts. Some other tips include passing in the screen coverage of the primitive to the tessellator. When it comes to rendering the shadow maps, using the low-poly un-tessellated control mesh is recommended.

These art creation issues are compounded by a relative lack of D3D11-centric-tools. There is the Nvidia Bake Tool, also Crazy Bump to generate the displacement maps for the geometry, in addition to Parallel NSight, and Perf Shader but due to the infancy of D3D11 rendering, we still have a ways to go.

The bottom line is that it’s a lot harder to re-use old Direct3D 9 art assets than anticipated.

How to Qualify your Game Publisher

• Financial Stability
• Reputation
• Experience
• Distribution Abilities
• Producers/Staff
• Acceptance Procedures

You’ll want to investigate the reputation of the publisher as well. Are there other developers coming back for repeat work, are they just working with publisher in “one-offs”? Do research into the public opinion and the press opinion of the publisher. Multiple titles per developer is preferable, as are favorable reviews of their games. In addition be sure to investigate the communities of the games they have published. Any kind words or references from fellow developers are key factors to determining a publisher’s reputation.

The amount of experience a publisher has in publishing games in your genre is crucial. Determine if the games they have published in your genre are successful, and look for examples from other developers in your genre. An added bonus would be if they have produces with a pedigree for moving games of your genre onto the marketplace.

Distribution is a major aspect of a publisher’s duties; you’ll want to see a strong track record domestically, and overseas. Ideally a publisher will have localized versions of their hit games in most major territories. Spend some time going out to the mall, and to major retailers and check to see if their games are sold there. Sure they’re going to tell you they can get your game into “Retail Store X”, go to store X and verify yourself. Look into the publisher’s history of cross platform launches or ports. If the publisher also handles digital distribution check the digital storefronts for games in their catalog.

The producers employed at the publisher are a very important part of your interaction with them. Before you get in bed with a publisher you’d want to make sure they have qualified producers, look to see how long the producers have been working at the publisher. Check how many projects have they been a part of, what were they? You want to gather as much information as possible. How many games does each producer simultaneously work on at the publishing company? You don’t want to see producers taking on more than 3-5 projects at once. How many projects are the producers working on now? Where do they fit in on the “food chain”? These are all questions you should be asking a potential publisher.

Finally the acceptance procedures of the publisher need to be scrutinized. You’ll want to see if your contact in the publishing company is the final decision maker when it comes to signing your product. If not, who is? Who are the other people involved in the decision making loop for the project. When it comes to milestone payments, how long can you expect to wait for feedback or approvals on milestones? What happens if a milestone is not approved? Ideally you’d want a 1-2 week turnaround on milestone payment approval.

The moral of the story is, make sure to investigate every aspect of a potential publisher before you sign your game’s life away.

Raising Capital to Build a Game

I really loved this session, unfortunately there were not many people sitting through this one – but the people who were there meant business. I’ll try to cover some of the more interesting points from the notes that I took. The discussion started out describing the current state of the market – it’s tough to secure capital but it’s getting a bit better according to the panel. The traditional publisher model that has been around for so long is struggling in today’s climate.

So, what can you do to enhance your chances of getting funding? Well you need to have a good business plan and a good team. If necessary fill in members of the team to make the investors comfortable. When it comes to securing money from venture capitalists, they like big bets. It helps to look at things from an investor’s point of view; they want to invest in a company not just a single game. In other words they want to back management who knows how to run and grow a business. This is how you should think of things, not just “how can I get money to make my game”.

The old saying around the racetrack applies to investors, they bet on the jockey not the horse. You need to find a “champion” investor within the group, somebody who believes in you and who will defend your position when you’re not around. If necessary you many need to go out and find a 3rd party commissioned representative (i.e. somebody with experience raiding capital) to interact with the investors on your behalf.

According to the panel there are investment rounds of different scales based on the types of investor involved. For instance Angel Investors will do rounds of up to $1M, where Venture Capitalists typically invest a lot more, millions of dollars at a time. There was a brief discussion about the impact of geographical location on investor attitudes; for the most part the south east is about 20 years behind the curve of technological investments. The panel advised to look to the west coast for investment money, suggesting companies on the west coast will be quicker to get the joke.

In addition to investment money from Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors; there are also government grants available to small businesses. Some include NC Idea, Movable Code, and SBIR Grants. In order to secure a government grant you need a “catchy differentiator” to make you stand out from the rest of the businesses applying for the grant. “One North Carolina” is a grant specifically for first time entrepreneurs. Becoming a Qualified Business Venture ( QBV ) allow your investors to receive a tax credit for up to 25% of money invested into the company. This certainly can’t hurt things; the only catch is that you’ll need to generate a financial review statement for these kinds of benefits will usually cost a company around $10k a year. I asked the panel if this 25% tax break applies to funds you invest in your own company, the answer is no. Only people who are not employed at the company are applicable for the 25% tax break.

It’s not easy, and never will be – but if you present yourself as a well managed business entity, and you can win over some investors in a group, your chances of receiving funding should be greatly increased.

Tuesday, 17th November 2009 – Leeds

Nokia’s Business Development Manager Ben Roszczewiski opened the evening with a high-paced session of slides and quick-fire Q&A. Roszczewiski ‘s primary aim was to explain the Ovi Store and introduce us to Forum Nokia. Following on was Keith Varty, Nokia’s Senior Business Development Manager who detailed some of the statistics and information to the UK market. Finally, Forum Nokia’s Chief Engineer of Web Technologies Petro Soininen stepped up to deliver some of the more technical information that will be useful to developers.

Introducing: The Ovi Store

The Ovi Store is Nokia’s equivalent of the App Store but features many different types of content, be it apps in the form of games, tools and entertainment widgets or handset customisation features such as wallpapers, ringtones, icons and themes. Nokia are promising that music and other forms of mobile content will be delivered to us by the Ovi Store in the future.

The Ovi Store is currently available on around 60 Nokia handsets and will only present apps that can be used on your handset – ensuring that users only get to access content that is compatible with their phones. Nokia were very keen to convey the sheer reach of the Ovi Store – with millions of Nokia handsets in use today, the Ovi Store allows developers to reach out to a potentially huge market.

At the time of the event, the Ovi Store features around 7,000 apps (including games) for sale, with the current rate of growth seeing approximately 500 new apps added to this each week. Nokia also cited that the Ovi Store has 50% user growth per month, a 70% per month growth in items downloaded and the average of 8 items downloaded per user, per month. Admittedly, the service is in a relatively early stage of its cycle so the growth rates are likely to slow down over time – but in my opinion the appetite is definitely there. It should also be noted that no figures for average sale price were cited by Nokia and that by “items” we must assume that this is of all types of content, not just apps or games. The Nokia team is aware of the various complaints people have about finding content on the Apple App Store and stated that their next biggest challenge going forward is the searching and filtering of “too much content” on their Ovi Store. They are exploring ways of solving these problems for users before the Ovi Store platform hits the size of the App Store.

Sales from the Ovi Store see revenues being split 70% to the developer and 30% to Nokia – the same split seen in the Apple store. Also like the App Store, developers are free to set their prices and can offer free or paid-for content. When asked by a member of the audience, it was confirmed that at the current time it is not possible to offer a free app with internal monetisation features. He did, however, state that it’s something they are “looking into” for the future.

One interesting difference to Apple’s offering that Nokia were keen to push is that the Ovi Store will present apps and content based on your geographic location. So imagine you’ve just arrived in Paris the store will begin serving up applications with relevance to the geographic area you’re in, recommending Parisian restaurant guides or art galleries. Many of the delegates were interested by this concept as the apps and content appeared to be targeted to each user. Nokia are also promoting the integration possibilities of their applications with the Ovi services they offer, such as the Location Services and Map Services that developers can hook into for a wide range of uses. Some such uses can be seen in a Nokia video that we were presented – we saw public transport firms overlaying the position of their trains in real time and so on. As a game developer, it’d be interesting to see some of the map and location services being used to make augmented reality titles or to dynamically match-make with people in your local area.

Forum Nokia

All of the speakers were very keen to push that Forum Nokia is “there” for developers and can offer advice on a range of topics, such as demographics, early information of new handset models, advice on which price point to set for your application and foster intimate relationships to provide the best opportunities for developers. I felt the latter offer was geared towards high-profile developers with a highly popular app, but as the Nokia team said – it’s all down to the content that we, as developers, create.

What came as a huge surprise to the audience was that if you subscribed to Forum Nokia’s Launchpad service at 300 Euros a year, Nokia will lend you physical devices for testing and development as long as you “remember to send them back”. A 300 Euro subscription is affordable to smaller studios and if it opens up a range of development hardware for free, it can only be a good thing. If you’ve not signed up for this service, you still get to use the Virtual Device emulators provided online by Forum Nokia so you can still develop for the devices in some capacity without actually possessing one.

Development

When it comes to developing your app you have a huge choice of Nokia handsets to target. Nokia informed us that the touch-screen devices such as the 5800 and the N97 are, unsurprisingly, leading the way in terms of sales on the Ovi Store and it’s likely that these are most attractive platforms for developers. These handsets are more like the iPhone in functionality so would offer game developers some obvious porting options for their titles.

After choosing your handset you must decide on how you actually want to deliver your content. The choice of options here is pretty vast and ranges from low-level Symbian C++ all the way up to HTML and Javascript. This is where it gets interesting for developers. The choice of development tool depends on two things, the type (series) of handset used and the size and complexity of your application. The Series 40 handsets allow Java and Flash Lite 3 as their tools of choice. The newer, more beefy, Series 60 models offer the widest range of choice, featuring the Web Runtime (WRT), Flash Lite, Java and Qt. These devices also allow you to get “closer to the metal” and work with the device at a lower level using Symbian C++.

Simple turn-based games, for example, could be coded using the Web Runtime (WRT), the HTML5 and Javascript solution. A nice touch of the WRT system was the ability to create “mobile widgets” that integrated into the user’s main screen and could minimise to an “at a glance” view. This technology is usable out of the box and appears to be the quickest way for people to get their content onto the devices.

For more graphics-rich games the developer can choose Flash Lite or look to Java, the Qt framework or even C++. In a simple example we were shown a simple Wolfenstein 3d style game written with Qt that featured a live web browser rendered as a scene object and a realtime editor that could use Qt’s scripting language to change how the game behaved. A simple demonstration, but it did show the use of OpenGL ES and the other integrated device APIs, such as the web browser functionality and scripting features of Qt. Nokia are putting a lot of work into exposing a lot of their APIs to the Qt environment and appear to be pushing it as their tool of choice. By the end of 2009 they hope that many of their Ovi and handset-specific services will be accessible from Qt and will therefore allow quicker, simpler application development. Qt can be obtained here – it’s worth a look if you’ve never heard of it before.

The key thing to remember is that applications need to be Symbian Signed before they can be published to the Ovi Store or deployed to a handset. This is really about protecting the device, the user and your application from being modified or doing something it shouldn’t do. Delegates were encouraged to get used to this process before critical deadlines were looming as it can take time to familiarise yourself with the process and any issues that come out of it.

Ian Weston, a speaker from Majinate was keen to state that the face of mobile development has changed significantly in the past 5 or 6 years and he sees the industry polarising somewhat. Applications have gone from costing hundreds of thousands of pounds and many years to develop to being turned around in a matter of months with a small budget. He sees the polarity between the two, noting that it will always be necessary to code the complex and low level applications but conceding that the smaller/simpler applications are gaining popularity between developers and users alike.

Conclusions

As a developer, the choice of development language on Nokia devices has evolved beyond the previous option of Java – we’ve now got a rich choice of tools to use and can go down to a low level if we need to. The Ovi Services available now and by the end of this year provide a wide range of features and allow you to code geographically aware games – even those that access the map features of the device. The clearest thing to us all is that the Ovi Store looks to be fertile ground for game developers and if you’re interested, you’ll be supported all the way by Forum Nokia.

MIGS 2009 Conference Overvew

The sessions that I attended were all set up very well, and I especially liked how the keynotes were laid out, with three session rooms opened up to form a large ballroom and which also lent 3 seperate projector screens to display slides, so people on the far edges of the room weren't craning their necks around to see. Last year the keynotes were held adjacent to one of the Expo areas, and so a lot of noise bled between the two. Speaking of the Expo, it featured the usual suspects from around the Montreal area, but the main lack was in aesthetics. It's not a big deal, but I have noted in previous years that the lighting they would do for the Expo was always so nice - I guess that was largely the Palais des congrès staff at work for that.

Everyone I talked to had a great time, as did I, and all the sessions I attended were very good. MIGS will be returning in early November next year.

External Coverage

Looking Ahead: MIGS 2009 - interview with director Alain Lachapelle
Another interview with director Alain Lachapelle
Ken Rolston (Big Huge Games) - A Narrative Designer's Toolkit
Chris Hecker (Definition Six) - Meaningfully Mass Market
Yiochi Wada (Square Enix) - Fostering Cultural Diversity in Game Development
Reid Schneider (EA Montreal) - Preaching to the Choir: Do We Make Games For Ourselves?
David Sirlin (Sirlin Games) - Every Click Counts
Randy Van Der Vlag (Big Blue Bubble) - Big Worlds on Small Screens
Jason Holtman (Valve) - Games Entertainment in the Age of Connectivity
Joe Booth (EA Montreal) - You'll Never Beat Nintendo
Jon Jones - How To Love Outsourcing (slides only)
Glenn Fiedler (Sony Santa Monica) - Solving the Networked Physics Puzzle (slides only)
#migs09 twitter hash | #migs twitter hash

In additon, MIGS Advisory Committee chair Jason Dell Rocca has his own perspective on his blog.

Select Session Coverage

Designing Assassin's Creed 2

• As you are writing things down, you are forced to face them right away and answer any questions that may arise - this was mentioned in the Gamasutra coverage
• If you keep proper notes, and don't simply delete and rewrite sections of the design document (bad idea) then you will have a running log of your design decisions from start to finish. How bad a position do you think you'll be in if someone else on the team argues against a feature, and you can't even recall exactly why you wanted that feature included in the first place? Remember, AC2 had over 230 features to track.
• Having something people can reference limits the amount of time they need to stop working and ask questions. Why does this have to be done like this? Why does that object need to go there? This means they can focus on being more productive. The key to this, as mentioned in the Gamasutra coverage (really, it's required reading for this), is creating the documentation in a form that is acceptable to the end-users. PowerPoint presentations and huge design bibles are out of the question.
• As with any project, failing earlier is cheaper than failing later. To fail in design is cheaper than failing in production. However your design has to be created deep enough so that you can even recognize possible failures that would crop up during the production process. This takes a lot of experience to pull off, it should be noted.

I'd also like to quickly mention the scope of this game's development, which spanned 300+ developers in 3 world-wide studios. Ubisoft Montreal handled the core of the game, while satellite Ubisoft offices in Singapore and France handled other aspects, like the villa and linear missions. That's pretty impressive.

Finally, Patrick mentioned a neat little design document trick he used. In the design, whenever he was forced to define some arbitrary value, like perhaps the length of time it took for a player to be lost amid a crowd, he would enclose the numeric vlaue within brackets - []. So if you were designing a FPS and wanted to list how many bullets a clip in a gun would hold, you would list the gun as holding [100] rounds of ammo. This is data that you don't want to exclude from a design document, but also data you know you can't accurately define without actually play testing the game. So initially this serves as a way for a designer to fully complete documentation, and later during production it serves as a marker for programmers to recognize as being data that will need to be changed/tweaked and not in any way hard coded. I like it.

How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design

Well wait, wasn't that what she had been doing since she first started back when she was 15, playing Dungeons and Dragons and using Legos as (literally) the building bricks for her ideas? Not exactly. She wanted to revisit the time when she designed a game herself. No team. No intermediary. No one else take her vision and create something for people to play. Just her.

It started with a discussion with her young daughter about the Middle Passage, which she had learned in school as part of Black History Month. Understandably, she had not quite grasped the full implications regarding what the Middle Passage actually meant. So Brenda whipped out some craft supplies and threw together a quick game prototype for her daughter to play, with a simple rule set and gave her daughter some additional perspective. From there, her designs led her to designing Train, which is based upon the Holocaust. This, as you may imagine, garnered a lot of attention - but it wasn't based upon the game's basis, although Brenda admits she did have to weather hatred from many people who found the game offensive. The big break came when she gave this very talk at the Triangle Game Conference in Raleigh, NC and a writer from The Escapist happened to be in the audience. The story hit the site and Train was unintentionally launched.

Designing Train (and other similarly-themed) games has brought Brenda back into her "happy place". Not only has she needed to acquire new skills, such as painting the wooden play peices, building rail road tracks, or knitting blades of grass into a burlap sack, but she's had to do them all entirely on her own. All the design decisions were also completely up to her. She's also been able to meet, in person, everyone who has played Train (prior to it's installation at an art gallery in Savannah). Getting that personal feedback and being able to watch play your game isn't something a lot of designers get to take part in these days.

Ultimately I will admit a lot of the detail from Brenda's talk escapes me. However that's where designer David Sirlin comes in, as his writeup of Brenda's lecture delves much deeper into her design and motive behind Train, including his personal take on the matter. As a bonus you'll find yet more MIGS coverage before and after his writeup on Brenda's talk.

And yes, although her next game does again focus on some of the more dismal aspects of human nature (hiring illegal Mexican workers) she has promised that she'll be switching tactics soon, and going after brighter ideals.

How To Make Games That Aren't Fun

Randy admitted halfway through his talk that the title was a lie to draw us all in to the room. "I really don't know how to do it," he said. But he did have some ideas. The premise behind his lecture was to create games that were engaging, but not "fun". In other words, games that focused on serious material and treated that material in a realistic manner. So, you have a game where you're part of a squad of soldiers and have to shoot bad guys. It requires you to make strong tactical decisions, such as a member of your group being wounded and forcing you to leave him behind to complete the mission. You then return to find he's be tortured and shot. It's easy to turn a scenario into something that's not fun, but an entire game? That's a bit daunting, but Randy tries to envision a game where you are working in a hospital and have to make decisions that could end patient's lives. There aren't really any rewards for saving people, if you do then you're just simply doing a good job. Do you send home a tired nurse and risk being shorthanded if a woman gives birth? Or do you keep him on duty and he ends up botching a surgery?

The problem comes from the fact that people engage in games for reasons other than fun all the time. People who play games like SOCOM want to know what it's like to operate in a squad and perform skills that real NAVY Seals do out in the battlefield. They're not neccessarily having fun in the way of shouting and cheering "hey look! I just slit that guy's throat without him even knowing I was there! Yipeee!!" but they are enjoying the experience of pretending to be someone they aren't. Not all games are accompanied by smiles and laughter, many are played with grim-set faces of complete concentration as players try to out-think their opponents. They'll no doubt look back upon the experience as fun, but at the moment they are playing they are either concentrating hard or even cursing at the screen as they die just before escaping a level for the umpteenth time. I can certainly recall plenty of gameplay experiences I wouldn't call "fun", but after completing them I did feel a certain amount of satisfaction. When I didn't, that was just bad game design poking me in the eye.

But again, I've digressed into situations within a game, and not the entire game itself. While Randy's idea for a hospital game fit the parameters of a game that wasn't fun, it was also a game I didn't feel any reason to want to play. Because it didn't sound fun? Or because it didn't seem to suit my tastes? Perhaps a bit of both. But since I keep ending up hypothizing distinct scenarios, it lends me to think that while we can't make an entire game that's not fun, it's certainly a thought we can apply to specific gameplay scenarios to make them darker and impose a greater affect upon the player.

Then again it could also simply open the doors for yet more video game violence controversy. But someone needs to push those buttons as well.

In the end it's all pretty much food for thought. Check out Gamsutra's coverage of the session and the comments there for more to munch on.

Introduction

That was really the one and only real push to get a conference started - in the years since there was still plenty of discussion, but no real moves were made to actually do anything. Then, in 2007, I got wind of this consumer show called America's Videogame Expo (VGXpo), which was held in Philadelphia, PA. What caught my eye was the fact that they were having several game industry sessions as a sort of side show to the main event. It wasn't much, but it was something and I decided to check it out. What I found was both encouraging and dissapointing at the same time. Encouraging was the fact that developers like Tommy Tallarico were willing to take the time to attend such an event, dissapointing was the fact that only about 25 people were in attendance to hear him dish our great advice about getting started in the industry. Furthermore, many of them didn't really know there was anything about game development out there like the IGDA or sites like GameDev.net.

I returned to VGXpo in 2008 to find the situation had not improved all that much. While there was definitely a larger crowd in attendance for the industry side of things, and the speakers were of the same caliber as before, this time they had a huge response to the consumer show, so much that it practically smothered the industry event and relegated us to side rooms that were difficult to locate and poorly marked. Heck, I realize now that I didn't even really cover it anywhere here on the site. However, there was definitely a better sense of community from the various people attending, and stuff like the IGDA was actually being tossed around and featured for some sessions. Women In Games hosted an industry party as well.

Another great thing that came from the 2008 VGXpo was NBC's involvment as a media sponsor to the consumer show, which was a major factor in the huge increase in attendance - so much so that NBC considered hosting its very own consumer expo, bringing along many of the people responsible for organizing the industry side of things as well. Recognizing that, in the past, trying to clump both shows together isn't a good solution, while NBC focused their media might on organizing the consumer show, the various regional IGDA chapters around and in Philly were contacted to help organize the industry summit. What began almost 10 years ago was finally going to come to fruition.

GameX Industry Summit

The two track format meant sessions had to be held side-by-side, and in this case it was really quite literally as we had to divide the one long room available to us into two seperate rooms by means of simple partitions that did only a slightly decent job of filtering out the adjacent speakers. It certainly was not the ideal situation, and yet everyone took it in stride, more than happy to deal with the problems and work around the sometimes hackish solutions. Another aspect was that, unlike problems with VGXpo, a lot of the attendees willingly pitched in to help work out issues and nothing really went unmended in some form or another. One telling tweet from the #GXIS twitter stream was "Back in the lab. #gxis was useful, and interesting, and fun. Next year, it needs to not be in a warehouse, though. :)"

So despite the fact that we weren't in some upscale, classy convention center, everyone who showed up got a great deal of enjoyment - the sessions were all of great caliber with lots of well-known speakers taking the podium and informative panels covering a variety of topics; the parties were packed and people were mingling it up with lots of enthusiasm, with plenty of live music and entertainment accompanying them; in general all the attendees of the industry summit knew a lot of other people, so it was like one big communal get together, and those who didn't know anyone but a few people were quickly passed around and introduced to just about everyone else.

Running alongside the Industry Summit was also the Philly Game Jam, which had ten teams of about 85 people total working for 48 hours from noon on Friday to noon on Sunday to make a game under a specific theme announced at the start of the competition. While they could come and go as they pleased, all development had to be done on site. Many chose to camp out in the sleeping area alloted to the competition for quick naps in between development sessions. It was a really intense challenge and during the judging I was fortunate enough to get to play a lot of cool games (which should also be avaialble on the website). It was a bit rushed, since the competition ended right before the awards luncheon - next year we'll probably have a more formal means of judging so it doesn't take myself and the other judges almost an hour to get through all the games.

GameX Consumer Show

The consumer show was included in the Industry Summit pass, and so developers got to walk out of the sessions and straight over to the expo floor to satisfy the gamer inside all of them for a little while. A Career Forum was held for consumer pass holders that allowed them to learn more about the games industry if they were interested in pursuing a career within it. As with any good games expo, cosplay participants abounded, with a contest held on Saturday and plenty of Star Wars characters milling about all weekend, including the local 501st garrison.

Reaction to the consumer show, which was also very positive, can be found on the #GameX twitter stream

GameX 2010

The Industry Summit will most likely try to expand, but there's only so much that you can cram into a single weekend. It will largely depend on the facilities we have at our disposal next year. One thing I know for sure is that people really won't care so much as long as they still have as great a time as they did this year.

Click for the full gallery of Austin GDC pictures

Austin GDC was yet another well-run GDC event taking place in... hey look at that, Austin Texas! Like last year, it was held in the spacious convention center downtown, which is within easy walking distance of the famous 6th Street and tons of bars, resteraunts and clubs. So you know the game developers were out partying until all hours of the night, every night. The weather was absolutely great - Austin can still be pretty steamy this time of year but a bout of rain swept through that ended literally the day people started arriving and temps stayed in the low 80's during the day, mid 70's during the night. Considering people were mainly inside all day, venturing outside mainly for lunch, we all got to enjoy some great weather as the sun went down and the parties began.

The conference was smaller than last year, although that didn't really affect the overall quality at all. Sessions were still very top-notch almost across the board from what John and I attended, and although the Expo was tiny, it was at least densly packed enough to "appear" really busy at times. But then at times it was still as dead as the huge main GDC Expo floor earlier this year in San Francisco. Yes, the economy is still biting people hard, but it was nice to see that everyone who came to the event was still stoked about the games industry moving forward with all speed. There hasn't been any sort of post-conference press release yet delivering attendance numbers or anything like that, and some people voiced concerns that this would be the last Austin GDC - but it appeared to me that AGDC downsized its event appropriately to account for a smaller number of attendees.

Austin GDC is scheduled to return next year, October 5-8.

Table of Contents

AGDC Twitter Stream

iPhone Games Summit
Bootstrapping Basics
Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption
How To Operate Your Indie Game Business - For Fun And Profit!
Effective Marketing For Indie Game Developers
The Rise of Premium Flash Games
The Blurst of Times: How to Make a (Shader-Heavy, Physics-Based, 3D) Game in 8-Weeks
Beyond the Finish Line of Shipping an Indie Game
And Yet It Moves: From Student Prototype To Published Indie Game
Making an XBLA Game in 6 Months: A Splosion Man Postmortem
The Universe of World of Warcraft
Resumes, Cover Letters and Websites
Developing in the Cloud
The Loner
Randomness: The Danger and Value of Chance Elements in Game Design
Where Agile Falls Apart
AGDC Retweets

iPhone Games Summit

• the sweet-spot for iPhone game development is "immediacy with depth"
• new term for kids who give your app bad reviews on iTunes - "apptards"
• "avoid 99 cent apps like the plague" beats "99 cent apps are great" 2-1 so far at #agdc iPhone sessions
• #agdc consensus is definitely "game must be instantly approachable" for the iPhone.
• worst thing about an iPhone seminar is the persistent "GSM buzz" on every microphone
• be sure to set your resolution to something reasonable when using iPhone location awareness. GPS drains battery, so avoid if possible
• iPhone 3GS compass is accurate enough to be used as a game controller and is reasonably good at filtering stray magnetic fields.

• bootstrapping: work for hire is what keeps you afloat, IP is what will make you succeed in the long run. Must balance the two
• seek a lawyer for contract negotiations ALWAYS. Very dangerous for starting companies - many taken advantage of
• contracts and negotiations take a LONG time - avg 5 months for even small less than multi-million $$ deals.
• milestone due date + 10 biz days = earliest you get paid. Keep 6+ months of your current burn rate in bank as a hedge if you can
• check TED talks for lectures on people's motivation regarding money to help you choose a 'comfortable' start up salary
• talent & passion will help with a startup, but you still need to take time to develop good bizness sense, or hire some1 with that XP

• Colin woke up in the middle of the nite and had a "cool shit idea" which then became, iteratively, Fantastic Contraption
• Colin: while you may be willing to accept complex gameplay in a $60 game, with Flash u need to get players playing as soon as possible
• Colin didn't work a lot initially at marketing the game, he just let the internet do its thing, and ppl could share levels
• in 3 months he had a total of 3,158,855 visits to the site, and converts about .5% of each
• Colin: "having a horrible job is a great way to make games. You come home and just explode with pent up creativity"
• Colin actually put "Support independent game development" as a point in his upsell menu for users to buy the full version
• Q: How did u decide what to charge? Colin: "Well, I figured it was about half as good as World of Goo, which is $20. And no, it's not $9.99"

• You don't need to be young to be an indie developer. The 3 owners of NInja Bee have a combined age of 127 and lots of kids.
• Brent: pitching advice: Ask questions before forming pitch to understand what publisher wants, keep it simple, focus on visuals
• Brent: be willing to say NO to publishers. Can grant you more respect in the long run & make your YES stronger
• Brent: Do a movie, not a demo for a pitch. Less tech needed, faster set up, and publisher would just watch you play demo anyways
• Brent: problems with WiiWare - rough purchasing experience and many Wii owners simply unaware of online portal existence
• Q: How long of a pitch video is too long? Brent: "3 mins is a long time, if you have 2 mins of awesome and 1 min of so-so, make it 2 mins"

• John: PR for indies is not PR for big companies. Make lots of noise, lots of friends and build a community from the start
• Wolfire's PR relies alot on the strength of the indie community, which also shows how awesome the indie community is. Don't forget it!
• John: PR tools - forums, IRC (w/ Mibbt, Rabbot), Meebo live chat widget, blog, Google App Engine, Amazon Cloud Front
• John: Games Press is the one PR service that we pay for - http://www.gamespress.com/

• Daniel: there is a secret to Lost Garden. Look through the links for hidden turtle porn :P Ahhh indie game devs...
• Daniel: lots of good money in advergames if you are good with Flash. Downside is that you have very little to no original IP
• Dainel: must design microtransactions into your Flash game from the very beginning
• Daniel: an amazing Flash game is played in 8 minutes. This makes it difficult for people to pay for such a relatively small value
• Daniel: use your own metric systems - they got bad data off of NewGrounds for their Flash game Bunni, ppl would rate w/o playing
• Daniel: game mechanics and social elements to Bunni kept players playing (long tail), not graphics and certainly not story
• Daniel: do not sign away your margin, customers, IP or future rights. Take a good look at "minor exceptions" in contracts
• oh, forgot to mention that Dan will have his presentation slides online soon at Lost Garden - http://www.lostgarden.com/

• Flashbang: improve urself (crossfit for example) to improve your games. Having a healthy, fun life will improve focus and productivity
• Flashbang worked 10:05 - 3:30 Mon-Thurs on Blush. That's it. In 8 weeks. Less time for ppl to ditz around or chase down useless ideas
• Steve: schedule leisure time first, then fit work inbetween. Ex: 3pm - 6pm is PS3 time. Get 2 office @ 10, oh crap only 5 hrs to work!
• Flashbang makes a lot of use of stand up meetings. No one is allowed to sit. This greatly reduces bickering and keeps meetings short
• Flashbang is showing off a cool agile tool they use called PivotalTracker - http://www.pivotaltracker.com/
• Steve recommends the book "A Whack on the Side of the Head" by Roger von Oech for creative ideas
• Flashbang on technology: Unity. Flash. Mac OS. The end
• Flashbang, BTW, will also have their presentation slides online soon - http://www.flashbangstudios...

• Ron: PR & Promotion after ship (World of Goo) responsible for ~1/3 of total revenue. WiiWare, Steam, MacHeist
• Ron: tried updating FAQ to reduce barrage of emails. "No one gives a shit about the FAQ". Putting FAQ in email response did help a bit
• Ron: if someone complained about not getting d/l link they just sent a game copy - too much time to check through. Same for refunds
• Ron: 2D Boy website, surprisingly, sold ~23% of sales. That's the *second-best* channel after 40% from WiiWare US. Use your website!
• Ron: don't let PayPal boss you around with a minimum balance (substantial one, like $5-$10k). Threaten to switch payment providers
• Ron: Bluehost gave them horrible treatment when the launch demand crashed their servers. He does not recommend them at all

• Felix: ~93% piracy rate for And Yet It Moves. Looking for upsides, at least ppl are playing your game and spreading word about it

• Twisted Pixel used a list of all gameplay elements prioritized constantly so it was easy 2 c what on the bottom could be cut if needed
• Q: Why only 6 mo? Twisted Pixel: to be ready for Summer of Arcade, as more games sell better with bigger Microsoft PR push @ that time

• WoW engineering team is broken into five sub-teams, Engine, Gameplay, Tools, Server, and UI.
• WoW servers have 13,250 total server blades and 75,000 total CPU cores and 112.5 terabytes of RAM running the servers
• There is currently one “unannounced MMO”, and it's a huge undertaking - the WoW guys
• To maintain one online game (WoW) requires 20,000 computer systems, 1.3 petabytes of storage, more than 4,600 people.

• Jim: Resume do's - multiple resumes (tailor to company), 1 page, .DOC or .PDF, spell check EVERYTHING, include website, keep updated
• Jim: Resume dont's: bulking up to compensate for lack of experience, logos/artwork, crazy fonts, including wrong company name
• Jim: also do NOT include your hobbies, marital status, political status, SSN, drivers license #, b'day, pic of yourself. Yes, ppl have
• Jim: use tables, not tabs, in Word to list your skills and organize layout. Makes for quick edits and easy upkeep
• Jim: use *your name* for your email, not superawesomeboy@hotmail.com. Have a professional ring/voice mail to your cell phone
• Jim: same for website. Be professional. A colleague of his once got sent to yellowsnow.com
• Jim: recruiters are more interested in what you can give the company rather than what you hope to get from the company
• Jim: likes it when you spell out your degree. No one needs to know your GPA. Don't forget expected grad date if still in school
• Jim: cover letter do's: show passion; fan-boy bit is ok, but don't overdo it; research company; be confident; what u can bring to team
• Jim: cover letter dont's: your (whole, entire) life story; address to wrong company; beg or plead; more than 1 page
• Jim: cover letter 3 parts: intro (create interest, attract attention); body (why work at company); closing (state interview interest)
• Jim: likes it when people thank him for reading their resume. "Thank you for your time" is a good example start of a closing statement
• Jim: never call for a follow-up, after sending resume. Send an email but not like, once a week or every day
• Jim: a lot of people these days will not take a paper resume. Websites are king. He once had to travel with 20lbs of resumes. Hates it
• Jim: have on website: best work, easily accessible content, downloadable resume link. Always assume recruiter knows nothing about you
• Jim: website don'ts: using other ppl's work; quantity over quality; work that doesn't apply; anime. Please no; hard to access content
• Jim: artists can have multiple sites for seprate disciplines (concept, environment, character, etc). If 1 site, must be well organized
• Jim *will* play games if you link to them and provide a quick install. Demos are best
• Jim: if ure a programmer, he wants 2 know you can make games. Lots of ppl can program, few can make games. CS degree alone means squat
• we gots the slides from Jim River's #agdc talk on resumes. TONS and TONS of good stuff from him & other HR ppl - http://tr.im/zyMW

• Ben: the real power behind cloud computing and tools is the ability to scale dynamically and readily to meet ever changing demands
• cloud risks: dependent on outside services (can go out of business, can turn evil, can nose dive in service support)
• cloud limits: may not scale for very large needs (Blizzard in the cloud for WoW? Uh, no), sensitive information, custom hardware reqs

• Schubert pointed at the interesting data gleaned from research into the psychology of traffic; love of the commute and [...]
• And minimizing road rage by allowing drivers to see other drivers (personalize a "solo" experience).

• Balancing randomness/strategy: regression toward the mean (decreasing pure randomness; depending on statistical analysis).
• Next strategy to balance randomness: randomness which affects all players. Random, but players all work with the same lot
• Third strategy: ensure all random effects are "balanced" - different effects, no one cumulatively better than another
• Randomness as a means of providing an infinite amount of content of variable strategic value (Nethack, etc.).

• Rich: Agile process lets you find the fun fast
• Rich: Scrum (Agile methodology) is *not* a silver bullet. No clear finish path (can lose where you are), publishers are NOT agile
• Rich: polishing what you have is key to moving forward. last sprint is dedicated to polish, no new development allowed
• Rich: we don't do verbatim the Agile methodologies, we take what we want and adapt to our team (remember, no silver bullet)

• RT @ChrisA9 Registration bounce rate when asked birthdate = 40%. When changed to "How Old Are You?" bounce rate = 10%.
• RT @SnappyTouch Indie business tip #1: Develop something that becomes a hobby for the player, not a consumable game like fast food.
• RT @SnappyTouch My GDC Austin 09 slides are up: Squeezing Every Drop Of Performance Out Of The iPhone http://bit.ly/JjOGm
• RT @bengarney Post on integrating google spreadsheet with your game for tweaking: http://tr.im/z8id - saved us major hassle!
• RT @jradoff Here is my presentation for #agdc on the Blurring Lines Between Casual and Hardcore Games: http://bit.ly/Co7zS
• RT @bengarney Video of my Austin GDC talk, "Developing in the Cloud" http://bit.ly/cQvYF - w/ 12 bonus slides based on Q's I got at the show

iPhone Games Summit Day 1

From AAA to indie: Tiger Style and the making of Spider

Why an iPhone studio?

We started out with a vision statement outlining their vision for the products they'd be creating. They targeted iPhone user habits and lifestyles (i.e. carrying the thing around all the time).

Traditional business - Investors vs self-funded, lawyers vs plain-English agreements, buying software vs using free stuff. Salaries vs royalties.

Not all of these are available to everyone, but many are. Remotely-run projects are very doable.

Managing a distributed team – empower them with trust, flexibility, transparency, ownership of direction, and generous royalty compensation. Everyone is in alignment. Awesome team culture (not sure what "awesome" is, but hey, awesome's awesome).

The schedule did slip, as the schedule was not predictable before Alpha, feature and quality-creep crept in, and a "because we could" mentality creeped in, stretching the schedule.

Evolution of the controls

Initial design for walking was based on the accelerometer, turning the iPhone around to make the spider crawl. Turned out it was tedious to force the user to rotate the device, so they went with a tilt-based approach similar to "spiky rolando" games as a compromise.

Quotes from playtesters showed that controls were confusing. Eventually they went from tilting the unit to a touch-based approach. The tilt-based approach just ended up feeling gimmicky. The controls ended up getting better as the tutorial got simpler. The tutorial ultimately ended up being a pile of still images with very simple controls.

Evolution of the art direction

The design was originally based on macro photography – very short depth of field with blurry backgrounds to give the impression of looking at something really small.

Another design was art inspired by Edward Gorey's drawing story. The final art style ended up with this style, although with color to give things a bit more depth. In the end, it's unknown if the photographic version would've been cheaper. Illustrations would be easier to modify.

Evolution of the story

Original story – you're a human who was turned into a spider by a witch, and you need to turn yourself into a human again. This turned out to be a crappy idea. Not a good way to relate yourself to your spider character.

Story eventually became more ambiguous, exploring an abandoned house. There's a back-story, but you're not really attached to the story. You're just a bystander.

They didn't go with the first story idea, but they did end up leveraging it for the final story.

Evolution of the marketing

The biggest part of marketing your game is the app store description. They spent a lot of time coming up with a compelling description, screenshots, and byline.

They added facebook connect support, allowing you to post snips of the story to your facebook timeline. They can also add your friends' faces to the game (high score tables). Adoption rate was rather low (about 9%).

They're localized into French, Italian, German, and Spanish.

As for versions, most people have upgraded to iPhone 3.0+, but not everybody.

Release and Promotion

Picking the price-point – people really get stuck on this, and there are multiple strategies. What you think you're worth and what people will pay are two different things.

There seems to be a gulf between the 99-cent apps and the "premium" games for $5 and up. That's where they placed Spider, at $2.99

Note to Apple, please de-obfuscate the process. Communicate with developers. Check metadata FIRST (referencing other games in the metadata is verboten). Document reasons for rejection. Show "place in line".

Ten days after submission, they were approved but their website wasn't ready. The trailer wasn't ready. Turns out marketing is a full-time job. You have to cast a wide net and leverage everyone you know.

The touchArcade site was a good bump for them. They ended up getting a review on the first night. They also wanted to see the developers on the forum.

Is the "Apple featured page" the magic bullet for big profits? Well, sort of. The sales boost isn't automatic. Converting the page-view to a sale is (mostly) up to you.

In conclusion – The AAA mentality is "take time and get things right" while the indie mentality is "decide quickly and trust your instincts".

The two points that came up from the users are that the controls are very responsive, and there is a story. Production quality is high, and it's a fully-featured game.

The sweet spot for iPhone games is "immediacy with depth". The core mechanics are responsive. The game's not demanding. There's no menu. You just go right to the game. The depth comes from the story and game modes and scoring/leaderboards and achievements.

Pangea's Road To Success: Launching and Marketing an iPhone app

(how to market an iPhone app)

In 2008, it was easy to make lots of money on the iPhone. There were fewer apps and hence less competition. Apps cost more and there were higher profits. Most good games cost about $10. It was new, and it was easy to get good press for your apps. Most good games made it into the top-100. Any reasonably good app made good money.

In 2009, it's a different story. There are 75k apps in the app store (22k are games), and competition is huge. The price-war was driving unit profits down. The newness of the iPhone wore off, so the press doesn't care so much anymore. It's now very difficult to get into the top 100. Quality no longer guarantees success.

33% of iPhone apps earned less than $250
52% earned less than $15k
2% earned $15k-$50k
1% earned $50k-$100k
1% earned $100k-$250k
1% earned $500k-$2m

Playing the app store is like playing the app store. If you don't really know the rules, you're pretty-much guaranteed to lose.

Five marketing rules for success

Rule #1: Get into the top 100 (now the top 200)

Apps in the top 100 typically sell over 1000 copies a day. Top 10 apps generally sell over 6k copies per day.

Only the top 50 are visible on the iPhone and iPod, so that should be your goal.

Getting into the top 200 requires you have a really good launch. Ranking is most important in your first week. Ranking leads directly to sales and vice-versa. Have a "special introductory price" to boost initial sales.

Admob released a big survey on iPhone app customers. Top store ranking led to about 60% of sales. Searches led to 60%. Word of mouth about 40%. Seeing ads in other apps about 25%. News articles about 20%.

Rule #2: Get the customer's attention

The first thing users see is your icon, so make it compelling. Make an icon that is going to stand out. Look at similar icons and see if yours stands out.

Modify your icon about every six months so people don't subconsciously skip it.

The next thing a customer sees after the icon is the itunes and iPhone description, and the screenshot is the most important thing. You get five screenshots, and the primary one is the most important. Nobody cares what your title and menu screens look like. Don't waste your screenshots on anything but gameplay. Show what makes your game worth buying.

If your game is landscape-oriented, upload your screenshots in landscape. Pre-rotate them and upload at 480x320 so they look right.

Product description – make it simple and concise. Localize it for other markets. Put keywords in your description to help your app appear in search results.

Lists are released in batches and are released in alphabetical order. If you get in a big batch, you won't get on the first page of "what's new" if your game doesn't start with A..D.

Sub-categories – if you cannot get into the top 200 list, try to get into a subcategory's top 200 list. You can choose two subcategories, and some categories are more crowded than others. You only need to sell about 15 copies a day to get into the top-100 list for kids' games, for instance.

Rule 3: Promote Your App

Expecting people to magically find your app on iTunes is a recipe for failure. You have to let people know your app exists before your app launches, during launch, and after launch.

Pre-launch hype – not the most important, but still the more the better. Put up a web page for your game. To to iPhone forums, Twitter, etc. and talk about your app.

Make a press-release. Try to release on a Friday so it'll stay up a bit longer. YouTube demo videos are good, so link to 'em from your press-release.

Most importantly, get reviews. Press releases last a day or so, but reviews will get you a week of exposure. You get 50 promo codes for each app, so reserve those for reviewers. The press gets literally dozens of releases a day, and you'll need to develop a relationship with media if you want them to cover your game.

It's okay to "jump start" iTunes reviews if you do it ethically. Just don't lie about your product. iTunes reviews are a pain because people can change five-star reviews to one-star reviews just out of spite.

Advertising doesn't really work for the iPhone, because there are really small unit profits. Advertising's good to build brand recognition, though.

Getting Apple "love". You can't buy placement. Apple puts stuff up that they like and want to promote. Do your best to make Apple aware that your app exists and hope that they choose you. Try to establish a relationship with 'em.

Post-launch hype – put things on sale! Give a reason for your sale "back to school sale", "labor day sale", etc. Send out press-releases, although the press doesn't usually cover sales.

Make sure your app is up in the search rankings before you start with press-releases so the press can find the app.

Pricing. If possible, try to keep your regular price at $1.99 or higher so you can always go lower and put your app on sale. If you're not in the top 200, set your price to what you think it should really be, then do an occasional sale to try and get back into the top 200.

Higher prices tend to filter out bad reviews from the "apptards" who like to write bad reviews.

What is better, 10k games at $1 each or 2k games at $5? The word of mouth of 10k people is better, but many $1 customers would've paid $5.

Updates are another good way to generate post-launch hype. You can get back on the chronological listing IF YOU KNOW THE TRICK. . .

After you get the approval email from Apple: log into ITC. Go to "edit product listing", and change the release date that the date that the update was approved. Click "submit changes", and the app will go out in the "new" batch even though it's an update.

Demo "lite" versions. In general, they don't work. In some cases it works great, but most times it doesn't.

Keywords are a pain because the content police often reject because of keywords. It's easier to add keywords later after the app is approved.

Rule #4: Diversify your portfolio

To be successful n the App Store, you have to diversify with many apps. Don't bet all your chips on one hand. The sum of cash flow from a large portfolio will give you a good income. No single app is liable to make a lot of money unless it's a rare hit.

A large portfolio also lets you cross-promote your apps.

Rule #5: Keep your development costs low.

It is very risky for an unknown company with an unknown title to spend a lot of cash on development. The safest strategy is profit sharing. If possible, keep costs at $0. Everybody can win and the risk is minimized.

Bringing Games to the iPhone: A Business Approach

Video Games: The Perception – Games are made for the 18-34 year old male with a game console. The money is exclusively with young males.

The Reality – More than 200 million people play online games each month, and 52% of casual game players are women.

PlayFirst makes games that appeal primarily to women, and it makes them uniquely qualified to develop for iPhone. They're still primarily a download/boxed product developer, but iPhone is big.

Diner Dash – 90% female audience and a very wide age range.

Dream Chronicles – 71% female, primarily 18-34 year old women.

Chocolatier – 74% female, primarily 18-34 year old women.

They're multi-platform, done with a C++/LUA framework that's freely available and community supported.

Their first products were very much ports that intended to leverage the existing brand recognition. Later products were more closely tied to the platform.

Cooking Dash was much more of a iPhone-centric game. It had a lot more native functionality than previous products.

Play-times are increasing. Things are going from quick 3-5 minute play to more immersive ½ hour times more akin to the play-time of a console.

Pricing-wise, depth is key. Also having an entrenched brand. Otherwise you're going to have to make your price low. Unless you have a powerful brand and an elaborate game, you'll have to make your game as

native feature-wise as possible.

Native Features = Aclerometer, Multi-touch, GPS, Camera, Microphone, Wi-Fi

Native functions = iPod music, push notifications, quick-save, microtransactions

Native gameplay = Pick up and play, "bursts", Rewards early and often, Intuitive controls

Native visuals = Button and font sizes, Game motif is familiar, Vibrant and distinct.

Application Networks

Indie developers have taken a back seat, as they don't have the budgets for marketing that'll become necessary as the platform's mass grows.

Before bringing a game brand to the iPhone

• Survey the market opportunity and establish some expertise with the device. You need to be really knowledgeable of the iPhone, which means downloading and playing lots of games to see what's expected.
• Understand what your audience expects. If they expect anything at all.
• Define your business objectives and be prepared to revise it.

How big is the iPhone gaming market?

Apple doesn't release publicly how much money is being made, but it's a lot.

Know your competition and their pricing strategy.

Play all of the competing games and play them all the way through. Learn their strengths and weaknesses. Also look at their prices, because people will buy the cheaper game even if yours is better.

Understand Your Customer

Does your target player own an iPhone or iPod Touch? Do an online survey.

Does your audience want an iPhone version at all? Again, contact your customers.

Do iPod Touch and iPhone gamers want your game or brand?

What are they expecting? If they're expecting a technology that the iPhone can't deliver, then you have a problem. Do they expect the same feature-set?

Define Your Business Objectives

How much money do you expect to make? Have reasonable revenue and margin expectations. It's okay to have low revenue expectations if it drives sales or builds brand awareness elsewhere.

You can make a quick buck if you can get the app out quickly and cheaply. Or you can go the other way and build a super-premium app.

Technology strategy – figure out if you're making an iPhone or a SmartPhone strategy. Know what it'll take to move your technology to other platforms.

Does your brand provide a competitive Advantage

Games associated with brands get noticed, but the app store is a great equalizer. Every app has the same "canvas" in the iPhone app store.

Brands do cut through the clutter of the app store, and branded games outsell "generic" apps of equal quality. They bring in an existing fan base. And you're going to get Apple's attention.

Other advantages – You have the existing library of assets (graphic and sound) that you can move over. Hopefully your technology foundation can move over, at least in part.

The competitive advantage – You can get premium pricing and leverage customer trust.

Getting Started

Know who's talking to the Apple developer portal. They control the certificates and profiles and device ID's and such. Make sure you own those.

Define your team roles and responsibilities

Create an honest and informed Profit and Loss projection. Success not measured in dollars should still be measurable.

One side does not fit all.

Social and connected features

At very least, email "tell a friend", import your friends list, broadcast your scores to feeds, invites and cross-promotions.

At most, have full asynchronous "live" multiplayer with cooperative multiplayer. You'll get strong user retention and you'll get Apple's attention.

Overall Take Away

Know your audience. Talk to iPhone gamers and give them what they want.

Define and leverage your brand's competitive advantage. Make it meet your business's objectives.

Once your app goes live, be prepared to adjust it. You are just getting started.

The Goldilocks Conundrum – Steering A Middle Path Through Apple's Orchard

Appy Entertainment is a new (1 year) mobile game developer.

iPhone apps are generally high volume and low price.

Appy Face Fighter is their current hit.

Opportunities

The iPhone install base is large and growing rapdly. It's now estimated at 5om, which rivals the PSP in sales. 40m are estimated to be added in 2010. Current estimates are between 800 million and 2.4 billion in revenues annually (but Apple's not talking).

There are currently 75k apps in the store, 22k of which are games. Apps are easy to buy and easy to try.

One solution: Micropublisher!

Three classes of iPhone developers – one man shops, micropublishers, and "big" publishers.

Micropublisher advantages: scale, brand identity, agility, control over product portfolio. The goal is flexibility, low cost, and long reach. The hidden cost of iPhone development is in all the post-launch stuff you need to do to keep your product viable.

Micropublisher challenges: self-funded, new production model, new distribution model, new consumers, and self-funded.

Appy's Organization: They're under one roof. Most of the company is outsourced.

Appy Product DNA: Fun to play, fun to show. "5/500" model (play in 5 minutes, but return to it 500 times). Entertains yourself and others. Share share share aspect, leveraging viral aspects. Under-promise and over-deliver. And snarky charm.

Building the Brand

Approachability and authenticity.

Company name, location & venue, logos and colors, development blog, and press outreach. It may look ad-hoc, but it's designed that way on purpose.

Their first product failed. In fact, it wasn't released. It just wasn't a good product. It was too ambitious and required an enormous amount of content.

Their second project was Appy News, and it was also wrong. It was opportunistic and optimistic development. Months of effort was blown by an app store glitch (lots of front-page views were lost). Early reviews were good, but the app died. They released a free version, but it still didn't move enough of the paid version. They had plenty of theories as to why it died, but ultimately it was just the wrong product for the iPhone market.

The third project was Face Fighter, and it was done right. It had a strong high concept. Version 1.0 was a bit thin, but they released updates that got it up to speed. They got version 1.0 out as quickly as possible with the intention of updating later. Later updates made the product quite a bit deeper with more scenarios and finishing moves.

FaceFighter lessons – Get the concept right and execute. Pick the right launch category. Pick the right price (new IP = 99 cents). "Appy Fu" vs "FaceFighter" was a question, but they didn't do the branding because it's basically an unknown brand in a crowded market, so they went with the more demonstrative because you have a 2-second "window" to grab eyeballs in the app store.

How Micropublishing Has Worked For Us

• Multi-disciplinary team is flexible and can scale
• Early brand identity and halo effect (app selling other apps from your company) in app store.
• Full time marketing and customer feedback
• "Adult supervision" watching finances
• "Punching above our weight"
• Allows simultaneous multiple products and updates

Being Goldilocks

• Not too big and not soo small
• A growing portfolio reflecting brand identity
• Many part time hats worn full-time
• Scaling up, scaling down – contractor havens
• Technological "Lilly Pad" jumps
• Flexibility, low cost, and long reach

Is It Worth It?

• Emphatically Yes
• They have "militant optimism" - problems have to be viewed as opportunities.
• The conventional wisdom doesn't apply to what they're doing.
• They've seen enough "sure things", so they know what'll happen.

Viral Marketing and Propagation on iPhone, YouTube, and Facebook

iTunes app store really hasn't changed much since its launch. Channels and features and such are basically the same. There are no viral marketing channels in the app store. There's no way to contact your friends and let them know about apps. The majority of app discovery is still on iTunes on the device itself. As of now, the best promotional tool is getting featured and listed in the top 200.

Charting checklist

• PR – traditional press coverage
• Traditional advertising – Radio, digital billboards
• Street marketing and contests
• App category selection – Top 100 category and tarings
• App Cross Promotion platforms – Plus+ Network, OpenFeint, "More Apps"
• Mobile advertising, adMob, Quattro
• Social Media – Facebook Connect, MySpace, Twitter, Email
• Tapjoy – paid installs

AdMob case study (getting your app on the top 200)

• Cost of acquisition – assume CPC bid is 10 cents
• Conversion rate at iTunes landing page: 12%
• Avg cost per ad install is 10 cents / 12% = 83 cents
• Target 3000 daily ad installs = 83 cents * 3000 = $2490

Tapjoy – Paid installs

• Pay per install
• Cheaper than Admob
• Monetization channel (free virtual goods in exchange for purchasing other items)

The state of YouTube

• It's crowded – 60,000 videos are added daily
• To get your first 100,000 downloads, content is not king.
• Embeds are the key to "most viewed". Target forums and embed videos. Target myspace and facebook embeds.
• Release all videos at the same time. It's not episodic TV content.
• Tag: videos for discovery. Think about how to get onto "Related Videos"
• Inspire debate to drive engagement
• Videos shouldn't be more than about 30 seconds long.
• Try to make the video provocative, shocking, or innovative. The latest trend is annotations with interlocked video.
• Optimize the description and Thumbnail
• Imitate other viral hits to gain momentum (even remix them)
• Change the title early and change it later to fit the content.

Facebook Promotion

• Facebook connect can help integrate your social graph and let users endorse and promote your app for you
• Wildfire contests
• Create a FB app that works with an iPhone application
• Fact: Only 1% of the apps out there have reached a million installs on Facebook
• Primary sources of referral traffic are install flow and engagement flow.

iPhone Games Summit Day 2

Tips for Success as an Indie iPhone Developer

They started with "Imangi" and "Word Squares", but their biggest success was "Harbor Master", which is a line drawing style game.

The Idea

• They have a "notebook of ideas"
• Follow concepts that WE enjoy playing
• Look for concepts with a wide appeal
• Look for an intuitive mechanic
• Look for games you can pick up and play instantly
• Make use of unique iPhone features

Prototyping

• Focus on making something that's fun. See if the mechanic is worth pursuing before you spend a lot of time on it.
• Focus on the mechanic.
• Make it quick and dirty to start out. Try to get the prototype out quickly so you can try out the mechanic immediately.
• Get feedback early.

Polish

• Have a theme and style in mind before you start working with an artist.
• Don't be afraid to iterate.
• Menus, level design, fine tuning, music, and sound take up the bulk of the time.
• One of the most important pieces of art is your icon, as that's the curb-appeal of your game.
• Make a mockup of your app as it appears in the app store, just so you can see if it stands out next to similar apps.

Beta Testing

• Start Small
• Feature Complete
• First Impressions
• Iterate Rapidly
• Diverse Group (from hardcore gamers to your mom). Get people who don't play games at all to try it.
• Watch them play to see what's intuitive and what's frustrating. You can't walk through people testing once your app's in the app store, so get feedback early.
• Respond to ALL feedback and ideas.

Development Summary

• Have a quick release cycle.
• Make a rapid prototype that focuses on fun.
• Spend a lot of time and effort polishing.

Marketing

• Know the App Store "sales curve", in which you'll get an initial spike of sales followed by long steady sales.
• Get listed in the new releases and try to get listed in the top 100
• Try to get positive reviews.
• Try to get featured on the App Store.

Pre-Release Marketing

• Engage the community early. Check the Touch Arcade forums to generate some buzz on your product.
• Try to get some cross promotion. App Treasures is another place for developers to generate some promotion for their own games while helping to promote others.

Engage The Community

• Forums, Social Media.
• Know your audience.
• Pictures > words. Do screenshots. People don't like to read, so have pictures and video.
• Respond to feedback. If you involve the community and the fanbase, you'll get more eyeballs.
• Be part of the community.
• Be nice. Even if people tell you that you suck, be nice.
• Give out promo codes.

Engaging the Press

• Get noticed by influential blogs. Apple reads the blogs, so if you wanna get noticed by Apple, get noticed by the blogs.
• Timing, pre-release, launch day, and updates. On launch day, the "new releases" section is a guarantee of eyeballs. Know the "release date trick". The release date is, by default, the date that the app was submitted, so be sure to change it to the day it was approved, not before or after.
• Press-release tips. Think like a reviewer. Reviewers get a lot of emails, so try to stand out as much as possible. Say why your game is cool and why people should pay attention to you. Just make the release short.

Top 100

• Hopefully the buzz will get you there, as that's where you get the biggest exposure.
• It's the best chance to make a profit.
• Stickiness is the key to having a "long tail" where people keep buying your app over a long period.
• Your price is one of the keys. Over 50% of the stuff in the top 100 are 99 cents.

Getting Featured

• You can't pay to be featured. "New and Noteworthy" and "What's Hot" are where apps show up in the App Store on the phone, which is where most people buy stuff.

Keeping Sales Up

• Keep up the buzz.
• Sales will inevitably slump after a time, so deal with it.
• Drop your price if you can to improve your rank.
• Localize it.
• Give out a lite version. It doesn't work dramatically, but it has worked for some people.
• Make updates.
• Integrate with social media (tweet your scores).

If your app doesn't get a long tail

• You might still get lucky.
• Play with the price.
• Move on.

Be Realistic

• Be realistic about the market. No more match-3 games, slide puzzles, farting apps or sudoku
• If a project isn't working, let it go.
• Building a reputation is tough

Be creative and adaptive

• Experiment with new gameplay mechanics.
• Try to stand out fro the pack
• Learn from others and how they're achieving success
• Use your unique indie assets – experiment, be agile and in control, and interact with the players.

Use LinkShare to help track clicks from the App Store

Squeezing Every Drop of Performance Out Of The iPhone

Performance has always been first and foremost when it comes to consoles.

"Flower Garden" is a 3D flower growing game that grows procedural flowers. First tests were on the simulator where they got 40 FPS only to end up with 4FPS on the actual device.

Performance Analysis Tools

Before you start with a formal tool, try turning features on and off in real-time to see what happens to the FPS.

Look at the "Instruments" tool which can be used as a profiler. It's a very comprehensive tool. It can display everything from frame rate to object allocations, memory usage, and even OpenGL calls. Run it on the real device and not the simulator. It does, however, sometimes give false positives on memory leaks, so don't just assume its complaints are valid.

The sampling rate of Instruments isn't very high, so let it run for a bit of time so you can see the actual performance.

The first pass on "Flower Garden" showed that the simulation itself was the bottleneck, not the rendering.

"Shark" is another Apple tool that can dig even deeper than "Instruments". It's not as friendly as Instruments, but it can get you a lot of information. It can also sample on events like cache misses. It's a fairly complicated tool, but you'll get some good benefit about it.

CPU

Everything after the 3GS has a 32-bit RISC ARM II running from 400-535 Mhz. The high-end latest iPod touches have a Cortex-A8 running at 600Mhz with a more advanced architecture than the ARM.

One thing the ARM provides is a thing called "Thumb Mode" which takes less memory, as it uses a smaller instruction set and no floating point operations. Floating point operations have to take the CPU out of thumb mode and then back in, making floating point operations pretty expensive. And it's on by default, so there are potential huge wins by turning it off. It's in the target options on Xcode.

In the case of Flower Garden, turning off Thumb Mode increased performance by a factor of two. Most games will benefit from turning it off, especially if you're doing 3D and stuff with a lot of floating point.

There's no integer divide on the iPhone, so integer divide is likely more expensive than you think.

The ARM itself doesn't have floating point hardware, so FP is handled by a vector floating point coprocessor. You can drop down to assembly if you want to vectorize your floating point operations for maximum performance. There's a "vfpmath" project on Google Code that talks to the iPhone's VFP unit.

Game Loop Architecture

The typical game loop = Gather input ? Update state ? Render frame ? repeat

There's an NSTimer, but it's not very accurate. Frames can vary by as much as 5-10ms. One trick is to call it at a higher frequency so the main loop is called right away and timer messages are more granular. Unfortunately then your queue can then be flooded with timer messages.

Threads are another solution, putting the game on a separate thread from the UI. That lets you run as fast as possible without delays, but it increases your complexity, especially with debugging. Running as fast as possible can also cause problems with things like battery life. Theoretically it's the best results, but it's a pain to implement.

Flower Garden went with a "thread driving loop", in which a thread drives the main loop then goes to sleep. This can give you the best of both worlds with consistent calls to the main loop and no flooding of events or "cuts in line". The best way to do it is with "CADisplayLink", which is triggered by display refresh. You can choose to receive the call every X updates. The updates are very consistent. The only drawback is that it is only available for SDK 3.1, so you'll lose a lot of customers.

All iPods up to the high-end iPod Touch's have a similar first-generation rendering architecture. The new high-end touch's have a new architecture that allows shader programming and is much improved over previous generations.

Avoid locking resources that the GPU needs while the GPU is rendering.

You might get a small speedup by rethinking your main loop. Present the frame, then update the game state, then finally render, hopefully leveraging using the render and main CPU's at the same time. Ultimately this made almost no difference in Flower Garden.

Minimize your draw primitive calls and state changes. Most of the typical OpenGL optimization tricks apply to iPhone OpenGL.

Rendering a lot of vertices can be a bottleneck, especially on the older models. The iPhone doesn't have true hardware Vertex Buffer Objects, so the CPU is involved in every draw call. The 3GS fixes this, but you'll still want to keep older phones into account.

Make your vertices as small as possible. Don't use 4-byte floats when a 2-byte integer will suffice.

Align your vertices on 4-byte boundaries at least. Experiment with larger alignments. Have a way to turn alignments on an off so you can test the results.

Use indexed lists and order them as if they were strips.

You can mix OpenGL and UIKit objects. Just try not to put UIKit objects on top of OpenGL, as it'll hurt your framerate badly.

Take advantage of the stuff built into iPhone like multitexturing and point sprites.

Memory management in iPhone is a problem. There's no guarantee of memory that you'll have available. You DO NOT know how much memory you have for your app at startup, so your game will need to be able to deal with it. The system notifies apps if memory is runnng low, and your app should deal with it by freeing memory, but that's not really feasible.

The best way to deal with memory warnings is to ignore 'em for a little bit. Things like Safari and Mail wait before they compact themselves, so it's a big game of "memory chicken".

Allocate memory slowly at startup. If you get a warning, wait a little bit and try again. Repeat until you have enough memory.

iPort: How to Bring any C++ Game to the iPhone

The project was to port the game "Caster" to the iPhone. It's a high speed action 3D game and didn't seem very suited for the iPhone. It was originally released for PC, Mac, and Linux.

There are lots of UI differences beyond just screen size. You need to take into account people covering the screen with their fingers. A faithful port that feels like a native app is a challenge.

Hardware-wise, an iPhone can be thought of as a ten year-old PC. If your game already runs on a low-end system, you're halfway there. Stuff like pixel shaders will need to be reengineered. Ditto for threading. Since iPhones are single-core, threads can be a problem.

Fix up your Physics, AI, and content later. The port itself can be a quick and easy process compared to building it from scratch.

When doing a port, it's good to have a layer of abstraction to keep your platform specific code changes at a minimum.

OpenGL immediate mode isn't available for OpenGL ES. It's rather easy to write a wrapper, though, that'll batch up immediate mode calls for you.

A downside is that you can be inundated with #ifdef messiness.

Porting the Graphics Engine

Doing things in fixed functions is tough compared to doing things with shaders, so plan for that.

Have an "iPhone mode" on your PC in which you treat your PC like it's an iPhone. Mainly with performance. Just because something runs well on the PC doesn't mean it'll be tolerable. If you have one codebase, make sure you can run with all the iPhone options turned on.

Check out iphone-glu and iPhone SDL, as they're nicely cross-platform.

In Xcode, go to the properties of the project's files and tell Xcode that they're Objective C files. That way you don't need to rename all your source files to .mm.

Landscape mode in OpenGL is fairly easy by setting your viewport to landscape mode.

Set Xcode to have "fat static libraries" so you can build a single library that runs on the iPhone simulator as well as the device.

-fno-regmove will remove a risky optimization that's been recently fixed in GCC 4.2.

Asset conversion – they did it with a script in Perl, calling these command-line tools.

• oggdec – convert off to wav
• afconvert – convert wav to caf
• sips – resample image and convert image formats
• texturetool – convert images to PVRTC format

in Xcode, add file references and use a "Copy Files" pase to bypass the standard Xcode "Copy Bundle Resources" phase.

Text Input – one hack is to make an offscreen text field. This will allow you to use the iPhone's keyboard but your own custom text field.

Audio and video. Use AVAudioPlayer for music. Use OpenAL for game sounds – one sound source per instance. Check out the oalTouch sample code.

Pay attention to UIApplication Delegate messages and respond to them.

In the iPhone OS, performance is inconsistent. Don't assume events get fired on a nice schedule. You can give the illusion of good performance even if your framerate isn't consistent.

One nice thing about the iPhone OS is that it's easy to update applications.

Crack detection – check your pinfolist for signer identity. If the game's cracked, you can respond to it in several ways. Their game stopped halfway in and implored the user to buy the full version.

Conference Sessions/Keynotes

The Universe Behind World of Warcraft Keynote

WoW started with the Warcraft franchise that started in 1994 with Warcraft and 1995 with Warcraft 2. Warcraft 3 brought about the "yellow exclamation point" that's become a cornerstone of WoW.

The original project that became WoW started out as a squad-based RPG called "Nomad". Meanwhile they were playing Ultima Online and Everquest. They decided that if they were going to restart the project, it'd be an MMO based on the Warcraft universe, so Nomad was set aside and WoW was born.

They try to keep teams around 5-8 people, but they routinely break that rule. The Engineering team is broken into five sub-teams, Engine, Gameplay, Tools, Server, and UI.

The art team is divided into characters, environment, dungeons, props, and animation. They have a dedicated "technical art team" that builds tools as well as maintains things like the correctness of the meshes and such.

The creative teams do not report to producers. The creative team reports to other members of the creative team. The producers ultimately aren't the "boss" of the creative team. Over the course of the project, the producers have tracked over 33,000 tasks.

As for design, there's a team that takes care of everything from "trash spawning" to the quests for players and guild leveling system. The "zones" are all built by hand and aren't built procedurally. The design team consists of 37 people , creating over 70,000 spells and 30,000 NPC's.

The Cinematics department (123 people) takes care of all of the pre-rendered cinematic sequences. They also build the teasers, promotional trailers and machinima sequences.

The in-house sound department takes care of sound effects, music, and voice casting/recording. WoW currently has 27 hours of music, and that grows with every patch. About half of the size of most patches are sounds.

Original WoW shipped with 2600 quests. Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expanded the number of total quests to 7650. The QA team is 218 people who are needed to play through all of these. They currently track about 180,000 bugs in the system (most are fixed).

Localization is handled in-house, and the game's localized into ten languages. There are no "partial" localizations. Localizations are not taken lightly, as each new language is a huge task. Each localization requires translating over 300,000 phrases.

Every patch must be multiplied by ten because there are ten languages (English, German, French, European Spanish, Russian, Latin Am Spanish, Koream, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and European English). And all those patches must be tested to work with all previous patches. Ultimately each patch ends up becoming 126 targets.

There are 13,250 total server blades and 75,000 total CPU cores and 112.5 terabytes of RAM running the servers. Data Centers include Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, Seoul, China, and Taiwan. The server staff worldwide is 68 people.

International offices are in France, Ireland, Korea, Taiwan, and China. China and Taiwan work through partner companies who handle most of the]]> Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:52:05 +0000 d869c99656ec60fc9de27338a87b2506 http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/business/435/siggraph-2009-r2682 Siggraph is scheduled every year at the start of August and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to meet in New Orleans in August. I spoke with several locals who thought we were crazy for visiting the city at this time of year and the heat and humidity didn’t disappoint. Between the sweltering heat and humidity and the icy air conditioning indoors, it felt like we were continually jumping between the lava and snow worlds in a game.

Tuesday morning, I got to meet with the conference chair, Ronen Barzel who described some of the initiatives for this year’s conference. The goal was to move the field forward. Ronen highlighted several aspects of the conference that were new this year, specifically in three unique areas including music and audio, games and information aesthetics. Presentations and performances around each of these areas were planned during the conference.

In further describing the games aspect of the conference, Ronen highlighted how games have become pervasive in society and how film and games have grown up separate from each other and each has a unique view. He also mentioned that over the last several years, the games industry has started its own conference, called the Sandbox Symposium, as an academic venue for presenting research in the field of games. This conference was scheduled as a parallel conference to Siggraph four years ago and over the years, it has melded into Siggraph until this year, when it has become officially part of the Siggraph conference.

To address this inclusion of games within Siggraph, the conference has included the presenting of several game papers along with published proceedings. The conference chairs also asked Will Wright to be a keynote speaker due to his affiliation with the games industry as a noted designer and as one who could inspire and entertain the attendees. Another key focus for gamers was the inclusion of real-time rendering in the animation festival.

When asked why New Orleans was chosen as the host city, Ronen commented that the decision was made 4-5 years ago. New Orleans is a good backdrop with a festive flavor, which aligns with Siggraph’s “festival of knowledge.” He also mentioned that this was one of the first major conferences to return to New Orleans after the devastating damage from the Katrina hurricane.

The Siggraph conference committee also offered several ways to give back to the city through its various outreach programs. These included several charitable organizations that attendees to donate to including the Louis Armstrong Summer Camp program; a mentoring program for local multimedia students; and a multimedia laboratory for the local students established by software and hardware donations from several companies involved in Siggraph.

Sessions and Interviews

Interview with Autodesk

The first major announcement was for Maya 2010 and SoftImage 2010. Maya 2010 has condensed it offerings to a single package. This gives all Maya Complete and Maya Unlimited users a single package for a single price of $3495. This includes all the features found in Maya Unlimited along with a full-featured compositor and Match Mover. Maya 2010 also includes five additional mental ray licenses and Backburner for batch network rendering. Softimage 2010 includes Face Robot. SoftImage 2010 also includes a new Giga III architecture for better performance and an expanded ICE, with the ability to export to Maya. Both of these packages are great values and offer cross upgrade paths.

Another key value announcement is the new Autodesk Suites that enable users to save as much as 35% over the standard pricing. The Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite includes Maya or 3ds Max bundled with MotionBuilder and Mudbox. Another suite is the Autodesk Real-Time Animation Suite, which includes Maya or 3ds Max and MotionBuilder.

Along with new versions of Maya and SoftImage, Autodesk also announced new versions of MotionBuilder 2010 with expanded physics and Mudbox 2010 with better Photoshop interoperability, an SDK and FBX support.

An update version of 3ds Max 2010 was announced earlier this year at GDC, but subscribers can download 3ds Max Connection Extension, which enables better import and export to other Autodesk products along with support for SKP and SAT formats and better exporting to the OpenEXR format.

Included in the education initiatives is a new Education Suite 2010, which includes key Autodesk products at competitive educational pricing. There is also a new Animation Academy package focused for 11 to 17 year old students.

Autodesk has also made versions of 3ds Max and Maya available free to user for 90 days through their new assistance program. This program is designed to allow 3d users to keep their skills current while out of work.

More on all Autodesk Siggraph announcements can be found on the Autodesk Area web site.

Getting a Job in 3D and Games

Finding a job in the CG and Games industry involves completing an internship, having passion and experience, creating an effective demo reel and portfolio. Another good point is to know the company that you are applying with. Several panelists mentioned an internship as an important step.

It is helpful to match your portfolio to the type of job that you are applying for. So, if a company is looking for animator, then include your best animation pieces and not so many modeling projects. When making a demo reel, resist the temptation to pack too much into the demo reel. The manager will have about 15 seconds to evaluate your reel, not 3 to 4 minutes.

The stuff in your resume is also important. Try to keep your content so it is grounded in reality. One panelist responded that seeing a character walk is often better to see that some wild unique science fiction image. When asked what content makes a poor response, the panelists responses included anything with teapots, lens flares, or chess pieces. Also avoid anything that has incorrect lighting, even if built by a team. Make your reel so it shows that you have a understanding for the basic fundamentals.

If your reel includes content developed by a team, be sure to include a project breakdown that describes exactly what part of the project that you did.

If you post your resume on a web site, make the site easy to navigate and fast. Hiring managers don’t want to wait to see your reel. If you post your resume online, make it downloadable using PDF or Word. If you make the resume available using any other method, then it will need to be cut and pasted to be distributed and the resume won’t look too good when viewed by others in the company.

For resumes, be sure to include a three sentence paragraph describing your mission statement that describes just what you want to do. Be sure to include in your resume the keywords that the company can search on. This is especially important for technical programming positions where the toolset is more key than a portfolio. Try to keep your resume to a single page.

When asked about hiring generalists versus specialist, the panelists said that broad skills are important, but it is skill in a specific area that will typically get you hired and that the general skills are the versatility that will keep you working.

Another key point is to be willing to collaborative with a team. Most CG positions work with a team and it is important to be a team player.

It is often helpful to network with others within the industry. So often it is “who you know” that will help you get a job. There are plenty of ways to network including emailing other students that are working where you want to work; contact with others through user groups and web sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; and conferences such as Siggraph are also helpful. After making contacts, it is critical that you follow-up. Be sure to respond to all the people that you meet and collect business cards from at the conference.

In response to the poor economy, several of the panelist responded that it could be tough to get into these companies at the current time, but the two panelists from London responded that they are actually busier than ever.

If you can’t get hired directly into a company, another way to try is to get hired for an internship or in the test department. Within most of the CG and game companies, there is a high demand for Creature TDs, Rigging and Technical Artists.

Fun with Maya

Duncan Brinsmead is one of the Maya specialists at Autodesk and he usually presents at the Autodesk User Group meeting at Siggraph, but since there wasn’t a user group meeting this year, Duncan presented his latest work at a Exhibitor session located in the back of the exhibition hall. The tiny make-shift room was packed with a crowd standing around to catch a glimpse.

Duncan showed off a number of interesting techniques that mimicked real-world phenomenon such as getting arrows to stick to the objects they hit, creating a snake from cloth, making a worm move, simulating a lathe and creating confetti that spins.

Many of these techniques use features that are new to Maya, but some use older features in new ways. The plasma ball showed an easy way to get electric arcs to be attracted to a hand touching the ball’s surface. Other dynamic based examples included a water wheel, a bag of microwave popcorn, a tornado, a lava lamp, dripping wax, and a dividing cell.

All of Duncan’s examples are showcased on the Autodesk Area site in a section called Duncan’s Corner.

Will Wright Keynote Address

Will started his talk by talking about his cat, Argon. He posted a picture of his cat on kittenwar.com and noticed the pattern of winning and losing cats. This site compares the cuteness of cats based on voting. The detected patterns are that winning cats are smaller and fit within a shoe. From this example, Will extrapolated that design fields are divided into several different areas including Environmental, Aesthetic, Functional, Storytelling, Psychology, etc. There are also several different entertainment silos including TV, music, books that are all tending to bleed together into a single field that could be called the Interdisciplinary Field Theory, which is similar to the Unified Field Theory.

When looking at the entertainment landscape, we often don’t know why we want it, but since games are just pixels that respond to the eyes, then game designers are like drug dealers. Within the continuous entertainment landscape, sports feed into the Internet, and dance feeds into hobbies and toys. This leads to a three interconnected circles for Play, Story and Voyeurism. The question for each discipline is where does it flow to?

Another way to look at this is to look at the platform landscape. Will compared his I-phone screen to the IMAX screen which is 100,000 times larger. Does this mean that the IMAX is 100,000 times better an experience? But, actually consumers don’t care. Just like the equation that 3D divided by 2D equals 1.5 times better, which isn’t true.

Perception also deals with our senses. Is a 3D concert a better experience than a 3D film? If this is the case, then what should we put on the screen? The ear can actually distinguish between earthquake tremors and nuclear blasts better than can be done using a visual display or graph. Each of our senses have a different bandwidth of data that can be processed with 10M for eyes, 1M for touch, 100K for sound and smell and 100 for taste.

The bandwidth limitations for some senses can lead to perceptual blindness. A good example of this is placing two headlights on a motorbike to help people to make motorcycles safer. A negative example is that using a cell phone while driving is often worse than a drunk driver.

You can also look at the Information Absorption rate as a function of age, so if a person can process 3600 bits of data per second, then a 10 year old could process 360 bytes per second. For the average age of the attendees, this would equate to about 4 slides per minute or 240 slides per hour.

When looking at a random image of dots, it becomes difficult to pick out any patterns. This similar effect happens when looking at captured versus synthetic images. When mapping reality and imagined images verses captured and synthetic images, then the middle point of the graph is where some interesting blending occurs. A good example of imagined images that are synthetically created are the images from the project, Life After People, which could also be called the “watch the world slowly rot” project. These images show popular landscapes after hundreds of years of neglect.

The camera is training wheels for the eyes and helps seeing uncommon perceptions. One way to look at this is to measure the amount of data generated within a lifetime. A simple list of ancestors accounting for about 1kb was common for ancestors, maybe a journal was kept for 100kb, then letters became common for about 1MB, but with digital cameras, 10 GB of data is common and our children will easily generate 1TB of data during their lifetime. Another interesting look is to measure what the half-life of this data is.

Perception is based on what we see. Imagine walking through a jungle and seeing a tiger or imagine being in the same jungle and seeing a picture of tiger. How will we react to these images? We can quickly classify the results to determine what we do. It is interesting how a 5 year old child can immediately distinguish between a cat and a dog, but an advanced computer cannot.

We can learn schema from others via a story or from experience with a toy via play. For kids, playing video games is using the scientific method. They try something and adjust their play based on whether they succeed or fail at a task. Through continual playing they form a play model of the game in their head. Another example is the creation of miniature sets to show such a similar mapping. This can also be created by using Tilt-Split photography to make real-world scenes appear like miniature sets.

One aspect for controlling perception mapping that games use is a force multiplier.

Another aspect of games is the social side and to determine how to entertain the hive mind, or a collection of connected brains. The hive mind has an increased speed of processing enhanced by instant communication. One way is to entertain the hive mind is to grow the community. A good example of this is the fans of the TV show, Lost. Lost fans have created the Lostpedia, which have gone to such lengths as to translate the hieroglyphs in the background of the show’s scenes. In fact, one minor character on the show has more Wikopedia pages than President Obama. Casual viewers can look into this depth of information to enhance their experience.

In games, a similar pattern emerged for Sims where over time a large volume of content was created for the game. The largest portion of the content created for Sims had a lower quality and the best pieces being quite a bit less. The idea with Spore was to increase the amount of quality content by means of tools.

For Spore, the team set a goal to achieve 100K worth of posted content via the Creature Creator game in time for the launch. This goal was actually met in 22 hours after its availability. Today there are over 100M in content posted. The Sims reached 100K worth of posted content after 2 years and with Spore’s Make and Share tools, there’s 100 times the Sims content available. The results are that the additional data makes for more player experiences.

Spore also has developed an API that others can use to create their own games using the Spore data. There is also a Maya import/export features to drive even more content. The key to this entertainment extension is the data.

True 3D Gaming Panel

On Thursday, a panel discussion entitled, “The Masters Speak: Game Developers Weigh in on True 3D Gaming,” was presented. This panel showcased three studios that have successfully used stereoscopic 3D in their game development. The panelist included Andrew Oliver from Blitz Games, Habib Zargarpour from EA, and Nicholas Schultz from Crytek.

Andrew presented first and gave an overview of the stereo 3D technologies. Current systems are divided into three groups: Active displays such as the DLP systems that uses expensive glasses to modulate the left and right channels; Passive displays such as the Real3D system that uses polarized glasses; and Auto-Stereoscopic systems that don’t required any glasses, but are limited in that you need to stand directly in front of the display.

One of the biggest challenges for Blitz Games was to build the game so that it worked on all the available 3D televisions. Andrew also mentioned that one of the main challenges is caused by the confusion over the various hardware and input formats. A standard would make adoption much easier.

He then showed off Invincible Dragon, a side-scroller martial arts fighting game in 3D to be released on Xbox Live. One of the motivations behind this game was to prove that it could be done. The side scroller game was chosen on purpose because the slow left and right pans would allow the player’s eyes to adjust to the 3D. Also, the player maintains a focus on the main character which allows the eyes to rest. The game is displayed at 1080p and 60 frames per second one for each channel. During development, the team found that they actually had to model more background items to fill the space. Overall, Andrew felt that adding stereo 3D to the game required about a 10 to 15% additional work.

Nicholas was second panelist to present and showed off a version of Crysis running in stereoscopic 3D. The effect was amazing. At one point, Nicholas moved his player into a river and shot a rocket into the opposite cliff causing pieces of rock to fly in all directions including a large chunk that flew right over the player’s shoulder and directly into the player’s face.

Nicholas commented that the way the Crytek engine was built, it was relatively easy to implement this new display mode and that it took less than 2 days to implement. His system was displayed using a duel output to a DLP projector.

Nicholas, like Andrew, also commented that the lack of a standard was a serious problem. He also sees this as a big help for serious game applications and architectural visualizations.

Habib was the last presenter and he showed off a version of Need for Speed: Shift that also used stereo 3D. With the moving cars moving in and out of the scene in 3D, the results were very realistic and immersive.

Habib stated that in building the game for 3D, many of the common 2D cheats, such as camera-facing planar trees and bump maps wouldn’t work and had to be redesigned. Another challenge was to keep the motion subtle and not to be tempted to rush objects at the camera. Finally, when EA releases a game, it simultaneously releases 65 different versions to cover all the different consoles and 12 different languages. If varying stereoscopic 3D standards require another 5 different options, then this creates a huge problem.

Building Story in Games: No Cut Scenes Required

Bob started by describing the typical 3-act structure used by storytellers. The first act tells the back story. It is also used to setup the character. The second act includes the confrontation and the climax. It is a roller coaster of emotions where the tension rises and falls. The third act has the resolution. It is used to tie up all the loose ends. During the third act, the tension should dissipate and the goal is to finish the story and get out.

At the end of acts 1 and 2 are plot points that are major events that turn the actor. Plot point 1 should drive the character to take on the problem. Good stories start at plot point 1. Plot point 2 is the climax for the story.

Story structure can be further simplified into two parts: an inciting incident that creates the problem and the principle action that resolves the problem.

Within games, story telling is unique because the player is the hero and you don’t always have control over what the player is going to do. For games, the story is all act 2. Games are often based on an internal story where the player describes the story as, “I beat the dragon.” This is different from external stories, such as Moby Dick, where the story is known.

Considering design and emotion, it is a common principle that “form follows function,” but for games it doesn’t work this way. For example, in industrial design, the function that makes the item work is surrounded by the emotional aspects that makes the person want the item. However, for entertainment, the emotional aspect is the core and it is surrounded by the functional design.

Danny’s presentation was titled, “Screenwriting in Gamespace.” He started by describing environmental storytelling where the game environment does a lot to tell the story. He then showed an example of a game, Homefront, currently in development at THQ. Through the game’s various environments, you could quickly detect the back story for the game without using intrusive cut scenes.

For game players, the story is immersive and subversive. “It is the player’s story,” commented Danny where actions speak louder than words. Danny then gave some examples. While playing Everquest, a low-level player fell down a well to a level with higher-level monsters. Although probably not intended by the game designers, this created a compelling story for the player who discussed it with other players. Eventually, the player was escorted out by some higher-level players, but the story was unique and memorable.

Another example, from World of Warcraft, was that a player stumbled upon a wrecked ship with all different kinds of different lifeforms. The story was that an alien ark crash landed on the island and it was established without any dialogue. Another good example is Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3 where the player has the choice to choose a faction to defend.

Danny then posed a question on which is more important, gameplay or story. The answer is that gameplay is critically more important. He then presented a quote that “I’d like to watch a movie while playing a video game about as much as I’d like to play a video game while watching a movie.” He then stated that cut scenes are the lowest form of storytelling.

Since game playing is an active medium, you need to ask yourself, “what are the verbs?,” and “why do I care?” The key is to tell a story through objectives and rewards. You need to write the story in the non-player characters (NPCs) and not into the player. A good example of this was an NPC that convinced Danny to follow him into a cave to get a treasure, but Danny found an ambush instead. This created an emotional response for this NPC and the next time he was encountered in the game, Danny took action.

Making a Feature-Length Animated Movie with a Game Engine

The entire feature was animated using keyframe animation with MotionBuilder and rendered using RenderBox, a game engine. The game engine with its real-time abilities enabled the team to work side by side with the director. The shots were rendered in several passes including render passes for the diffuse, occlusion and normal channels.

Another key benefit of using the RenderBox game engine was that the feature had no lighting department. The ability to place lights within the engine eliminated the common duel between the compositor and the lighting departments since a single artist did both. They were also able to bake lighting into all static scenes and typical render updates were about 10 seconds to render.

The pipeline involved rendering work for the day during the night so that the results could be viewed the next morning. The feature didn’t require an expensive render farm. All content was input into the engine using FBX format and output as EXR files. The RenderBox engine was adapted to be able to render in layers with passes, but otherwise the off-the-shelf engine was used.

Through the experience, the team learned that the game engine was not a magic potion and they still had problems including anti-aliasing, transparency and poly flickering. There were also memory issues and some of the heavier scenes needed to be split for rendering. The game engine in some ways couldn’t compete with a software renderer and posed limitation such as no GI, true reflection or subsurface scattering. The director was aware of these limitations and tailored the story to not be constrained by these limitations.

The project marked the long sought-after convergence of video games and film. The game engine allowed a flexibility that could handle last minute changes to the film. In fact, some changes were made only two days before the film was released. This gave a lot of control to the director. Overall, the decision to use a game engine saved millions of dollars on the project by allowing the project to be rendered on typical workstations with requiring a render farm and eliminating a separate lighting department.

Game Papers

The game papers were divided into several discrete categories covering social play, visuals, game mechanics and kinesthetic movements.

One of the more interesting papers was presented by Scott Kircher and Alan Lawrance of Volition. It showed a technique that speeded dynamic scene lighting for real-time rendering called inferred lighting. The process works by using a discontinuity sensitive filtering (DSF) algorithm to compute lights and shadows based on a lower resolution approximation of the scene.

Another interesting game paper presented by Kaveh Kardan of the University of Hawaii. It showed a system for automatically editing cinematics based on a defined shot list. The system also includes the ability to add stylistic edits. The team compared some movie clips with those created by the system and although interesting, the system still deviated from the clips in several ways.

In another paper, Michiel Roza showed a visual profiler called GamePro that he has developed. This profiler allows developers to investigate frame drop in their game by means of a visual interface that makes it easy to quickly see the methods where the frame rate and memory leak problems occur. The profile is available from Kalydo and more information is online at www.kalydo.com.

Karthik Raveendran presented work by two teams on an augmented reality game called Art of Defense. This game is a board game with physical pieces that the players place on a table. Then by looking through handheld PSP systems, they can see where enemies are attacking the towers of defense that they’ve place on the table using tiles. This game concept is unique because it combines traditional tabletop board games with a virtual component. The game was also designed to be collaborative so players work together to beat their virtual foes.

Another new and interesting game concept was presented by Floyd Mueller. Floyd defined a category of games called exertion games that are designed to require physical effort to play such as DDR and several Wii sports games. Floyd and his team worked to create a game called “Remote Impact.” The game consisted of a wall-sized framework consisting of layers of plastic and foam onto which the outline shadow of another player could be projected. The shadows were captured using a camera and projected onto the opponent’s screen. Two networked screens allow players to shadow box with one another. The edges of the framework detected stresses applied to the screen so that the position and intensity of the player’s hit was used to determine the strength of the blow. The benefits of this game included exercise for fitness and social interaction between players.

Rene Weller of Clausthal University showed a new algorithm for collision detection that would enable correct feedback for haptic devices. Correct haptic feedback requires rates of 1000 frames per second and BVHs and Voxels are too computationally expensive to be used for such. The new algorithm based on inner sphere trees computes the collision surface based on non-overlapping bounding volumes that are recursive and fast.

These are just a sampling of the available game papers. The entire game papers can be found with the Sandbox 2009 proceedings.

Exhibition

Happily, Pixar was still strong at Siggraph 2009 with a booth that resembled the house in their latest film, Up. Throughout the week attendees lined up to get Up posters and collectible wind-up teapots.

Autodesk also had a strong presence at the show including a booth that demoed their software throughout the week.

The exhibition floor also showcased several new and interesting technologies including this video graphics board that could simultaneously display hundreds of video streams at once.

The Fraunhofer group showed a virtual mirror that could project an image onto a shirt. The image bent and moved with the cloth. You could also change the design and color of the shirt and the image in the mirror was updated to show the changes.

3DVia was also present showing off a broad array of technologies including this cool application that let a digital character move and dance along the edge of a box being held. As the box is tilted, the character slides to the edge of the box and if the box is quickly moved, the character jumps to regain its footing.

Several digital schools also had booths and one school was showing off its DJ Hero interface and game that is similar to Guitar Hero, except it uses a proprietary turntable to scratch discs. You can learn more about this interesting interface at www.sultansofscratch.com.

Emerging Technologies

The platform shown below was able to detect the pressure of people walking on its surface. For the demonstration, participants could walk across an icy surface and see virtual cracks appear on the platform and hear the cracking sound of ice as pressure was applied.

Another exhibition used programmed robots to fold laundry. With a simple interface, you could define exactly how you wanted the clothes folded and the robot would figure out how to do the folds.

This display was a simple sled simulator and it saves a trip to the emergency room. It also included a force feedback system for bumps and turns.

One of the most unique game interfaces was this team who used a blowing device to shoot at monsters within the game. A Wii remote was used for directing the shots and a breath analyzer could detect the type of breath odor you were emitting. By trying different flavored snacks, you could change the effectiveness of the shots, so garlic could really be used to kill a vampire. One suggested use was to create a game to encourage children to eat the healthy foods they dislike.

Another unique input device was a thick sheet of plastic that could detect pressure. This pressure sensing device could be used in gameplay or could be used to detect the surface of an object.

Another displayed showed a cooking interface for games that didn’t require any heat. It used a typical pan and spatula interface hooked with wires to provide feedback to the player.

This interface used an umbrella, called the Funbrella, and simulated the effect of different weighted objects falling on the top of the umbrella.

GameJam! and Conference Games

This year also featured Game Jam, where teams of game developers also got to compete to create games in a 24-hour period. There were two different categories: 2D games built using Flash and 3D games built using Panda 3D. Prizes for the competition were provided by donations from sponsoring companies and included passes for next year’s conference, software from Autodesk and books. Each winner was also given a medal, which was a set of beads around a classic NES game cartridge. Winners were also invited to be part of the Reception parade held later that night.

The 2D Game Crowd Favorite was awarded to the creators of Invasion of Zaltor.

The 2D Game Best of Show was awarded to the team that created the game, Falling for Siggraph.

Dumpster Dave was recognized as the Most Creative 3D Character.

The Most Lifelike 3D Character was Sir Thomas.

Creepy Crawler was the 3D Character Crowd Favorite.

The Henry character was the 3D Funniest Character.

Finally, the 3D Character Best of Show was awarded to the team that created Winston Leopold Chesterchumberfield.

The conference also held two conference wide games. The first, called Encounter, was a scavenger hunt game where teams of participants were given clues and questions via a mobile device or a custom I-phone app. The event had over 300 teams with over 1200 simultaneous players.

Another conference wide game involved collecting business cards to create a virtual company.

Animation Theater

The real-time pieces that were highlighted included Flower for the PS3. This game was created by ThatGameCompany and demonstrated in real-time as a player played through several levels of the game highlighting its detailed, beautiful graphics.

The second piece was an application developed in Japan at Soka University called DT4 Identity SA. This application used a camera to capture a picture of the person in front of the camera and then used a number of different rendering styles to display the camera’s image.

The Froblins demo was created by a team at AMD. It showcased the graphics capabilities of the latest ATI graphics card. The Froblins are small frog-like creatures that wander about a scene seeking gold, food or rest. The entire world is rendered in real-time and features several thousands autonomous high-resolution characters. Despite the heavy amount of content, the resulting animation are smooth and detailed.

The final real-time demonstration showed a Fight Night 4 fight between Mike Tyson and Will Wright. After a nail-biting couple of rounds, Will Wright’s character was able to knockout Mike Tyson. The real-time graphics use advanced physics to create a sense of realism.

Sandbox Game Showcase

One such game let players drawn their own terrain level using a scanned white board marker. This drawing was then used as the game map.

I'm still working on Texas time, so I was up and at 'em around 5am. And downtown Seattle doesn't stir until around 9, so I found myself with a little time to hike and sightsee. For those unfamiliar with downtown Seattle, it does tend to get a mite cold at all times, even in July. Mornings are pleasant, but the city is situated with the streets pointing to the bay. It's quite nice in the summer, as the cool North Pacific breezes work their way through the city. I can't imagine what it's like in the Winter, though. I think I'd prefer to stay in Texas from October to March.

In downtown Seattle, the streets all head downhill to the waterfront.
If you look across the street, you'll see the "Triple Door", which is a little concert venue used for some of the sessions.

There are plenty of coffee places. And by that I mean that there's a coffee place every hundred feet or so. And I'm only exaggerating a bit. Why a cold place like Seattle got famous for pushing a product that's grown in the equatorial tropics is something I won't get answered for this trip.

This latte was just so artfully swirled that I had to get a picture.

And it won't get answered because this week we're all about casual games!

Tuesday started off with two keynote speeches. First off. . .

A Leader's Perspective on Building Value – Jeremy Lewis, CEO of Big Fish Games.

To be honest, I'm not sure I can convey much of a take-away from this speech. It's pretty high level and feel-goody. The first ten minutes were mostly bio and photos. But here are the bullet points.

• Make Culture A Top Priority – Big Fish is working hard on creating a culture around their games.
  
  
• Have and Communicate A Vision – Push forth a focus and direction. Build a clearly-defined and concise vision for your company.
  
  
• Set Lofty Goals – Develop your own techniques and work on your terms. If you call yourself a global leader and imitate other companies, then you won't reach your lofty goals. On a related note, BFG is sponsoring a developer contest, and the prize will be a climb of Mt. Rainier.
  
  
• Expand The Audience – This is a lot easier said than done. BFG is clearly moving to court women gamers, as he repeatedly references the audience as "she". Strategic partnerships are an important part of this. Related to this, BFG just announced a partnership with People Magazine – again courting the "Chief Household Office" (i.e. women).
  
  
• Reputation Matters – Choose your associations carefully and ensure alignment of interest. Read the fine print.
  
  
• Focus On The Numbers – Compete on the analytics. Numbers allow you to make dispassionate decisions. Make decisions based on what you know rather than what you think you know.
  
  
• Put Your Ego On The Back Burner – Humility is a key variable that affects leadership credibility. Leadership is in the eyes of those being led. Listen to those who's opinions differ radically from yours.
  
  
• Manage Growth – Growing is one thing, but sustaining growth is a whole different dynamic. While you're growing, it's easy to live by the delusion that everything's going well.

Games are integral to the very being of people. We, as an industry, have a limitless potential to create value.

Building games developed and intended to be played in the West by Tom Prata – Game boss for Nintendo for "International" (i.e. non-Japan) games.

Somehow graphical performance became the determinant as to what would make the best quality games. The mission became "Expanding the Game Population", and this was not done with improved performance but with expanded markets and less complicated gameplay. People were losing interest because games were becoming more complicated. They felt that the newest games weren't for them. Hence the prices dropped despite growing development costs.

Expand the market – US participation in gaming is growing. In the last 2.5 years, 30 million new game players have been added. The opportunity is still there, though. Given the right game, there are another 150 million players who would play.

Price pressure is an issue, especially when you're competing against games that are free.

Focus on quality and that which is different. Players decide what is good and what is great. And this quality leads to word-of-mouth.

"Go For Different" was the model they went with for the DS and the Wii. Experience was broadened to include more than just performance.

Wii Fit has become the best-selling game in the world, despite carrying a retail price of $90.

"I wanted to make something very unique. Something very different" - Shigeru Miyamoto

Miyamoto's Method – The creativity behind the games is the important things, not the big franchises (Mario, Zelda).

• Observation – Observe people and see what grabs their interests and what they're passionate about. Know that things change and things that were popular before may not be later.
  
  
• Find a "Universal" Theme – Don't just make a product for yourself. Look for the core concept that's appealing and universal.
  
  
• Analysis – Find the "central compelling element" that will attract people to your product.
  
  
• Proof of Concept – show that that "core element" is interesting. This is done as an actual prototype, not just on paper. The concept is tested with a small team.

If there's an underlying problem with the core premise, no amount of bonus items or levels will fix the problem. Learn from mistakes.

In 2003, there was an experimental product called "Stage Debut". It allowed you to take photos of yourself and build a character around it. While interesting and funny, the team couldn't make the demo gel as a game. They decided not to turn it into a product, but the experiment ended up becoming the "Mii" concept.

Three key attributes in games with wide appeal. Nintendo always keeps these in front.

• Accessibility – Focus on the broader market and things that appeal to everyone. Wii Sports needed to focus very hard on this. Rather than building several fully-featured games, they took smaller games with a good Wiimote gameplay experience. People could easily relate to the Wiimote's connection to the sports.
  
  
• Sense of Newness – Products must surprise and delight. Otherwise you'll reach a saturation point. This is the secret to keeping life in older franchises.
  
  
• Consumer Reaction – It's not about what we think, but what they think. See your product through the eyes of the consumer. If the consumer doesn't like it, it's not the consumer's fault.

In game development, one thing matters – the talent of the game developer. Some of Nintendo's products were created by very small teams. For example, BrainAge is one of their biggest products, but it was made by six people in a few months.

Determine what you can do with the resources you have, and try to exceed that.

Consumer Reaction - it's not about what we think, but what they think. See your product through the eyes of the consumer. If the consumer doesn't like it, it's not the consumer's fault.

In game development, one thing matters - the talent of the game developer. Some of Nintendo's most popular products were created by very small teams.

Determine what you can do with the resources you have, and try to exceed that.

Casual Connect - Wednesday

We got down to a little more work on Wednesday. One comment (complaint) about Casual Connect this year is that it's ALL business. There were very few programmer-oriented sessions, and pretty-much nothing resembling source code appeared anywhere. There were a few booths for developer tools here and there, but it was mostly about business.

Wow, there's something you don't see in the summer in Texas, fog!
The gray "Pig Truck" is a barbecue sandwich place that was quite popular around lunchtime.

"iPhone crashes the portable gaming party" panel

Jason Loia of Digital Chocolate moderated the panel. His opening point was that the iPhone is blurring the developer-publisher relationship. In the past 12 months, the mobile publishing industry has really been put on its head. The model for purchasing digital content for mobile has certainly changed with the instant popularity of the iPhone App Store.

Cross platform and multi-platform development is important with a core "center of gravity" platform and several ancillary platforms also in development.

iPhone and iPod Touch user base is currently at about 46 million units. Nintendo DS is over 100 million. This quarter, iPhone/iTouch sales exceeded those of PSP.

About 20% if the apps on the iPhone are free. The current rate is about 300 new games per day. In the course of one year, 68,000 apps have shipped and 1 billion apps have been downloaded.

If you're targeting iPhone, don't neglect iPod Touch users. They skew to a younger demographic and, despite fewer of 'em out there, they download almost as many games.

The real cost of development isn't just overcoming technical hurdles. The context of user experience between the DS and iPhone is quite different. And the price-point is also quite a bit different. People don't expect as deep an experience on a $2 iPhone game that they do on a $40 DS game, despite the similarity of platforms. Games are structured differently between DS and iPhone, and that's not just due to the tech. The depth of the game (20 hours vs 20 minutes) is quite different.

One of the big values of the iPhone is the app store, as you don't have to work through carriers and deal with their systems.

Cost of goods is also an issue. The intrinsic cost to get a DS game on the shelves is $6-$8 with a 14-28 day backlog at manufacturing. The physical goods and costs component must be taken into account.

The top-ranked game on the app store is getting 25k-40k installs per day.

Microtransactions and subscription content on the iPhone is ready, ad the future of the platform is going to be the 99-cent game. In order for microtransactions or subscriptions to be available, the game cannot be free, so you need to go with the lowest price-point.

Remember that you're competing with disposable apps with a very short shelf-life.

Successful entities are the ones creating a franchise – the Hulu model vs the YouTube model.

How do you take something that's done well on other platforms and get 'em successful on the iPhone? Try to reimagine the experience for the iPhone. Take full advantage of iPhone 3.0 features. Don't just port it. Don't just count on the hottest franchises becoming the hottest iPhone titles. The Sims on iPhone was knocked off the number-one spot by "Sally's Spa".

Kongregate – Fatal Flaws in Flash Games

Kongregate – 16,000 games and 1,000 uploaded monthly. Audience is primarily young males.

The top games make up the lion's share of the traffic. The top 10% of the games get 90% of the play-time, and the top 1% of games get half of the traffic.

High ratings are the key to multiple plays. They differentiate between regular players (5 plays/month) and addicts (20 plays/month).

Achievements are not a key to improving a game's rating. Achievements and badges drive traffic to a game, but they give gamers a longer experience, and they'll often rate it lower because not getting lots of achievements frustrates players.

(Lots of reading of bar-charts to us. Some of the annotation is interesting, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm being read to.)

General mistakes you can make in your designs.

• Have a mute button and a pause button. Some users are fanatical about it.
  
  
• Keep the mechanic simple and build on that. Make sure it's fun from the onset, as you can't insert the fun later.
  
  
• The final product matters, not the amount of time spent on it.
  
  
• Don't concentrate on game length. Some of the best games are the shortest and some of the most frustrated comments come from games that are unnecessarily long. Don't add filler if you think your game is too short.
  
  
• Players do not read the instructions. If your players do not understand the controls, that's your problem and not theirs. Allow flexibility for controls. "Super Energy Apocalypse Recycled" is very popular despite being very complicated and the game itself being about 2/3 tutorial.
  
  
• Challenge vs frustration. Making a player randomly die is not difficult. It's just frustrating.
  
  
• Art need not conflict with fun. Sprout and Anika's Odyssey are very popular and are text-free, but they're enjoyable.
  
  
• Make sure that the most effective strategies to get you to your goal are the most fun. If there's a "cheat" way to play that gets you to the end, you need to tweak your game to get rid of that.
  
  
• Style, aesthetics, and relate-ability win over the technically impressive stuff.
  
  
• The final 10% is the most important. Some small tweaks can improve your rating quite a bit.

Most of the panels in the Recital Hall looked like this. It was always humorous to hear a panelist insist that they had the NUMBER ONE game portal on the internet in front of a Big Fish Games banner that proclaims that they are the NUMBER ONE game portal on the internet.

Mobile Showdown

This was a rather odd panel, as the 800-pound gorilla of mobile phones was not present. Most of the rest of the pack (Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Nokia) were there. And I noticed that the pundits no longer referred to "smartphone" in the context of Windows Mobile (where I'd always heard it used) but as a more generic term for the new crop of uber-powerful phones. So if I use the term "smartphone", it's iPhone/Android/Blackberry/WM/Pre/etc.

Not surprisingly, the legacy phone download market is flat. All of the growth is in the smartphone arena, especially the new phone hosted "app store" (which all the smartphone-makers are implementing) is a great achievement that we should all support. The existing carrier-hosted download stores were a problem for users and phone-makers.

As for non-iPhone app stores, one new name I heard was "Ovi", which is Nokia's new phone-hosted app store. It's not currently popular in the US, but it's growing where Nokia phones are more popular. Windows Mobile Marketplace is also opening next week and promises to offer such an experience.

One important point made by a non-iPhone OS maker (Microsoft I think) is that while the iPhone app store currently owns the market, it will not dominate forever. The industry is still in its infancy and there's plenty of room for more phone-makers.

Smartphones are where you need to be. Wired Magazine recently did a survey, and the number-one piece of tech that people want to upgrade is their phones. And smartphones are overwhelmingly what they want to upgrade to.

The between-session crowd mingles in the foyer of the opera house.
One thing you notice in Seattle is that every building or arthouse or museum that's built with donations has the name of some Microsoft luminary on the "our contributors" wall. There are plenty of Gates' and Allen's and Simonyi's passing money around to the local projects.

I Have Seen The Future And It Is iPhone

In contrast to the previous panel, this session was all about iPhone and how you need to take a hard look at the new iPhone OS 3.0. The word "iPhone" was definitely on every developer and publisher's lips at Casual Connect. The rest of the smartphone pack was lumped in together in the "yeah, we'd like that too" category. iPhone clearly owns the smartphone market, at least for the time being.

What's the most compelling iPhone 3.0 feature? The new capability for microtransactions and subscriptions, thus allowing more payment methods, are definitely going to open up the phone to new games. One thing that's important to know about the new microtransaction and subscription model is that it is only available for paid games. You cannot release a free game, and then up-sell improvements later. If your game has a commerce model built into it, it must be a paid-for game.

Smaller, but also compelling, features in iPhone 3.0 include in-app text messaging. Minor "convenience" features include a new programmer-launchable landscape keyboard and the ability to play music during games. These new features are really easy to implement.

Note that OS 3.0 upgrades have been going very much slower for the iPod Touch than the full iPhone. If you're relying on OS 3.0 features, you won't be in that market until more Touch users upgrade. Also note that Apple isn't getting behind featuring apps unless they're OS 3.0, so you're currently playing a bit of a balancing act between your market and Apple.

Pricing is very important, and it's a very gray area. There are many different opinions regarding the "sweet spot" for game pricing. In the pre app-store world, prices were set by the carriers, so this is an entirely new phenomena in the mobile world.

After Wednesday's sessions, Mochi had a big reception at a nearby hotel. It was fairly dark with a giant projection of their mascot against one wall, as evidenced here.

Here's Mochimedia's booth. They were pushing their new MochiCoins in-game microtransaction system with a pile of chocolate coins and some flyers featuring codes for free MochiCoins.

Casual Connect - Thursday

Thursday, the last day, is when everybody's tired. The big parties are usually scheduled before the last day to ensure that everybody's been up too late and is tired and/or hung over. If you ever want to do a conference session but you're worried about having too large an audience, be sure to hold it on the last day when everything's sparsely-attended.

Thursday's overwhelming 9am keynote attendance.

But your intrepid reported was bright-eyed and bushy tailed for the 9am keynote!

Mike Peronto - CEO of WildTangent "Playing with Games"

WildTangent started out as an advergame company, but they're now exclusively downloadable content

Business Model Basics

• Not all consumers are the same
  
  
• Thus not all games are the same
  
  
• Therefore you must optimize revenues
  
  
• When models don't work, you often look for short-term solutions without regard to long-term repercussions.

Avoid one-dimensional models. When great games are valued the same as lower-priced (and lower quality) games, then you're at a race to the bottom.

Look into multi-dimensional models. And his example of a multi-dimensional model is the entertainment industry. It's available in several models. . .

• Free - Hulu, broadcast TV
  
  
• Purchase - Buying movies on disc.
  
  
• Rental - Movie theaters, NetFlix. They have no conception of "ownership" associated with them.

Free is not really free. A third-party is paying for you to view the product. It's good for recessionary times. Comparing the free movie-models with the free game-models, try-n-buy games are up 22% while the standard boxed retail games are down 23%. Free leads to higher consumer revenue thanks to greatly increased exposure.

As for purchases, the best games have the highest conversation rate.

Finally, game rentals. Consumption models for game rentals all revolve around micro-currency. Lots of "free to play" MMO's with purchase-able items can be considered rentals. This model works better overseas where the concept of "ownership" and the physical box doesn't carry as much value. It's a good model if the consumer doesn't value a game as much as the full retail price reflects.

Advertising models have good news and bad news. The good news is that premium advertising for games is booming. The bad news is that high volume and low quality advertising is cratering. Taking the long view, there is $50 billion that will be spent on TV ads, and games are perfectly positioned for this.

As a case study. WildTangent released "wild coins", which are a microtransaction currency that can be used to rent or purchase games. The rentals ended up happening at 3X the purchase rate even when "full buyout" purchases were available.

In summary, the gaming industry is well-positioned to thrive, and there's a strong outlook for premium advertising and microcurrency-based rentals.

WildTangent's ORB booth, pimping game rentals for your downloadable content. Also a couple of freebie games to take home. Don't mind if I do.

My Meetings

One thing you can guarantee if you're press is meetings. Press-agents are more than happy to pester you to learn about a client's new product. I tried to avoid meetings that weren't germane to game development so I could concentrate on stuff you'd want to see. And I got a couple of interesting bits here and there.

Meeting with TrialPay

TrialPay is an established (three years old) payment solution for products purchased over the internet, but their "get it free" virtual currency solution is something new. Basically people can purchase products the "old fashioned" way (credit card, PayPal, etc.) or they can get their purchase for "free" by signing up to special offers, filling out surveys, etc.

Payouts are mapped to an exchange rate. Once the retailer determines and item's price, TrialPay will post the offers that are compatible with that item. With retailers, the price will be based on the amount spent. Payments are then made to the developer monthly.

As mentioned above, while the "free" thing is new. TrialPay still supports the traditional payment solution model. Hence TrialPay can be used as a standard commerce "back end" for people who just want to get out their credit card and buy something.

Another TrialPay feature is that they can post premium items for extra purchases, giving the user price-breaks for multiple purchases and (hopefully) a better incentive to purchase the product.

Meeting with Spil Games - Peter Hodstede

Spil Games is a global network of online casual game sites. They're fully localized with 50 different native-language sites. They're headquartered in the Netherlands with in-house development studios in the Netherlands and China. The in-house studios develop about 100 games per year, and the rest are licensed from third-party casual game developers. The lion's share of the content they license is in Flash, but Shockwave (Adobe Director) is acceptable if your submission requires a lot of 3D.

Since Spil's sites are localized worldwide, a game that can be easily localized is preferable to one that's not. Their biggest localized hits right now are licensed and localized versions of the "big" games, like their new fully-localized versions of Disney's "Club Penguin".

Club Penguin Localized for France

One thing they've noticed is that they're getting more mainstream console developers wanting to partner with them to create small-format casual games. Developers like having more control over the development process as well as faster turnaround times, so they're moving into the casual space.

Spil keeps an eye on games submitted to flashgamelicense.com, so if you want their attention, you might get it there. To contact them directly, email partners@spilgames.com.

What makes a success on their portals?

• Don't make things take too long to start. You can have a back-story, but it must have an initial "pull" that gets the user's attention rather than just tangentially-related material.
  
  
• Don't just make games that you want to play. The female market in casual gaming is huge, so take it into account. One of their big successes recently are 3D "dress up" games in which you can dress up a character and then look at her from several angles in the "room".
  
  
• If your game is difficult, give the user some success straight away. Save the extra difficulty and depth for later on.
  
  
• Give early audio and video feedback and early encouragement to the user so they know they're playing the game correctly. Don't be too harsh if they're not.
  
  
• Games where users are allowed to build and share content, like the "line rider" drawing games, are very popular right now. Look into 'em.

Why choose casual game development?

• If you're an independent Flash game developer, you'll get more projects and more success. And if you're good at it, you'll have some financial success.
  
  
• Developing quick stuff on a quick schedule can be rewarding.
  
  
• Their most successful game got 20 million hits last month. And even if your game is simple, 20 million plays is a pretty hefty ego gratification.

Meeting with Arkadium

On Wednesday morning, I had a chance to get a quick meeting with Arkadium. They're an online games platform/portal/page, and they've been working closely with other non-game brands. Their more recent successes have been games for AARP and Hearst Publications. Most of their games were standards (Sudoku) that were then re-branded to fit in with the portals. The portals themselves work more as a general "experience" than concentrating on individual games. They also work with the existing sites' user profiles in the communities for things like shared high score tables. They work to ensure that their games are a "seamless" experience for the user.

They've also put together some share-able widgets. One of their successes is a WebMD-branded allergy calculator.

As far as outside submissions go, they're pretty-much a client-driven pipeline. So unless you just happen to have exactly what the client wants, they probably won't be very interested in outside submissions.

Their audience strongly leans towards women, and they've noticed that their audience prefers hidden-object and card games. While their audience leans towards women, the games themselves don't tend to. They let the content be driven by the site itself and let the games be gender-neutral. Some of the content is strongly gendered (i.e. Cosmopolitan magazine), but the games generally aren't.

As for advice for developers, don't put your eggs in one basket. Look at the opportunities that are out there. Look at the content that you have, and try to make the most of it.

The take-away message is "diversify".

Similar to the Spil Games interview, I get the impression that developers are still strongly male and tend to make content that appeals to males, despite casual gaming having a very strong female audience. So get outside the "I only make games that I play" mold and grow your audience.

Meeting with Oberon

Oberon is a holding company (i.e. a company that mainly owns other companies). One of their highest profile jobs is as a content provider for gaming portals. I remember talking to MSN games a couple of years ago, and their advice to game developers was to "get Oberon's attention" if you want to get your games on MSN's downloadable game portal. And I know this is the case for several other companies. If a company has "outsourced" their game submission process, it's probably to Oberon.

The publishing division inside oberon is iPlay.com, and it works as a more traditional "game portal" with downloadable as well as web-playable games. If you want iPlay's attention, you'll need to work through Oberon.

While this is interesting, what's of more interest to game developers is their new fully-automated online content management system called "Unity". The system's not yet ready for release (although there's a press-release here). Unity will be available Real Soon Now, and they're on the hook to get in touch with me when it does, so expect a review for gamedev.

Meeting with Scoreloop

Scoreloop is a newly-launched gaming community and game library (what I guess is now called "middleware" by the danged kids nowadays) developer. Their newest product is a global high-score and challenge API for iPhone games. Linking to the Scoreloop API's gives your games access to global high score tables with "medals" as well as challenges and buddy-lists.

Challenges can happen within your buddy list or Facebook. Challenges are linked with a user's scores, so you do get an indication that you're about to challenge someone who's hopelessly out of your league. You can challenge people just for giggles or you can put "coins" on the line to make things a bit more interesting. Mind you, Scoreloop coins are considered "merit items" and don't have any real-world value. They're strictly used to rub your opponents' collective noses in your accomplishments. Although in the future, coins may be available for purchasing virtual goods.

Scoreloop is available in Scoreloop-enabled games as well as a (free) app in the iPhone App Store that manages challenges for you.

For programmers, the user interface is customizable. The default interface looks nice and "iPhone-ish" right out of the box, but you can re-skin things to get a more consistent look. The interface is fully localized and localized text is sent from the server, so international challenges are a bit easier than they could be.

Their most recent announcement is that they're partnering with Unity (version 1.1 and 1.0.3). While Unity 1.1 now can "break out" to the underlying iPhone SDK, the Scoreloop objects are native to Unity, thus making the process much smoother.

The Scoreloop SDK is free, and developers get a 50% share of any challenge-coins purchased. If you're interested in Scoreloop-enabling your games, there's a developer sign-up button on their web page.

Meeting with AddictingGames

AddictingGames.com is one of five key properties of Nickelodeon (itself a property of Viacom) and is aimed at teens. They post 12-15 new games per week. For the developer they offer credit (i.e. your name and a link back to your site) as well as sponsorships in the form of up-front payments and quarterly bonuses for top-performing games. For licensed content, they'll likely expect you to integrate branded assets as well as their own community features, like shared scores, scores of "friends" registered on the site, and/or the ability to create levels and send 'em to friends.

A major "event" that I, being the father of a seven year-old girl, got to see was the "AddictingGames Showdown" on Nickelodeon. They made up ten tongue-in-cheek categories that could be applied to Flash Games. The show broadcast on June 27 and was probably a "first" for television to become a platform for promoting Flash games. And, admittedly, one of the challenges was to make Flash games look exciting on television. While "Bloons" looks just fine in your web-browser, it's not exactly as awe-inspiring as the latest "Transformers" clips on TV.

Another interesting item that's popular on their site are "News Games", which are extremely quick games that are based on recent news items. Their most popular recent News Game was "Where's The Naughty Governor?", a silly hidden-object game based on the recent governor scandals. Other recent games were "Cheney Shooter" and "Land The Airplane In The Hudson". These games are developed in-house because they need an absurdly short turnaround time (2-3 days) to keep the topic timely.

AddictingGames is happy to talk to third-party developers, and getting their attention regarding your Flash game is as simple as clicking the "Submit a Game" link on the site. New to AddictingGames is their "Submit an iPhone" game button, as they're expanding their reach from browser-based Flash games to iPhone.

AddictingGames will most likely get back to you with playability and tuning issues needed to make your game a good fit for the site. They also have "stinger" animations and watermarks you can use.

Since Flash game "theft" for other portals has become such an issue, AddictingGames opened up the door and created their own "embedded game program" with all the code necessary to embed games on your own site. Since the branded games link back to AddictingGames, there's still value in letting others use the content.

What AddictingGames is looking for are games that take 2-7 minutes to play. Rather than instructions, you should be able to get along with trial-and-error until you get a proper "feel" for the gameplay.

Coda - Pictures and Miscellany

One fun thing I got to do was participate in a "game show". The GSN WorldWinner people were showing off their new "Head To Head" version of Bejeweled, Bejeweled Twist. It's a bit like standard Bejeweled, although you can bet actual money at it.

Unfortunately, I was clobbered by my opponent and ended up taking home a consolation prize, a box of Rice-A-Roni. And a $10 gift card from Starbucks, as nothing goes better with chicken-flavored carbs than coffee!

As with all trade-shows, everything was about freebies. And there were fun freebies to be had. Probably the funniest freebies were cans of "Brain Ooze" that PopCap handed out to push their latest Tower-Defense game "Plants Vs. Zombies". Here's the label.

The Fun-Dead Energy Drink! Tastes like a mixture of Red Bull and. . .Red Bull.

PopCap even had a genuine zombie on-hand. Thankfully, he was apparently so hopped up on Brain Ooze that he didn't have time to eat your reporter's brain.

GSN had the "serve yourself" candy machine there. After all those MochiCoins, though, I've had enough candy.

Least-inspired freebie had to be the T-shirt I got from the Namco booth. While they had a couple of cute toys available, the idea that a publisher with as much character IP as Namco handing out plain white T-shirts with a little red "Namco" on the front was disappointing. It's almost as if they were saying "Hey, we know you're gonna use it as a car-wash rag when you get home, so we didn't muck it up with a big decal."

During lunchtimes, I tried to avail myself of Pike Place, which is Seattle's fish/flower/coffee/tourist district. It's only a couple of blocks from Casual Connect, and it's a must-see. It's apparently built into a hillside, so it's several labyrinthine levels of shops. I rather wish I had one of these near me because all of the fresh fish and fruit and vegetables were beautiful.

My plane didn't leave until Friday afternoon, and I did the Space Needle last year, so I took Friday morning off to visit the Science Fiction Museum. I got to see lots of cute movie props and space-guns and other chunks of my childhood. They also had an exhibit of Muppet memorabilia, so I got a chance to see such cornerstones of my childhood as Kermit and Bert and Ernie in the "flesh".

If you're running the new Windows 7 release, the picture below might look a bit familiar. The Science Fiction Museum and Experience Music Project are housed in a giant oddly-shaped building that's clad in riveted-together chunks of randomly shaped and colored sheet metal. One of the default pieces of wallpaper in Windows 7 is a close up of the building.

Just thought it was interesting.

The Develop conference is the UK’s premier games development conference and returned to Brighton for the 4th year running. The conference is split across several tracks, covering Art, Audio, Business, Coding, Design and Production. New to the lineup this year was the Evolve conference, an entire day dedicated to the development of games on emerging platforms, including iPhone and social networks.

The conference has been three intense days of ideas from the best in the games development industry today. From the speakers I saw, there was the notion of us being back in the frontier days of games development – much akin to those in the 1980’s in which many smaller studios and developers could reach the mass market with novel games such as Elite. The possibilities of the online space are only just being realised and embraced, but developers wishing to do so must remain agile and adapt to each challenge as the market shifts and evolves. We’re in the territory that sees the consumer is the king; only the games that try and reach the real needs of the consumer will succeed. Players are demanding more opportunities to play and want greater freedom to tell their own stories, interact with people and be creative in their play – if we fail to measure up to this demand we’ll be ignored for those that provide the experiences players want, where they’re “hardcore” gamers or people with 10 minutes to play in their lunchtime.

Those developers leveraging the innovative sides of the online environment will reap decent commercial rewards; the traditional subscription model used by World of Warcraft is losing its appeal, new games should learn from the Asian markets and offer Free-to-Play supported by novel and innovative ways to raise real money through monetisation of virtual item sales. The conference showed several successful implementations, including those in channels that were unexpected such as static browser games.

For those with roots at the high-end of the market the online space will see changes as well, with networked consoles and PCs allowing developers to reach their customers in many new ways, be it through virtual rewards to fully emergent behaviours that can only be realised through having thousands of players online simultaneously. We may also want to consider adding new routes into our games via links into other platforms, such as the iPhone or Facebook. However when doing so you should be aware of not taking the cheap option and only achieve convergence using ideas that add value and maintain the core ideals of your product. You may also want to embrace online distribution, allowing either your game to be downloaded from the internet or playable entirely by a streaming service such as OnLive or GaiKai. Online systems such as Playstation’s Home allow us to interact in new ways with our communities and otherwise embrace portions of the market that are unavailable to the high-end of the spectrum.

Whichever end of the spectrum you are, from sole developer on one platform to huge developer targeting multiple platforms, the message from this year’s Develop conference is clear – we live in uncertain times, but we have many ways to innovate and drive our way forwards into the future. We need to be aware of our audience and tailor to their specific requirements whilst innovating in the way we do so. The best way to do this is, as argued by several speakers, is that we should make the games we want to play and not what we think people want to play. All we have to do is make careful choices and we can reap the rewards the future has to offer, be it as a static HTML-based game or a full AAA-multiplatform title.

Tuesday 14th – Evolve Conference

Resetting the Game

In an online world, Dave Perry asserted that those developers who embrace the virtual distribution and online channels will be the ones to reap the rewards in the future. Citing services like GaiKai and OnLive as an example, game developers can deliver high quality games to players in an extremely convenient way – even down to removing the requirement of specialist hardware or the concept of ‘platform’ entirely. Speaking specifically of the GaiKai platform, it was shown how features of social networks can be leveraged to allow friends to join game sessions or share saved game sessions with each other to allow friends to game together from a single click. Such features, Perry argued, would allow games to self-promote by taking advantage of the viral trends in social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Although the notion of friends playing together is being pushed, Perry argues that we need to make games for strangers to play together, again as it allows for the most convenience to all players involved.

Turning to the future, Dave Perry then warned that the Western markets must act now to evolve or potentially face being overtaken by the growing Chinese and Korean markets who are already taking ideas such as “Free to play” to market. In order to survive we must challenge our traditional business models by embracing micropayment models, figure out how to monetise outside of current retail distribution platforms. Dave Perry’s session really set the tone for the rest of the day, with many other speakers echoing his sentiments.

Browser Based Games: The Past, the Present and the future

20 Great Innovations in Casual, Social and Mobile Games That You Should Steal

The Xbox LIVE Game Platform: Community Games for fun and profit

A Game is a Game is a Game

Case Study: A Browser-based MMOG on Every Desktop

Practical Applications of Online Convergence

Indie games created for the online space are expected to produce a return for the company creating them. As a result, Croft indicated that it was a tough stream to create revenue and relies on every game being developed rapidly and being a hit with players. Your typical team working on such a title would be 1-2 people and less than 2 months development per title. Croft also stated that relying on ads to monetise the game is extremely unreliable – on average you can expect $0.07 per player/month, less if you rely on portals to host your game (who take between 10% and 35% of all revenue). The best way seen to monetise such games are via microtransactions, with such games making $0.10 to $0.30 per player/month when posted in the social networking space. Croft warns that such revenue often isn’t sustainable in one title due to the rapid appearance of clones.

Moving away from market models, Croft then talks about the convergence of games across multiple online platforms being the key to profitability. As seen in other sessions, Croft speaks of games using features of social networks to achieve collaboration or competitiveness outside of the main gameplay itself; for example the use of a web-based level design portal for an iPhone game wherein the community can share content with each other. Some games are creating clients for multiple online platforms simultaneously, allowing people to play the game on Facebook, the iPhone or other mobile phone platforms, giving the player the maximum choice and convenience of accessibility.

Finishing up, Croft summarises that online can be profitable for developers and offer many opportunities, but it’s a highly dynamic environment that requires you to constantly evolve and innovate to survive. The requirement for you to develop for multiple platforms requires a highly adaptive team with a varied skillset and knowledge of the usage patterns of your players on these platforms.

The Long Tail and Games: How digital distribution games everything. Maybe

Taking the flipside view, Edery stated that markets with no gatekeepers can lead to markets with high barriers of entry as they become overwhelmed with content, creating a situation wherein there is too much content and too few consumers of that content. However in these markets Chris Anderson’s book argues that “The Long Tail” takes hold and every product sells a little, in reality Edery points out that the market is still hit-driven and one look at iTunes or Amazon shows that 75% the revenue comes from 3% of the products – that’s a lot of items making little or no money at all! What we would see in the current digital distribution environment is that the hits get bigger and that many indies are losing out in big ways to major labels. In addition to this, the current digital distribution channels on consoles and PCs don’t have common Long Tail features such as recommendation engines or user rating systems to ease searching and browsing. He also argues that it’s impossible for a company to give any discounts or incentives to attempt groups of players into buying your game. The platform holders control the pricing models in such a way that you have to offer such things to all people or none.

Looking to the future Edery is certain that digital distribution and online games will become mainstream but he says we’re not there yet. And to get there we have to embrace all sorts of innovations emerging from the East, such as Free-to-pay games backed up with microtransaction models, better access to games and ways to protect certain communities from games that may cause offense.

Wednesday 15th – Develop Conference

Online Functionality for Your Next Game? Why Not go 100% Online?

Showing some footage of APB, the new game from Realtime Worlds, Jones talked about the some of the opportunities given to his team in moving from the traditional single player game to moving the game entirely online. Showing how the game starts out as single player missions, the dynamic world the game is set in allows scenarios to escalate and become huge multiplayer battles that are automatically created via their dynamic matchmatching system. In many ways it is the extreme manifestation of your actions having an effect on the world and is an experience that couldn’t be delivered in a game that is played offline. “Our players are our main content”, said Jones to highlight this. Embracing other features of a connected world, the player experience was said to allow Creativity, Conflict and Celebrity. Creativity is delivered from innovative ways to interact with the world as well as the ability to 100% customise everything how your avatar looks to the sounds they play when they win a fight or die. The game features an in-game audio tracker that lets people compose music and a system that lets people design clothing and other decals for things such as vehicles – all of which can be traded to other players in game. Celebrity status can be gained in everything from being the best clan to the worst, the best fashion designer to the best musician – such things that only really have meaning in a game that is fully online.

In many ways the session brought home some of the messages from Tuesday’s Evolve conference. It’s certainly obvious from the work of Realtime Worlds on APB that moving entirely online has granted many more opportunities to deliver a great gaming experience than if they’d remained focussed on single player.

Preparing for Larrabee

The software part of the Larrabee architecture is a WDDM driver, meaning that it is treated as a display card by Windows and can be used seamlessly with DirectX for example. Developing for Larrabee is going to be somewhat different to developing on a normal graphics card in that you write C or C++ code and compile it for the Larrabee CPUs, which means no new language or HLSL equivalent. The radical notion of this is that we are no longer confined to the current architecture of graphics cards and can write any code in C/C++ to render our graphics – it may even mean that hardware accelerated raytracers become the norm on Larrabee architecture. As long as there are no OS calls, Dr Binks was keen to say that many libraries can be dropped in and compiled for Larrabee without issue.

Although no technical details were given, Dr Binks gave us some high-level points that we should be considering should we wish to take advantage of Larrabee when it is available to us. There are three stages of migration; the first is the use of standard DirectX or OpenGL APIs – business as usual for us as Larrabee will support the current APIs on release. The second phase is to start migrating components over to Larrabee, so DirectX is still used but some of the functionality becomes Larrabee-native - for example you may wish to skin or animate your models using C++ compiled for Larrabee rather than using HLSL code. Mixed-mode operation means that you create or manipulate DirectX resources such as vertex buffers in Larrabee code without worrying about moving data back and forth over the PCI bus. The third phase is the 100% Larrabee native renderer, this option is the most dramatic as it sees you abandoning all of your DirectX or OpenGL code and implementing your own rendering engine. This does, however, grant you the most freedom such as the ability to use hardware accelerated voxels or raytracers. It even means that Larrabee could be used for non-rendering functions such as Physics or AI, but it does mean that you should be aware of “who” is the consumer of the data processed by Larrabee to prevent too much data being pushed over the PCI bus.

In preparing to move, Binks suggested that we migrate components over gradually and that the best way is to start coding with Larrabee in mind now. As a result we should be mindful of the instruction cost of our graphics code and start turning features we don’t use off now, even if them being enabled on current hardware is effectively free. Binks suggests that we start decoupling our resources from the rendering engine and start isolating our rendering engines away from the underlying DirectX or OpenGL APIs that we currently use. As Larrabee is entirely 64-bit Dr Binks recommends that we should be testing our code on 64-bit systems now and compile it using Intel’s C/C++ compilers to highlight any issues that may be present and to show code which can/will be optimised on the vector unit. Due to the many-core and multi-threaded nature of Larrabee we should start considering the use of task-based parallelism and stop thinking in terms of individual threads. There is no doubt that the advice from Intel is that we should be moving to many-core architectures now. In summary, the Larrabee architecture looks like an exciting development and is one that can offer us a lot of power – but in order to utilise that power, we should be preparing for it now.

For those wanting to read more, visit the Visual Adrenaline site or the Larrabee site.

Designer mash-up: David Braben and Dave Jones play Elite and GTA

Braben then went on to talk about how Elite evolved as a game, starting as a simple 3d tech demo of a spaceship to becoming a fighting game; the key element of trading and loot dropping wasn’t originally planned as a feature until Braben needed the fighting to actually lead to something. With the trading mechanic in place the game took on a whole new set of choices by effectively allowing the player to choose to be a pirate and shoot ships for cargo or face being pirated themselves. Many of Elite’s revolutionary gameplay mechanics and design ideas simply evolved into being because Braben and Bell added things they thought would be fun – they wrote the game for themselves. Elite sound out its first pressing of 50,000 units in the first week and eventually sold between 1-2 million units.

Over 10 years later GTA was released by DMA design. Like Elite, GTA started out as a simple idea demonstrated by a tech demo – Dave Jones wanted to see how a police chase game would look in a top-down open city environment and thus the game “Race ‘n Chase” was born. It was only when the developers found more fun in chasing down the pedestrians that the idea of GTA was born and evolved from there. Jones said that GTA was built from very simple principles - with inspiration from pinball the game mechanic was simply to achieve 1 million points. The idea of the feedback from a pinball table was also applied to the game, giving the player the opportunity for combos and score multipliers with instant visual and audio feedback. Unlike the accidental controversy of Elite’s launch, GTA’s controversy was actually planned with DMA employing Max Clifford to drum up outrage over the apparent content of the game.

Both designers were asked to comment how they found porting their games from the original platforms. Jones commented that when developing GTA, the PS1 and other consoles were very much an afterthought – a far cry from today’s development platforms. Although the PS1 saw GTA eventually, it was very much cut-down from the original due to the huge difference in specifications of the systems. Braben told us how Elite had the opposite issue due to the original platform being so restricted, subsequent versions of Elite saw it arriving on platforms with much more power so things like graphics and sound could be upgraded.

When commenting on the difference between then and now, both designers reiterated on the evolutional nature of their games and how it’s not viable to develop a large budget game in the same way in today’s environment. Games are far more planned and designed for target markets today, back then both designers just created the games they thought would be fun. This ability to ad-lib in this way was said by both to be the key to how the game eventually turned out, key features were added that eventually became the mainstay of the gameplay, with Braben commenting that “freedom to innovate is hard to come by these days”.

As a final teaser, when asked if we’ll see another Elite game Braben simply said “Yes” and moved quickly to the next question. One thing’s for sure, I imagine the experience of creating this new game is significantly different to how it was in 1984.

Lua Scripting Interactive Behaviour for Playstation Home

Lua scripts are used in scenes to control everything from ambient behaviours such as sounds or particle systems all the way to scene-based mini-games in which multiple players can interact in a full 3d environment with control over most of the Home engine. The Home API consists of over 400 functions exposed to Lua in a low-level way – for example you must obtain a handle to the renderer system and use that rather than using a set of higher-level functions to achieve your goal. With this level of granularity, however, the API grants you a lot of power and can control everything from area triggers and sound playback, to network messages between mini-games and control over commerce points for microtransactions in your game. Finishing the session Evans pointed out that we should take advantage of Home as it offers new ways of interacting with your players. He also stated that we should reward players as it’s the quickest way to interact with your players in Home, granting them exclusive rewards that they can show off to their friends for unlocking specific or difficult objectives in your game. He also points that using the game-launching features of Home you can create some custom lobbies for people to gather and play your game with each other.

It was interesting to see some of the things that could be done in PS Home, especially when you bear in mind the mini-games and microtransaction opportunities it gives you. However I was disappointed to hear that to get into Home development you must still have a full Devkit, although a Home-only kit can be purchased. This severely limits the access of Indie game developers to the platform, when arguably they would be the ones to provide the most innovative experiences in the system.

Driving 3D TVs Using Current Generation Consoles

Now that we’re aware of how 3d is delivered in the home, Blitz Game Studios demonstrates their method of presenting 3d. All 3d games require a 3d TV and a console capable of presenting full HD 1080p resolution, sorry Wii owners we’re only going to see 3d on the Xbox and Playstation systems. The “active” style glasses that effectively “flip” between one eye and the other requires that you can render games in full 60 fps otherwise the illusion is destroyed. Finally, the 3d effect requires two renderings of the current frame, each from a different viewpoint. The astute reader will realise that to make our games 3d-ready we must be capable of rendering 2x1080p frames at 60fps – a fairly high benchmark to expect! As Oliver points out, however, this benchmark raises the gaming experience for all people, whether using 3d or not –we get 1080p resolution games running at 60fps. Once this resolution can be achieved, Blitz showed us how the 3d effect could be created through the use of parallax effects and using a non-linear z-buffer to achieve a greater 3d resolution in the foreground; camera FOV can be used to great effect to draw the viewer’s attention to specific areas when zooming in or out.

Of course, implementing 3d has its series of challenges. New decisions need to be made about the speed of the game, the location in the depth buffer the HUD/UI sit and how we avoid edge violation problems that ruin the illusion. Oliver comments that the 3d effect can make people feel nauseous if misused, so too many moving elements on the screen should be avoided as should quickly panning camera cuts. Considerations of the lighting and shadowing in the game needed to be made as shadows now effectively have screen depth as well – many small things can quickly spoil the illusion. The challenges do not stop with development of your game; the single main issue in 3d is that there is no standard to the type of glasses used, the polarity types of the glasses (linear or circular) or the TV screen output format itself. As a developer we need to make sure that the game is usable on all current models of glasses and TVs, meaning that the creation of code to output for each format can be time consuming to develop and test – let alone the cost of purchasing the hardware. Finally, how does the 3d effect get advertised to the masses? Being that to see 3d, you need the hardware – how do you sell the hardware to people without it when pictures on the internet or in magazines cannot convey the effect?

My personal opinion is that 3d is neat, the game “Invincible Tiger” was great to watch in the expo with the glasses, but I have many concerns about the viability of this tech for games at this point in time. The lack of a hardware standard is a huge sticking point, as is the requirement for a full 1080p resolution game running at 60fps, let alone the requirement of rendering 2 frames at this resolution. Once these technical challenges are conquered, I’d like to see what other studios come up with.

Thursday 16th – Develop Conference

The Wizards of OS: I Don’t Think We’re in C++ Anymore

In order to improve the performance and tame the issues of code complexity, the team decided that API should be scaled back significantly and abstracted into a series of game-specific actions and goals. An example was shown that demonstrated this, with the original implementation having the series of actions “walk to bike, get on bike, ride to destination, get off bike” condensed into a single engine command “travel to” which implicitly took care of everything else. However, this meant that the goal of “Engine is the OS” quickly started to break down as more game specific code was needed in the engine. To implement this, the AI needed to be smarter than it was, allowing the game to make key decisions about whether the character was close enough to the destination to walk or take his bike – all of these previous decisions were scripted explicitly in the original implementation. The main issue when it came to abstracting the API was deciding how granular it needed to be – in order to decide this the team scripted up several different mission types and decided on the common traits and functionality seen between them.

Summing up, Wolff did highlight that the scripting allowed for much quicker iteration cycles in the game. New mission ideas could be prototyped and tested very quickly using Python but there were many issues in implementing the scripted code, the main being that of performance – current consoles simply don’t have the performance to deliver their original idea using Stackless Python. The team still believe that the original concept was right and will be working towards it in the future.

Playstation: Cutting Edge Techniques

Continuing his talk, Kish moved on to speak about the latest developments in PS Eye technology. A new facial recognition library is available which can, amongst other things, detect the Age and Gender of the players as well as determine the position of individual face parts, such as detect the shape of a player’s mouth. An upcoming release of this library aims to provide full skeletal recognition, a feature recently shown off in Microsoft’s Natal demo at E3. Keen to show the application of the PS Eye, Kish showed a demo movie of two games, both of which augmented reality in some way. The first game was akin to a virtual pet game that allowed people to interact with the pet in front of the TV using gestures and natural movements – another technology seen in Microsoft’s Natal demo was also seen, the ability to “scan” in a drawing and have the pet interact with it in some way. The second game used the PSP Eye technology to allow the player to track and hunt down a virtual pet; it showed an interesting use of the portable nature of the console to augment reality with the Eye technology.

Colin Hughes then took the stage to talk in some detail about the latest techniques employed by Playstation developers (PSP and PS3) in delivering the current series of games on the platforms. The session was extremely detailed and would have been of the most benefit to PS3 developers, so I won’t go into the detail here. I will, however highlight some of the key points from Colin’s talk. On the subject of preserving framerate on the PS3, Colin talked of using the screen-area of an object to track and drop small objects once the framerate starts to suffer. The idea here is that the larger objects on the screen are the most important/visible to the player so a falling framerate should mean that lesser objects can be dropped without sacrificing visuals. A technique used on WipEout HD was to dynamically change the screen resolution to ensure that constant framerate is preserved – the idea would be that the screen can be rendered at 1024x768 in a graphically complex scene and jump back to 1280x1080 when the complexity drops off – in many cases this almost free due to many games dropping to a lower resolution for post-processing anyway. Another technique was to use shader-LOD to reduce the complexity of shaders at distances where the effect isn’t visible anyway – for example one could disable the parallax and normal mapping shaders of an object in the distance. Used with a z-prepass before the application of shaders, you can avoid many unnecessary shader passes for objects that may not even be visible or are too distant for it to matter; in many cases this technique was shown to save almost 10% of GPU time even when considering there were effectively two renderings to determine the information needed for the z-prepass and the final render of the screen. Deferred shading was also mentioned as being a must; with games like Killzone 2 using 5 render targets packed with different types of data to achieve scenes which contained over 100 separate lights. Many of these techniques are non-PS3 specific, so both PC and Xbox developers would get a lot out of researching them for their platforms.

From here, Hughes talked more specifically of PS3-only optimisations that rely upon the Cell SPUs to take much of the load off the RSX unit and save GPU time. It’s possible to use the SPU for geometry processing, per-vertex lighting and even post-processing effects. However it should be noted that using the SPU requires you to be aware of the differences between the SPU and the RSX, specifically that certain operations are more costly on the SPU and the fact that the SPU doesn’t have direct texture access means that data needs to be copied to main memory. The SPUs can’t work efficiently at HD resolution, so data needs to be scaled to fit – this makes them ideal for processing blur/glow effects but poor at high quality image processing. The parallel processing available on the SPUs allows for many complicated effects to be achieved, in some cases they outperformed the traditional GPU solution. The accumulation of all these techniques is available in Sony’s “Edge” library, a tech available to all Devnet developers. Hughes notes that the decision to use the SPUs isn’t because the SPU is faster, but because they can often be idle at the time and makes sense to offload some of the processing while the GPU is busy. Clever use of the hardware can lead to highly advanced and optimised graphics.

Building LEGO Worlds, online, offline and everything in between

In talking of convergence of multiple games and media into the online space, the LEGO Group were keen to make sure that each move was planned and added value to the overall experience. For example, they said it would be easy to “cash in” and take the easy route to short-term profit, but this experience would cheapen the overall product. Their idea is to make very distinct, focussed products and deliberately design in links and convergence when it was the right thing to do. The idea refreshing, especially as many developers clamour about to find how they can link as many media together as possible to make money quickly. The key driver to designing the games for LEGO is to remember that players are driven to live out their stories and allow for the emergent gameplay and experimentation that comes from one’s own creativity. The idea of social play is extremely attractive to many, especially children, who enjoy interacting with the community around them either through chat, co-operative play or through sharing LEGO designs and models. The LEGO Group pay special attention to their community and listen to their needs as well as fostering a culture wherein the “bad” elements are ousted by community as a whole – the idea of a mature, self-moderating community must be appealing to many developers in the online space.

The talk was very well presented and I think served to show off how some of the key ideas discussed in the Evolve conference could be approached by other developers and companies.

Using GIT to Tame a Herd of Cats

It was decided that features would be worked on by specific teams in order to isolate and localise whole sections of the codebase to specific teams. This was then mapped into a hierarchy; a team of up to 5 developers was led by a senior developer, who in turn was led by a lead programmer and so on all the way to the root of the tree. The senior developer is responsible for maintaining the code quality of the 5 people under them, meaning that it is only allowed into the main source repository when it all works together. At each point in this hierarchy the people can be assured that the code they receive is functional, if not it becomes easy to track where the issues appeared due to the smaller team sizes localising the development effort. With people acting as gatekeepers of their nodes, they ensure that they only good quality code to be seen by others and can expect that only good quality code arrives to them.

When this hierarchy was decided upon, the current use of Subversion as a SCM didn’t fit this way of working so the team turned their attentions to hierarchical SCM systems such as GIT, Bazaar and Mercurial. GIT was chosen as it was a system designed specifically for source code by people who work with source code every day, members of the team managing the Linux kernel. Having decided on GIT, the team began to migrate their SVN codebase to GIT – a task that took literally weeks to achieve. The rollout was achieved gradually and focussed upon the engine development team, so many people were still left working in SVN, notably the game developers and artists; as a result there was a constant maintenance of pushing and pulling to and from the SVN repository to the GIT_HEAD main repository. However this push from GIT to SVN was treated as a weekly milestone by the team and was used to focus the development and delivery of features to the game development teams. A SVN pull into GIT was done daily, so the engine team always had the cutting-edge game code – the reason for this is that the team found it easier to map the SVN code into GIT but not the GIT hierarchy and layout to SVN.

Working in the hierarchical way encouraged developers to take advantage of source control locally, making literally hundreds of local commits per day and only pushing up to the next level when the feature they were working on was fully complete. This provided benefits such as point in time recovery and diffs, providing east resolution to issues such as “but it worked last night...”. Likewise, the senior and lead developers could be assured that the majority of the code they receive has been checked by many people, thus removing many of the potential issues before they break the main codebase. This way of working allowed people to create shared branches that were pulled and integrated constantly, allowing potentially code-breaking changes to be shared and developed across many teams before they are merged seamlessly into the main codebase.

Whilst having many benefits, the process did have its issues. The main was that you need a GIT expert or two on hand to resolve issues that can occur through incorrect use of the system. As it’s such a powerful system it is possible to trash a repository fairly easily and although it’s possible to quickly recover from these scenarios, you still need someone at hand to tell you how. Secondly, as GIT is designed primarily for Source Code, keeping ever-changing binary assets such as art or sound assets can lead to many problems. People linking GIT to traditional “flat” SCM systems such as Perforce or SVN will suffer issues as the paradigm doesn’t translate back very well from GIT (for example, the lack of revision numbers in GIT). The team also suffered issues with line endings, but didn’t detail what they were.

Overall, however, the Free Radical Engine team had a positive experience of using GIT and would recommend that people try it. Stating that Crytek don’t use GIT except in localised situations, the team do miss the freedom allowed by the system.

Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

The talk was split into two main parts; the first talked about the concept of difficulty in games what we can do to provide the best experience for each player. The second talked about ways we could move beyond the traditional challenge/reward concept we use in games. When discussing difficulty, Adams admitted that he was bad at games and often played them on the easiest setting to see the content and narrative. When defining difficulty Adams split it into 6 influencing factors, 4 we can control and 2 we can’t. The ones we can control are the intrinsic skill required to meet a challenge, the stress (time pressure) required to meet it, the power we provide the player in achieving the goal and the previous experience of our game that the player has. These four elements can be combined to create what is the perceived difficulty of the game – we can make things require more skill, or better twitch reactions from the player, or we can provide more or less assistance to achieve the goals provided. The 2 factors we have no control in are the native talent of some players and the previous experience of other similar games. All six of these factors combine to create the “perceived” difficulty of your game. Managing this perceived difficulty is paramount, if players see the game as too hard they’ll get frustrated – if they see it as too easy they’ll get bored. Your gam]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:38:36 +0000 eef15e7066deb4f1a7a6c1e2d24eda9e http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/business/435/paris-game-ai-conference-r2646 Introduction After a first successful AI specific conference last year, the people behind AIGamedev.com, Alex Champandard et Petra, have managed to invite not only more speakers but also some of the most interesting ones. In fact within 2 days there have been so much different, highly quality presentations and panels, that I fear it will be difficult to condense my 24 pages of notes into an article without interfering with the slides, videos and audio cuts that will be made available to premium members of AIGamedev.com. And I hope that my article will do justice to the event.

The event was held in one of the rooms of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers on the 9th and 10th of June. About 15 speakers and panel contributors participated and informed the ~170 listeners per talk about their research and their approach to different AI problems, and talked about themes such as emotions and body language.

State of the industry

There have been made many interesting statements during this first session that it’s worth an article of its own. But I’ll pick some of the short statements that interested me most:

Phil Carlisle mentioned that independent game developers tend to do more experimentation than main-stream developers.

Mieszko Zielinski stated that designers want total control but when the player does something the designers had not foreseen the AI looks broken.

Alex J. Champandard said that one of the achievements of the last 10 years is that the technology is now in place and the programmer is not in charge of everything anymore. Designers can actually start focusing on the design without having to interact with programmers for every single requirement.

Emotion in Game Characters

You have to meet him in person to understand Phil’s charismatic presence whenever he starts to talk. It’s hard not to listen to him when he’s talking about game characters and the need to give them emotions and how they can create emotions. Perhaps it’s for this reason that he’s also the best to inform us about the research that has been done until now and where it probably will head in the future.

His motivation is to create “real” emotion and to understand the gamers emotions with the final target to create actors instead of insensitive, emotionless puppets that are in-game characters now.

To illustrate this, he showed us three video examples: Fallout 3, Team Fortress 2 and Wall-E. While the character shown in Fallout 3 seemed to be completely emotionless, the Heavy of Team Fortress 2 made heavy (sigh) usage of facial expressions and body language. Finally, Wall-E was an example of how to create the impression of deep emotions even without using speech. Sometimes simple movements can express more than 1000 words.

Phil talked to us about “Artificial performance” which should create convincing characters taking into account verbal (language, paralinguistic) and non-verbal communication (facial expression, gaze, posture …)

When talking about the current research, he pointed us to Antonio R. Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain”. Phil said: “People are not logical beings. People are emotional beings.” With this he introduced us to the idea that it’s perhaps more important to make usage of recognition systems than logic, because “emotions help regulate what we do.”

Phil told us about different models for emotions, personality and mood used in Psychology:

• OCEAN (“Big Five”)
• PAD (Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance)
• OCC Model of Emotions (Ortony, Clore, & Collins)

Finally he talked about future works in this field and the player's perception of agent communication (verbal and non-verbal), models of emotion, and procedural animation. He shortly described emotional characters and a possible way to include emotions in AI.

He's been talking about much more, and it would take much more than a conference report to elaborate in a more detailed way the different approaches Phil mentioned throughout his speech.

Nevertheless, for those who are interested in learning more about all this, I've added a couple of links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralanguage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g071r4n59240u537/ (PAD)
http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2002/integratingTheOCCModel/bartneckHF2002.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_animation
http://www.actormachine.com/products.html
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.6716

Coordinating Agents with Behavior Trees

He mentioned that current GFX is creating high expectations to the behavior of the characters on screen, and that the AI has to keep up with the increasing complexity of today's computer games. AI must deal with more information, be easier to debug, permit rapid iteration, use less hardware resources and enable easy coordination of AI agents.

Behavior trees (BT) can be used to handle some, if not all, of the above mentioned issues. BTs display a tree-like view of the complex behavior and thus are more readable.

Before one can make usage of the behavior tree, it's necessary to represent some game data in an abstract way. Ricard used a simple table to represent the agent knowledge. To generate this knowledge, filter functions are used to simplify the world data which is then easy to read, easy to pack and easy to debug.

Typical content of this simplified agent knowledge is i.e.:

• current_weapon = 3 (UZI)
• Health = 100
• Ammo = 60
• ...

Using the above mentioned example of a soldier, he elaborated where and why to include a branch in the BT to introduce the idea of a squad/group management. The newly included squad/group management is called a "tactic" (i.e. "Flank") and is used when some given conditions (such as "use this tactic if 2-4 agents are available") and the context make sense for this given tactic.

In order to achieve a deeper coordination between the involved characters, a tactic manager is used which monitors the BT activity. The tactic manager analyses the situation, elaborates the list of possible tactical candidates (agents available for any given tactic) and re-evaluates the agent's BTs once a tactic has been triggered.

I would have liked to add a lot of interesting links about this topic but unfortunately, when searching about Behavior Trees, you mostly will find papers related to natural speech processing or similar. The best approach (which is also referenced over and over again) is Alex J. Champandard's BT overview: http://aigamedev.com/open/article/bt-overview

Discussion on Squads & Group Behaviors

It has also been stated that it would make sense to incorporate environmental hints to point the AI to good areas for flanking or a good place to concentrate suppressive fire.

The AI of Killzone 2's Multiplayer Bots

The first part was held by Remco, who told us about the overall scope of the game. He told us that the bots in Killzone 1 were a well received feature and thus they wanted to focus more on bots for multiplayer games in Killzone 2. While the bots in Killzone 1 were more meant to accompany the player, the new bots had also the role of a teacher, telling the player how to play the game.

Focusing more onto the multiplayer part with 32 players in a game also allowed for more team based game modes. Per map multiple modes such as "Capture and Hold" (Domination), "Body Count" (Team Deathmatch), "Search and retrieve", "Search and destroy" and "Assassination" are available. Due to this, the AI had to adapt to the game mode on the map. Additionally, the AI had to handle badges adding capabilities dependent on the agents assigned character type (Scout, Tactician, Assault, Engineer, Medic or Saboteur).

While the previous version of the Killzone AI made usage of Lua, the new architecture is layered and split between Strategic AI, Squad AI and Individual AI. You can consider this as being a top down way of handling situations. The Strategic AI will hand orders to the squads like "Defend this point", "Advance to that point" or "Attack that unit". The squad will try to solve those orders and report to the strategic AI about the outcome of its operations.

The squad AI, while trying to obey to the strategic AI's orders, will order the individual AI to move to a specific location and receive feedback about combat information. The strategic AI may also assign targets to the individual AI and receive requests for assignments from it, but this strategic AI to individual AI communication seems not to be the "normal" way to handle this but more of a special case when the situation and game mode makes it necessary.

The individual AI makes use of hierarchical task network planning (HTN) after having created a "picture" of the current world state. This picture is created with daemons which collect orders, messages and threads (which have been recognized through stimuli and perception). The planner creates a plan which contains tasks which themselves create controller input (thus, the game AI makes usage of controller input to move around the NPCs).

Killzone 2's HTN planner creates one domain per individual AI. Each domain will contain one or more methods containing one or more branches with preconditions and task lists. A task can be a primitive such as "Shoot" or "Reload" or a compound which resolves recursively. Using this, a general combat behavior is created which is opportunistic and ordered.

Some numbers of the individual AI:

• 360 methods
• 1048 branches
• 138 behaviors
• 147 continue branches.

The squad AI makes usage of the same planning structure. The difference is that the daemons will receive strategic orders and the task execution will contain individual orders member messages which will then trigger individual AI planning as depicted above.

Alex then took over the presentation and reminded us of the challenge they encountered: 1-14 bots per side put into squads. He compared Killzone 2's AI with Halo 3: While Halo 3 has disposable bots, which are level specific and made to be easily handled by designers. The AI is mostly declarative and story driven. Killzone 2 on the other hand has persistent bots which have are applied in a more general way and have been programmed by programmers for programmers. It's mostly procedural and strategic.

As a reminder: The AI has to separate the "what" and the "how" in order to achieve good plans in a goal-driven approach. Killzone 2 did this my creating mission-specific AI (one for "Search and Destroy", one for "Capture and Hold", etc) containing sets of C++ classes. Also dependent on the game mode different objectives are generated and specific hints are set onto the maps to inform the AI where to find offensive and defensive locations.

Using these objectives a base strategy is created which is used to create tasks for the squad and individual AI. The objectives scale up and down with the number of bots which need rich and detailed information about the objective to reach. The objectives can be laid out this way:

1. Calculate ideal distribution of bots, then squads.
2. Create new squads if necessary.
3. Remove extra squads if too many assigned to any objective.
4. Pick an objective for each squad. This is based upon a weighting of each objective.
5. 1. If the objective is already active, pick a new sub-objective on a regular basis.
   2. Assign the best objective to each squad if the above is not valid.
6. Un-assign bots if too many for squad or objective.
7. Process all free bots and assign them to the best squad.

He then elaborated in a more detailed way the hints placed upon the map. The annotations are placed manually on the map ("create the information by hand first, then automate later if necessary") and include regroup locations, mission specific points to defend, sniping and hide locations. Using this information, the level is then automatically processed to create a strategic graph which helps support runtime strategic decision making and interpret the manual annotations dynamically.

The strategic map contains a set of areas which are groups of waypoints. These areas are connected and the number of connections already gives a hint about choke points in the level. The strategic map is used to make a rough squad movement planning (the actual waypoints are then used to do the actual path-finding). This high level overview of the map enables also an easy representation of faction influence on the map.

The influence map enables the AI to determine who controls which areas on the map. It is calculated using all bots, turrets and deaths. Through this information, the strategic planning can decide where to choose regrouping areas, where to attack, what the current progress is, etc. To select i.e. a regroup selection the strategic AI must identify candidates using recently used (by other squads) locations and previously selected locations. The influence map is also used to calculate movement on the map. Its information provides hints about areas appropriate for flanking or movement without getting into a fight.

Finally Alex told us about the future work which will include data mining to find ideal positions and hot spots. The usage of bots in early versions of the maps will help to improve the level design because this enables the designers to let the bots test run the levels and find weak points in their design. The bots role of a teacher will become more important. They will teach us how to play the game. In the future the interaction between a squad and other friend-squads and/or the human player will become more important, too. Currently a squad is not able to be of meaningful use to a player (from an automated point of view).

To learn more about the topic, see:

"Realistic Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Environments" (Alex J. Champandard)
"HTN planning for flexible coordination of multiagent team behavior" (Obst, Mass, Boedecker)
"HTN planning: Complexity and Expressivity" (Erol, Hendler, Nau)
"Using Player Models to Improve Robustness of HTN Plans in Multi-Agent Domains" (Semsch, Jakob, Doubek, Pechoucek)
"Hierarchical Task Network Planning: Formalization, Analysism and Implementation" (Erol)

AI Multithreading & Parallelization

When working with parallel programming most of the problems one might encounter are related to race conditions and deadlocks.

Race conditions appear when operations of the multi-task system depend on the order in which the code parts are executed. Race cConditions also arise when several threads of a multi-thread application try to get access to data simultaneously and one thread is performing write operations on that data. This can lead to unexpected results. Deadlock describes a condition where two or more processes are waiting for an event or communication from one of the other processes. Thus all threads involved in this deadlock are blocked and cannot work anymore.

Another problem that might arise is the lack of performance in such a multi-threaded application if there are contention point situations. Bjoern talked about the memory wall related to this: This is when you hit the bandwidth limit of throughput from the memory and latency of accessing memory. You might want to share as little data as possible and minimize the amount of times you synchronize data to improve latency. You have to find the right balance between minimizing sharing and maximizing locality.

Bjoern elaborated on different methods for synchronization. The first one is asynchronous calls, which has the benefit to scale well (with task pools) and has potentially better memory locality. But then you have to take care of determinism and be aware of side effects because it's difficult to get the syncing right. The second system he introduced to us was parallel agents. This system is a little bit more complicated because it not only keeps the idea of task pools (with agents ordered into it), but this also introduces the problem of the ownership management.

Ownership management must be done when agents share data and memory (i.e. objects or entities) and must communicate with each other to regulate the access to that data and memory. A lot of synchronization is necessary at this point. To solve this issue, a two step approach is taken: In the first step, which is the collection stage, the agents only can write private data (read only from objects and/or memory) and request changes to public data. Between the first and the second step, the system determines who can have access to which object. The second step then allows the agents to alter the objects they have been granted.

The advantages of this system is that it guides the parallelization, scaling is possible and has implicit syncing. The cons of the system are that the implementation effort is high. You have a lot of work to do to achieve and implement this system. Also, it has bad locality and it's hard to achieve some kind of determinism. You still have to cope with getting the synchronization right and avoid side effects. And finally, since the access to the data is deferred, you don't have immediate access to the data but must wait until the next frame (if no other agent wants to access the object/data).

The last way to synchronize cited by Bjoern was Data Parallel Systems. This means one might slice the agents and group aspects of them into separate tasks (such as pathfinding, sensing, logic, ...). Basically it works as the parallel agents but breaks them down into separate tasks. The advantage of this system is that lean data structures are used which improves scalability and enables us to scale the system appropriately. It's deterministic and has implicit synchronization while working in an explicit context. On the other side, this system requires quite some implementation efforts and deferring is still necessary. Getting the synchronization right is still an issue.

He concluded his talk stating that we really need to understand both, our game and our target hardware. We must be sure that our code is error-free first before jumping into parallelization (because it would be hard to make the difference to determine if a problem arises due to some problem in the code or in determinism). And finally KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)...

The Art of Concurrency and AI System Architecture

The contributors of this panel agreed upon the need to have a more general sub-system framework which doesn't grant access to low level threading or to shared data. While we have learned the pros and cons of shared data access (and how to improve that situation), the thread masking is based upon platform dependent threading problems. Each platform has its own approach to parallel processing and thus, the implementation of threading on those platform is platform specific. Masking or hiding this platform dependency from the user might help him to concentrate more on AI than the technical background.

The participants also agreed that one should plan his own AI system with multi-threading in mind. Most often it's problematic, if not impossible, to port an already existing, single-thread oriented AI solution into a multi-threaded environment. When porting, try to not use explicit synchronization. Markus put an emphasis on clean code which will help pin-pointing problems.

Julien went a step further and added that you also should have a clean structure. But then, you don't only have to take a look at the object oriented side of the coin but also take into account the data flow (As a personal note I'd like to direct you to "Object thinking" by David West which treats this topic in an highly interesting way).

"Object thinking" by David West

Advice and Tales from the Trenches

Phil was astonished that there aren't that many students who start small indie companies. It would show their mental capability to create, design, implement, and actually finish a project. It would also show off their skills. Eduardo put emphasis on the fact that this would also help you create a portfolio which proves that you can do your work. Miezko said that the last few percents of a game take fifty to sixty percent of the time.

The speakers also talked about creating for designers. Since designers are not necessarily technical people, it’s better to have a system that allows them to avoid breaking the content too easily and to avoid creating impossible setups or designs. You also should train designers to build self created examples which can be used to show the concept and proof functionality.

Planning Multi-unit Maneuvers using HTN and A*

HTN planners are great for problems with hierarchy as i.e. resource or unit planning. William decided to combine HTN planners with A* because this allows for finding the best plan. To do so, he starts with an initial top-level plan which he expands until the plan consists of primitive tasks. The planner generates multiple alternative plans and estimates the costs for each of it based upon the world state. The costs are then evaluated to select the best possible plan. Target of this way to handle things is to generate good solutions and not many solutions. The implemented planner must be efficient, generate useful mission briefings and create error messages when the planner fails to generate a valid plan. The planner to implement must be able to easily add new methods, and to do forward and military style reverse planning. The quality of the generated plan is important. While any plan can have bad positions, bad coverage, and make insufficient usage of resources, a good plan will contain good unit positioning and manage usage of all units in an optimal way.

When using HTN planners the top-down approach in planning reflects the problem domain of the plan to create. For each (partial) plan, costs are assigned which are calculated using the world state delta plus the risk to execute this plan plus the preferences of that plan. The multitude of plans are called plan space. Each plan space keeps track of the world states. This is necessary because if we can define world states for the start and end task of the plan, then we can estimate the plan costs.

As stated in the previous paragraph, the plan costs are based upon the delta of the world states. Since the planning breaks down the plans and sub-plans into tasks, we have to determine the costs for each task to perform (since they will, in the end, create the delta between the world state at the start and the end of the plan). The task costs are the sum of the task duration and the task risk. To weigh the resulting costs, a task preference influences (i.e. via a subtraction) the task costs. But now, how to we get the task duration? The task duration can either be the effective task duration if it's a primitive and if the inputs to that primitive are available, or the difference between the maximum time of the children execution time and the minimum time of the children execution time, if it's a task consisting of several sub-tasks. Finally, if none of the above apply, the task duration can be the lower bound estimate (given by a designer). The plans and their costs are then evaluated using A* "best first" search for planning.

William gave some examples of tasks to plan and how the costs are calculated. In his example he wanted to transport a group of soldiers from point A to B. The created plans included several solutions about where to pick them up, or even if it's worthwhile to pick them up. Each sub-task (i.e. drive to pick up location, let soldiers move to pick-up location, drive to delivery point, deploy, ...) is estimated and taken into account.

He talked about some technical issues he had encountered and how he solved them. When working with planners, you encounter binding problems. That is, you have to assign values to variables and check their consistency. STRIPS planners usually have implicit bindings. This binding becomes a problem when you have to cope with large range of values (he gave us the number 16,000 waypoints), when you write most of your planner code to constraint binding and if you have a lot of branches to handle in order to find a good plan. The work around consists of using procedural pre-conditions, abstracting and/or reduce the world state values and use explicit binding.

Using Military reverse planning helps to limit the options to evaluate. Reverse planning means that I take a look at i.e.for example an objective to attain, and I ask the question "What do I have to achieve that?" An answer could i.e. be "I have to send in 5 units." You then ask yourself what you have to do to send in 5 units. In this way, step by step, you will not only elaborate what you have to do to attain the objective, but also which resources you need (i.e. transportation, support, waypoints, landing points, etc). When planning this way, you might find it useful to take the output of one planned task as the input of the next tasks.

Compared to STRIPS planners, HTN planners allow more control and limit the branching. HTN even helps limiting the combinatorial explosion. To learn more about HTN planners see the links in the Killzone 2 related part of the report.

Interesting links:

STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving.
Classical AI Planning: STRIPS planning
Goal-Oriented Action Planning (GOAP)
Automated planning and scheduling

Approaches to Interactive Narrative Generation and Story Telling

He started with a short lesson in history, telling us about stories in action games, stories in adventure games and finally stories in action-adventure games. For each genre he broke the history into different stages. The stories in action games for example began with a rough background story which was weakly integrated into the game play. Later action games then used the story to connect missions. In either case, the story is pre-written and offers little to no flexibility. Within the missions the story is not included.

Adventure games also made usage of pre-defined stories and allowed for limited player interaction with the environment. They have evolved to a better interface usage and more complex story graphs but still made use of a pre-written history. Only the latest adventure games, while still pre-written, have more elaborative narrative using multiple character perspectives. The action-adventures integrate action and story. The story is still pre-written and the mission structure remains.

As a conclusion to this historical approach, one can say that the story is always pre-written and has a small branch factor. The influence by the player on the story is limited and not scalable. Daniel revealed to us his utopia, where the player is part of the story, changing it through his actions. The story should be scalable and allow large, complex worlds. Domain independency would be ideal. This would allow one to create a general engine which can generate different stories independent of the game domain or genre. Through the flexibility re-playability should be achieved and enable the player to immerse more into the game. Target is not to create better stories, but to create them dynamically, faster and cheaper.

An important part of dynamic story creation is the dramatic structure which can be described using Gustav Freytag's pyramid. This pyramid analyses the plot of a story by slicing it into different parts such as the exposition, the climax and the ending. They different parts are separated by events that lead from one part to another: the exposition passes through an inciting incident to the climax, which consists of a rising action and a falling action. The climax then uses a resolution to pass to the proper ending. Different solutions can be used to create dynamic storylines: Plot graphs, Bayesian networks, planning and drama structures.

A solution presented by Daniel is called GADIN (Generation of Adaptive Dilemma-based Interactive Narrative). The idea behind the project is that specific focal points create dramatic tension and everything in between these focal points lead up to these focal points. This is done using five dilemmas (betrayal, sacrifice, greater good, take down, favor). A story consists of a sequence of dilemmas with story events leading from dilemma to dilemma. The events are controlled by the drama engine and triggered by the player's actions.

The drama engine of GADIN makes usage of a knowledge database which contains characters, story actions and dilemmas. Through a narrative generator, which is a planner, and a user model which is used to predict user actions, the story is generated and presented to the user who reacts to it. The user actions are used to trigger new story elements in the narrative generator. To select and generate the new story elements, the narrative generator makes usage of the current game state and a dilemma. It tries to generate a story using those parameters which may either fail or succeed. If a story generation fails, the generator selects another dilemma and re-iterates the story generation. Once this succeeds the plan is presented where possible and the dilemma is presented when valid (through user actions). This leads to a new state which re-iterates the story generation. GADIN has been evaluated using a kind-of turing test: One GADIN story containing only NPCs and one soap opera have been taken and presented online to 127 users in soap and game forums. 42.5 percent of the users had chosen the second story (the soap opera) as being the one generated by the computer. Now, one has to wonder if this "small" amount of replies and comparing only two stories is valid. Personally, I would prefer giving 10 choices with 5 cg and 5 soap stories and let a larger amount of users select the cg ones. And even then... the biggest problem of the current GADIN implementation is the fact that it does not produce good storylines.

Directly after Daniel's speech a panel was held. Daniel said that combining autonomous agents and storytelling was new to academia. It has been said that it could be a good idea to separate NPC into a character agent and an actor agent, taking into account the storyline generated by the story planner. But then, where do we put the line between story line control and normal AI? The story line is high level and determines general goals for the character which have to be achieved to reach the next dilemma point. The actor AI could take into account the character's beliefs and goals to trigger accurate actions that would push him towards that goal. Also, the story generator could be used to generate content for the gaming world or avoid re-spawning of enemies at places that have already been visited. As you can see, the story generation feature will have a huge influence not only to the game play but also to the content creation in future games.

Dramatic structure
Freytag's pyramid
Generation of Dilemma-based Narratives: Method and Turing Test Evaluation
Dynamic Generation of Dilemma-based Interactive Narratives (GADIN)
Facade AI

The Racing AI in Pure

To achieve this, as Eduardo told us, they have chosen to make usage of a race management mechanism. The reason for this is that games not using such a system usually have an AI that is either too good or too bad, and the AI won't react to the player's mistakes. Using a race management system allows developers to create games that are more challenging for everyone, which adapt to different situations and which actually are fun.

The first technique presented by Eduardo is called "Rubber band". In fact, a big rubber band is placed around the player, forcing the AI players to be around him. This is usually realized by any means necessary, if the player is too far behind or too far ahead. The player perceives this as cheating, because it's quite obvious what is happening. While this solution works almost always and removes completely the feeling of "lonely racing game", it usually breaks the illusion of fairness because the cheating used to achieve this is easy to spot.

Eduardo then talked to us about a skill based system. In a skill system a skill represents how well a player performs on a particular behavior or game play aspect. For each player and behavior, one skill will be stored which is normalized (0..1). Eventually all behaviors have the same skill value and the set of skills can be used to represent the personality of a character. In their first iteration of a skill based system in Pure, they used a static skill system which didn't work out well because it either was too hard or too easy and still could create "lonely racing".

Therefore they implemented a second skill based system called "Dynamic Competition Balancing" (DCB). This system modifies the skills dynamically during a race by applying rules to them. In their first approach to DCB, they tried to match the player index within the leader board but it proved to be too inflexible and thus didn't work well. To bypass this problem the system has been coupled with a grouping concept: the riders are split into different groups, each group having a leader and members. The members follow the leader and the player will have the possibility to jump from group to group. Unfortunately this solution wasn't very good because the groups were too loose and if the player jumped ahead of the first group, "lonely racing" still occurred.

This is where the system called "Race Script" has been implemented. It's the final method used in Pure and it worked out quite well. A race script includes a definition of a script and parts of the implementation. It's implemented by the designers and contains an explanation of how the race should ideally develop under different circumstances. The different player skills must be reflected in the document. The designer must understand that the race actually depends on the player's performance and thus the document is not a strict script but just guidelines.

The implementation is still based upon DCB but the main rule for grouping is the distance. Every rider aims to reach a point X meters in front or behind the player and the skills will be modified dependent on the distance to that point, not the distance to the player. Grouping is achieved through giving a similar aiming point to the AI riders. Since the aiming point moves during the race, the groups progress. The player is progressing from his perspective; he doesn't know the game is made easier for him because the changes are subtle. This is very rewarding for him. The difference to the rubber band technique described at the beginning of this speech, is the fact that the skills are limited to a certain range and the race follows a script.

Other mechanisms have been used in the game to ensure good playability. At the beginning of the race each AI rider only has 1 skill and the difficulty is changed every lap. In the last meters the AI will stop improving their skills to make the first place more accessible to the player.

To conclude his session, Eduardo said that the main goals have been achieved: Having challenging, fun races which do not contain "lonely racing" and which are subtle and rewarding. Throughout the entire race coherent groups are around the player, motivating him to progress. The method itself may be adapted to other types of games if a good set of skills can be generated. This mechanism also gives more control to the designers over the difficulty of the game.

AI Characters From Animation to Behavior

Upon the question what AI plus animation actually is, Phil said, that it is bringing life to characters. Now, this is a nice metaphor because it not only shows how far we already could go and how far we actually go in games. Julien put his emphasis onto the fact that the animation actually is the showcase of AI because it displays what the AI wants to do. An AI without appropriate feedback is not enjoyable. He used the game Totem by 10tacle Belgium as an example: In Totem the player was able to make usage of his totems which were animals. The totem’s powers were transferred to the player's character and the character moved according to the totem's animal. The player immediately understood what kind of power he was using by only taking a look at the character’s movements.

Taking the example of The Muppets, Christiaan stated that with a single hand gesture and posture, huge expressions are achieved. The timing is key with the puppets posture. He stated that puppetry is interesting for animation because it generates much outcome with little efforts. The posture (gaze, body movement) seems to be a major point when it comes to generating the feeling of true emotions and real depths in characters. Most games don't catch this right because they do not use well the facial expressions and the body language. Concerning facial expressions the important point was stated that the gaze and the eye-lids play a major role. If someone is talking to me and he's not blinking with his eye-lids or if he's not looking at me, it doesn't feel right, it feels like something is missing.

This is also a point where designers have to improve and learn the subtle differences that make a character actually seem to live. But then, what most often hinders more impressive expressions is the fact that those animations are quite difficult to achieve and it's not quite clear if the effort is worth the money spent on it (means: does it generate more sales). Everyone is struggling to get the best graphics, but almost no company (if any) is trying to have the best animation system. Consensus is that almost all games that pushed the limits of animations have had success, both from the game review point of view and the sales.

The question is: Why don't we integrate better, deeper animations? While some agree that mentality has to change, others put emphasis on the fact that it's a question of how much added value it brings to the game.

Voxelization of Polygon Soups for Navigation

I've taken this part from the open source project page: Recast automatically generates navigation meshes. The Recast process starts with constructing a voxel mold from a level geometry and then casting a navigation mesh over it. The process consists of three steps, building the voxel mold, partitioning the mold into simple regions, peeling off the regions as simple polygons. The voxel mold is build from the input triangle mesh by rasterizing the triangles into a multi-layer heightfield. Some simple filters are then applied to the mold to prune out locations where the character would not be able to move. The walkable areas described by the mold are divided into simple overlayed 2D regions. The resulting regions have only one non-overlapping contour, which simplifies the final step of the process tremendously. Finally, the navigation polygons are peeled off from the regions by first tracing the boundaries and then simplifying them. The resulting polygons are finally converted to convex polygons which makes them perfect for pathfinding and spatial reasoning about the level. Recast

Conclusion

The VIP evening was well visited. I'd say that about 60 people were attending a relaxed small-talk event in a nice bar called "Chez Claude". If you wonder what typically small-talk topics for AI developers might look like, here are the ones I chatted about that evening: C#, Java and C++ and the programmers difficulties to transit smoothly from one language to another; Camera movement and direction using HTN planners; Difficulties to develop and distribute for IPhones; Human-machine interfaces such as direct brain plugs and brain firewalls; etc. etc. etc. As you can see, even though this was an relaxed evening we programmers aren't able to not talk about something that isn't remotely related to AI.

If there would be anything I'd like to see changed it's the time given to any speaker. Currently it's 45 minutes including the Q&A session. Although this is "standard speaker time", I'd like to see this extended to 1h or 45 minutes of speech plus 15 minutes Q&A. Every so often we ran out of time: Either the speaker could not finish his talk and Alex had to ask him to hurry, or the Q&A session had to be cut. Giving more time to the participants would give more time to the attendees to interact with the speakers, and thus get a better understanding of the topic on hand.

I'm already looking forward to next year's iteration of this event with (hopefully) a similar impressive, high quality line-up of speeches.

A typical lunch keynote at LOGIN with excellent food. Click for full gallery

This year's online gaming conference LOGIN was held once again at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront hotel, which is right on the shore of Puget Sound a hop skip and a jump away from downtown Seattle. LOGIN has been around for three years, however it's been through a few names in its time. Originally called OGDC for Online Game Developers Conference, they were smacked down by CMP (now Think Services) for incorporating the "GDC" trademark into their conference name. That may ring some bells - we'll get to that in just a moment. The following year, they named themselves ION and once again faced litigation, this time from some random dude claiming to own the trademark for "ION". While the name LOGIN hasn't given them any issues this time around (and will hopefully be the name next year, although the running joke among recurring attendees is "what will it be called next year?") they were partners with Howell Expo, which organizes the China Game Developers Conference. Yea - CGDC. So the litigation hit them again in a rather roundabout way.

Still, for all the changes that the conference identity has gone through, its content and focus as an event has always been of top notch, and none of the attendees have ever particularly cared what it was called, so long as it delivered with quality sessions, bountiful networking opportunities, and copious amounts of yummalicious food. And it did. Many of the comments I heard from other attendees I spoke to during the conference were in praise of those three attributes.

The Sessions

This year they had an opening session the day before the conference really got started, where all the speakers got to come on stage for a minute or so and pitch their talk to the assembled conference attendees. I liked the idea, but it didn't seem that well executed and some speakers didn't seem to fully grasp the concept while others just weren't able to make it that early to take the stage themselves. That's not to say it still wasn't useful. I listened to the pitches and rated all the talks I thought sounded interesting. It did help me a little bit in deciding where I wanted to go sometimes. It would have benefited though from more speaker participation and understanding, and a hard cutoff limit to keep the ramblers at bay.

Another new session this year was the debates. Each day had a debate focused around a topic that would have two sides, a For and Against, duking it out with each other over the course of an hour. The idea wasn't really to come to any sort of conclusion or crown one side victorious over another, but to take a topic and break down its various viewpoints from developers close to the subject matter at hand. How did it go? I'm sorry to say I didn't attend any. Perhaps from a pure editorial perspective I should have at least sat in on one, but all were scheduled against sessions that actually interested me. In retrospect, I could have missed the session I sat in on Wednesday.

The Networking

LOGIN also has a nice 30 minute buffer between sessions throughout the day, which makes the whole event slow down to a nice leisurely pace. It also means you can hold a meaningful conversation with someone between sessions. Or multiple people, even.

Parties are a required part of any conference, and LOGIN always delivers. This year they had an opening reception, an official conference party (unfortunately not as swank as last years party at the Seattle Aquarium, though Joe the Magician helped make up for it) and the Seattle IGDA chapter also held an after-conference event on the last day.

Every morning, a networking breakfast is held for those willing and/or able to crawl out of bed at 7:30am. I did it once this year and once last year. Lissa somehow managed to do it twice. Each breakfast is handled speed-dating style, and every few minutes you're sent to another table via some means - like my breakfast used playing cards and people were shuffled around based on odd/even numbers and suits. If you're able to wake up in time, they're worth the effort. And not just for the potential business - which brings us to our last LOGIN attribute...

The Food

If you've been to GDC, you know well the infamous boxed lunches. They aren't bad, but they're nothing great either. MIGS has a cafeteria on-site and they give you lunch vouchers, but it's still cafeteria food. Austin GDC has a ton of great food outside the conference and in Austin proper (BBQ FTW!), but you still have to leave the conference center. Same for IGC East up in Boston.

LOGIN is different. Last year, they served sushi one day. This year one of the lunch offerings was wood-grilled salmon. We're talking full-on gourmet meals here. Breakfast has a full helping of pastries, bagels, french toast, eggs, etc. The parties all have decent finger food, the networking party had huge shrimp and crab legs.

Glorious food! Bountiful food!

My Nitpicks

There was no conference wireless, which crippled my hopes of live tweeting sessions again. The second day I discovered that the Marriott hotel access point actually offered free wireless access, but it was very spotty down in the ballroom level, which was below the hotel lobby. A dedicated conference access point was available, but not enabled for us this year. It was rather ironic to me that an online games conference wasn't online.

There was no soda. It made me wish I were a fan of water, iced tea or coffee. Luckily the hotel lobby cafe had a nicely-stocked fridge.

Next Year

actually I wonder if I would actually survive attending and then covering three conferences in a row.

Select Session Coverage

Designing with Cheaters in Mind

This isn't about how to design your game to prevent cheating. You can't do that. This is about designing your game to mitigate cheating. It's also not designing in terms of gameplay, but in terms of how your game system functions - how all the pieces interact. That's where a lot of player cheating will stem from: finding flaws in the system.

What is cheating? It's interacting with a game to gain an advantage that others cannot. These run the gamut from simply not following the rules of the game (don't create multiple accounts), running exploits (scripts), or abusing design flaws (a certain armor piece remains in affect even when removed). Why should you work so hard to counteract cheating? Because it's simply not fair and will cause players to not want to play your game, and it's just bad practice to leave harmful system effects unfixed that players could use to cheat or potentially even use to hack into your game or other people's machines.

While the design of the game can be the first place to stop cheating from occurring, it won't solve everything. Programmers can also fix issues however they can also create their own as well. Customer Service will see the brunt of any affects cheating has on players, so they're your front line of defense, but Community Managers are your early warning system, as they will be able to spot trends in the community that could lead to the discovery of players covertly cheating.

Why do players cheat? Dr. Richard Bartle has 4 basic types of cheaters:

• Achievers - these people are looking for quick recognition. They want to be on the top of the heap as fast as possible and stay there
• Explorers - not always cheaters per se, they do exploit glitches to get to areas of the world they're not supposed to be
• Socializers - usually looking for payback in some form or another for being socially rejected
• Killers - these players want to dominate others, and usually exploit cheats that let them kill swiftly, or widely

The best time to catch possible cheats is before game launch, preferably before beta testing. Just as with any other change you would make during a project, the sooner you do it he less it will cost. You also don't have to worry about any backwards compatibility or masses of players to piss off by taking some part of the game offline to fix it. However it's easy to miss cheats during this time because 1) developers who playtest don't usually try to cheat 2) you don't have a lot of people playtesting the game and 3) some play testers may actually try to hide a cheat until game launch when they can exploit it. Once a game is live you have thousands of players - the numbers will always be against you.

Catching cheats when the game is launched requires special handling. You have to fix the problem quickly, but not so quickly that you push out a hotfix that only makes the problem worse, or fixes that cheat and introduces a new vulnerability. Clear communication between the Community Manager and the community is key to letting players know action is being taken but time is also being taken to ensure the fix is fully effective. Make sure your Customer Support knows the status of the fix as well so they can inform players calling in for support if you've taken part of the game temporarily offline. Programmers and designers need to be talking to ensure that any fix to the game does not upset the game balance or game play. The whole team has to be mobilized to deal with this.

Detecting cheats quickly can be achieved by a number of means. One obvious way is to have an efficient Customer Support department and Community Manager, so that any complaints from players who have witnessed cheating are handled promptly. A better way however is to actively monitor the community and game to try and discover improper behavior before it becomes a major problem. This can be done with the proper community management tools (flagging system, user activity tracking, etc) and proper game metrics (server logs, client logs, player stat tracking, etc). Study previous games to find out how players cheated to get an idea of what to look for in the data. If you detect a cheat, don't always swoop in right away to fix it. It's one thing to discover a cheat, it's another to actually catch a person(s) cheating.

Top ten lessons:

1. Listen to players about possible cheats - then get specific info from your team and metrics system to confirm suspicions
2. Use mod value for temporary changes - don't modify the base value of an item or game setting, instead replace it with a temporary value so you can switch back easily if things go bad
3. Make on the fly changes easy - build your game to allow for quick and easy changes so you can react to cheats faster
4. Don't put test items on a live server - oops? It happens. Why would you have a one-shot kill item anyways?
5. Don't ignore social engineering - people will believe anything, someone will let a cheat or even an imagined one get to their head
6. Don't let your ego get control - people are out there that are smarter than you. Accept it and accept the fact that they will find ways around your system
7. Don't be afraid to punish cheaters - legit players will start to lose faith if they see repeat offenders only getting a light rap on the hand, on the other hand players will respect the game rules more if the law is laid down. Ex: zeroing of Gamer Points
8. Competition (PvP) makes things worse - be ready for more problems if you have PvP in your games - players hate unfair advantages and they come about often when people cheat
9. Be realistic about cheats - people will find cheats, be ready for it
10. Just keep the game fun - don't punish for the sake of punishment, stop cheaters to make the game fun for others

Pathfinding Solutions for Large Online Worlds

I'll admit this is something I never really thought about myself until now - the fact that in an online game, NPCs have a lot of terrain to navigate over. And they're only getting larger and larger as technology progresses. The usual pathfinding methods don't work as well as they do in single player games, mainly because of the fact that MMO games are mainly server-based and share a lot of resources. The algorithms also don't scale well to the large open spaces in MMOs versus the small, tight FPS levels and perform slowly. MMOs are also dynamic worlds hosting thousands of players, so not only do you have to account for changing environments but thousands of pathing requests per second. And it all has to be extremely stable, lest you bring down part or all of the server and piss off thousands of paying customers.

A typical solution is to generate nav meshes, but John has surprisingly found that a more common word is "create". He was appalled to learn that the majority of MMO nav meshes were done by hand in an editor. This is a bad idea for the aforementioned reason of changing environments. MMOs are not static, and neither should the nav mesh be. These meshes are a layer visible to NPCs that help to guide them along paths and areas were walking, swimming, jumping or flying is allowed. Edges connect to nodes, and characters are directed along the edges from node to node to create a path. It's an expert system that is fully aware of the lay of the land so it also describes the connectivity between nodes in the mesh, for example whether an NPC can jump from one node to another. Interpolating the resulting path can smooth it out so the character's walk looks natural. The nav mesh can also be used to store meta data, such as where NPCs spawn, patrol areas, custom regions and programmable triggers. You also have to make sure to account for various-sized NPCs, either by storing such data in the mesh or creating additional mesh layers. To keep required data to a minimum John recommends classifying NPCs as either small, medium or large. Latency must also be accounted for, as in the time it takes for a path to be created, the character may have moved beyond the starting node, causing it to turn around, walk back to the start point and then turn around again to continue on the path. This obviously looks stupid so allow characters to blend the difference.

John went over several middleware, after admitting how useless he found it to try and roll his own system.

• Kynapse: Didn't have an API. At all. This was very crippling to its use, and also had long computational times
• Havok AI: John found this middleware interesting but was unable to share any data on it. He recommends a look
• PathEngine: This middleware also returned long times in computing paths

John's other reference was the AI Wisdom 4 article on auto generation of navigation meshes.

What you already know about building secure software...

Dave Weinstein is good at his job, and that job is to be paranoid. Of everything. Well okay, I'm sure he doesn't think the coffee machine in is office is planning worldwide domination, and perhaps he's not constantly worried about his house being broken into. But he is on the constant lookout for hackers trying to worm their way into whatever system he is tasked to make sure is secure - and that means not trusting a single bit of data that system receives from a remote client. Likewise, he expects that whatever remote server he connects to doesn't trust a single bit of data that he sends it.

Sounds like a quandary? If both parties can't trust each other, how do they communicate? Very, very carefully.

Hackers aren't motivated by what drives normal people to play games. They simply want to gain some level of control over your system and use it for their own devious means. This sole purpose will drive them to formulate all sorts of attacks, and you can bet that you won't think of them all. So if you can't prevent someone from breaking into your server or hijacking your client then the best you can do is make it as difficult as possible for them, and hope they simply give up and move on to some other, more vulnerable game. Of course, there's also the mentality among hackers to be the first one to beat the system, and that if a suitable challenge presents itself they will work tirelessly at figuring out a way to solve it. That's how things like Blu-ray encryption get broken.

So okay, either way you can't really win. Build that bunker!!

The problem is that, while many people do mistrust data in online games, they usually don't distrust enough. The first thing that security people always look for is corrupt packet data. Older games that performed a lot of client-side calculations fell victim to this. Air Warrior, which ran all its flight models client-side and did not validate on the server, quickly saw players flying higher and faster than they were supposed to be able to. Other client-side data that can be manipulated if it's available to a client can be position, class/level info, authoritative combat, etc. Note that this is all packet data that were looking at here, but actually the entire packet should be considered a security risk, as hackers can modify the size, format and sender (UDP injection - which affects many online games that take advantage of UDP vs. TCP) to break through to your system. This is where you should apply a technique known as fuzzing to see if your system is susceptible to these forms of attacks. You should also review features that can be unsafe by design such as a tech-support ability to run commands on a user's machine or an auto-update feature that could be hijacked to send malicious updates to clients.

So you shouldn't trust you clients. But your clients can trust your servers right? After all, they're usually directly under your control. The client connects to the server and sends a verification code. The server goes okay! and you're all good right? Uhm, are you sure you're actually connecting to the game server? Internet connections are generally done by hostname, and just asking for server.game.publisher.com doesn't guarantee you a connection with the actual game server. First, there's DNS poisoning. Then there's also ARP impersonation on a local network. How to hackers get on your local network? Well it turns out that wireless routers in the same area can have the same SSID and password. Are you sure you're connecting to your router when you log on to the internet? Connecting to a rogue server can allow inappropriate content to be streamed into your game, or even allow the game to be patched with malicious code as Evilgrade demonstrated. So clients can't trust servers either, and mutual authentication is required.

Another threat is posed by scripting systems. Lots of games have them to allow their users to create new scenarios or objects, and lots of hackers love to exploit them to run programs that give them and advantage or control over some part of the game. Usually these problems manifest themselves after the game has been out in the wild for a while, but a lot of vulnerabilities can be found via an audit by a security professional. These are people whose sole purpose is to pour over your code and try to break it. They can be well worth the additional cost to ensure that your scripting system (and other systems) are secure so that your players can get full enjoyment out of extending their game play experience. This should also be something that is actually planned into the development cycle, not a last-minute decision that will cost you tons of money if anything needs to be fixed/overhauled/cut.

Finally, don't forget the data that you store on people's machines. Media formats are complex, large and in binary - hackers like this. Anything stored as data can be interpreted as code. While games usually include custom complex formats with accompanying custom parsers in the game to read them, humans have a distressing tendency to write vulnerable parsers - especially if they control both the tools that produce the content and products that consume the format. People always think it’s good enough for them - but there's always someone better than you. Some examples include replacing camouflage colors in a texture with high-contrast colors - now everything is extremely visible. Or increasing the volume of footsteps so the player can't be snuck up on. Or changing model data to alter the hitbox. This is where fuzzing comes back into play again. Fuzz your parsers, and your signature validation code for the client/server.

The hackers are out there, and they're gunning for you because you're a new system that hasn't been tested yet and they all want first dibs. Fuzz all exposed data surfaces, any user provided content and network traffic. If you can't hire a security expert to audit your code, it may be best to simply not expose code to the player through a scripting language. Security experts like to say "think like an attacker" but that doesn't just apply to how an attacker will attack your system, but why.

Building Like You Play: The Mechanics of a 100% Virtual Development Team

The Conference

But I digress. Back to the conference. So it was a two-day affair, which is normal for events of this size, and held on the Northeastern University campus. I stayed with an industry friend and not at a hotel, so I can't comment on ease of travel in that regard, although there is a light rail stop right down the road. Since I had my car I drove us in both days, and the campus had a nice parking garage within 5 minute walking distance of the conference buildings that only charged $20 for the day. NEU has a really nice campus, with plenty of open space and buildings with lots of windows to really let the light in. Sessions were held in two seperate buildings, but within eyesight of one another and and easy walk to and fro. Luckily the weather really held out for us and was in fact quite lovely for Boston at this time of year. It was probably nicer out than it was back home a ways south for me!

Although the conference did not include lunch, there were plenty of on-campus options that didn't take long to walk to. I ended up going with my friends for burritos both days from Boloco. As usual dinner was an open-ended affair, although on Thursday night a local game developer meetup happened to be going on at a local bar down the street, so my friends and I ate there and then hung out at the bar afterwards. Always be sure to look into the local scene when you're out at conferences, because they usually try to schedule something around the same time.

Internet, courtesy of NEU, was fabulous. If nothing else, I hope the conference returns to NEU just so I can have such wonderful wireless service again. Seriously. At GDC, you'll be lucky to get a blasted cell phone signal, let alone a wifi one. I was just at LOGIN more recently (which is an online gaming cnference) and ironically enough they didn't even have wireless (more on that this Wednesday when I summarize that event). At NEU they had a guest access point you could pick up anywhere - a simple click on their gateway page and you were online. I used it in both session buildings and even out on the campus lawn one afternoon, reclining in one of the many lawn chairs they have spread randomly about. Awesome.

There was also a smallish "expo" outside the main lecture hall, consisting of 3-4 tables of companies showing off some products. Given the trouble GDC had with its expo this year, it was no surprise to see a small showing at IGC East. Even aforementioned LOGIN was lacking this year. I hear some companies are already pulling out of E3. It's a tough time for this aspect of game conferences.

Darius Kazemi (Orbus Gameworks) and Chris Oltyan (Zeitgeist Games) talk about focus testing. Click for full gallery

The Sessions

Almost all the sessions I attended were great. One or two where fine, just not containing the content I imagined so I didn't take away much from them, and I have to admit that Dallas Snell's keynote was a bit wonky for me. It's not that it was a bad keynote, however the way it was delivered was, to me, ineffective. After almost 30 minutes of him rambling on about his personal life I had pretty much zoned out, so that by the time he came back around to the game dev aspect of the lecture, I had forgotten what he was supposed to be talking about. He was a very entertaining speaker though.

The business track sessions were held in an amphitheater underneath West Village F, and it had stadium seating with comfy chairs and a huuuuge projection screen. Or two side-by-side screens, which were used on day two. Being partially deaf, I had no trouble sitting way up towards the top of the room and hearing the speakers just fine. The technology track was held in a room about 2 minutes walk away at the Egan Research Center. It wasn't a lecture hall, but did the job just fine for presentations.

Scott Macmillan from Macguffin Games shows off his demo. Click for full gallery

Game Demo Night

Conductor Yohei Sato leads the group through pieces from Chrono Trigger, God of War, Mario Bros, Halo, and more. Click for full gallery

Video Games Orchestra

Select Session Coverage

I'm pretty pleased at how the live tweeting thing turned out. Sure I had only 140 characters to explain things, but that meant I was able to naturally distill a lot of the talks without thinking about it too much. I've included all the tweets from the sessions I attended (and tweeted) below in case you missed them or are simply not on twitter. If you're not, then here's a good reason to join!

Keynote: Challenges of Independence

• when working for hire, don't plan to leverage royalties into your budget - doubtful you will see any. Creat only saw some for 2 games
• Creat's been in business since 05 over in Boston and saw their online publishing takeoff in less than a year. Having a strategy is important
• RT @tinysubversions: To sign w Sony PSN you need to sign different contract w EVERY Sony (SCEA SCEE SCE Japan etc)! Took Creat 1 year

Rapid and Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics

• Etain: N+ had a level editor - ppl spelled "fuck" in blocks. Was not worth it as much as N+ devs had assumed
• Etain: don't pay focus testers. Ever. Paying sets a bad precedence. Oh, they work for you now? Food is a great & simple method of payment
• www.firehosegames.com will have slides of their rapid prototyping talk online at some point
• RT @darrentorpey: Fire Hose prototyping lessons: "Do it now, get it right later" ... "don't argue: implement, then test"

Taking Game Design to the Next Level

Note: All these tweets are courtesy of Darius Kazemi

• Discussing "Really Important Things" (RITs) in game design: 1. Formal project goals/focus statement. Guides every single decision.
• Meretzky: I've seen more projects go off the rails for lack of clear agreed upon vision than any other reason. 1 person shld own the vision
• Foster: at Harmonix we have the "one question". For Rock Band was: is it an authentic band experience?
• Kerr: For LOTRO, we had the 3 A's: accessibility advancement atmosphere, if you're not communicating this you're devaluing your team
• Foster: if you communicate vision well enough, the team will autonomously steer themselves in the right direction.
• 2nd RIT is balance. Meretzky: Challenge, difficulty curve, economy, pacing, reward. Balance is obv hard b/c not all your players are th same
• Meretzky: balance for your core demographic. Let players balance the game for themselves: autobalancing, diff settings, self-pacing.
• Meretzky: in terms of rewards, carrots as far as the eye can see. Short term and long term rewards always visible. Civ: just one more turn!
• Currie: balance is art not science. On Wizardry 8, was massive game. We scaled the diff w player lvl but ppl hated it, hurt sense of progres
• Kerr: 60% content 40% balance. But you need to bake in imbalance to make players feel like they've progressed. No "eternal rats" at hi lvls!
• Foster: if your game has lots of interconnected systems you need to be very cautious about changing any systems
• Kerr: we modified one elf sword attack and it broke our DPS across the entire game
• Meretzky: always err on side of overcommunicating. Foster: you buy yourself credibility thru communication
• 3rd RIT: Constraints. Meretzky: financial, marketing, design space, technical. Constraints can be beneficial: 2 few or 2 many can be bad
• Meretzky: some constraints are too much. In mobile games you have the publisher the carrier the tech and the IP. V hard to make a good game!
• Kerr: follow your constraints to their logical conclusion. Otherwise you're making a dissonant game. Foster: if ur lucky tht can HELP design
• RIT 8: don't overdesign. Currie: you design every last thing up front, you're no longer flexible. Foster: no one reads design docs!
• Foster: real design is the conversation that happens around a design doc, so keep it short and to the point. Kerr: agile dev is great
• RIT 9: iteration. Zirpoli: you can't predict where a design will go, so u have to b flexible and build in clay instead of in stone.
• Zirpoli: good tools give you the ability to iterate!
• Foster: my experience is that tools can get too complex and collapse under their own weight. Specific tools are much more helpful
• Currie: iteration will happen. Don't get frustrated: you are never "done" so get used to it. Foster: nobody knows anything.
• RIT 10: research. Currie: research your content, research similar games.

Quality of Life – How To Build Games, Make Your Company Successful And Still Have a Life

• Brett: Curt Schilling loves acting like a designer but knows he isn't. Throws ideas like spitballs at team to see what sticks
• Brett: some QoL examples include working from home, non-standard hours, leave of absence, support for training and special needs
• Brett's definition of crunch: working in excess of 50 hr/wk in excess of 5 days/wk - within core hour structure (like 9-5)
• Brett: cites source saying 16-20% higher total output from working 8 hour days versus 9 hour days
• Brett: productivity is hard to quantify - so where is the break even point? Generally around 4 weeks of crunch until diminishing returns hit
• Brett: cultural no-nos include ego battles, personal agendas, territorial behavior, random productivity drains (like excessive web browsing)
• Brett: 38 Studios plays Ultimate Frisbee regularly as one of many ways to break up any crunch periods
• Brett: be honest in your hiring process to ensure that people fit with your culture (so they know if they'll be crunching a lot for example)

How to Maximize PR for Your Games

The slides for this lecture can also be downloaded

• Sue: Assets are key - screens, videos, interviews or original art given on exclusive basis to key sites or writers. Key word "exclusive"
• Sue: create an Asset Calendar that defines asset, outlet (website, magazine, etc) for asset, requirements for asset, date to deliver asset
• Sue: treat community sites like press - will most times publish small updates that bigger sites wouldn't consider "newsworthy".
• Sue: Great art makes a difference - save and use everything from concept to final art. Can bring more coverage if art is stunningly awesome
• Sue: feature spreads on game site homepages (like IGN) are awesome, but best when given to just one site to leverage powers of exclusivity
• Sue: find a 3rd party expert to comment on your title - can also open new doors for where news of your title will appear
• Sue: exploit what is different about your title. Bohle got great press pushing Christian-themed game by focusing on the Christianity
• Wow, seeking assistance from ppl like Bohle for TV interviews can really save your butt if there is any controversy surrounding your title

  Todd Hollenshead from id Software asked Sue if he should take a TV interview on game violence when his lawyer said don't even try it. Sue sat him down and prepared all the tough questions he could be asked and came up with soundbytes for him to memorize to step around dicey topics. At the interview Todd totally stumped the reporter, who was trying to catch him out while talking about violent games. The reporter finally just came out and said "But Todd! Why do you need violence to make an entertaining game?!" and Todd's reply was "in Romeo and Juliet, why did they both have to die?" and the reporter just gave up.

• the hardest part is finding all the right media outlets to push your title to. There are so many, and new ones popping up all the time
• Sue: tips for studios looking to promote themselves for contract work: speak at conferences, get interviewed by industry sites (like us!)
• Sue's final tip: get your company positioning down first thing and find what's different about you and/or your title(s)

Focus Testing - Making games that people other than you like

• Chris: Generally not a good idea to bring focus testers to your home if you develop out of your house. Look into shared meeting spaces
• Chris: don't focus test (FT) to *find out* if your game is fun. FT is to determine if *other* ppl think game is fun when you think it is too
• Chris: know in advance that things will leak about your game from FT, so be sure to show only what you're ready for ppl to see & hear about
• Darius: You can classify data in two ways: Subjective vs. Objective and Quantitative vs. Qualitative. Mixing them is key for good results
• bringing in fans to focus test can be bad as they are biased and likely won't give you the hard truth about your game sucking (if it does)
• don't forget that paying focus testers can raise all kind of legal issues. Go with a 3rd party service or find a creative way to recompense
• watching people play your game can be creepy to the play tester but is an option if you have a limited budget (no vid camera for example)
• Darius: The more quantitative data you have, the easier it will be to confirm subjective data collected. People are filled with lies.
• You need to make sure you design the FT around the questions you want answered about the game beyond just "is it fun?"
• Darius: Share test results with entire team. Ask for feedback from members specialized in area of FT. Test results can be useful in future
• Test data can be a great weapon to use with publishers to swing their decision to allow key changes you feel need to be made to the game

Networking for Indies

• so far talking about the benefits of twitter and blogging towards networking. Darius met and helped a lot of ppl through blog comments
• Darius: as an indie - good to be your own brand, having one twitter account for yourself and company is usually okay
• Scott: know your audience - are you tweeting just to your friends or to people you may not know so well? Or may not know you that well?
• Darius: don't be afraid to lose twitter followers, don't change how you tweet just to attract new people. Tweet yourself honestly
• Sam: be responsive on twitter, make replies to people to engage in conversation. I'll have to ask the panel how far to take this concept.
• Darius: try to make mundane tweets still useful. "having a beer" is a bit better as "having [beer name] at [place] and it's really good."
• the panel agrees that at some point, you will have to strategically cull people you follow on twitter, blogs you read, etc
• Use services like bit.ly and tr.im to track the effectiveness of your social media use
• Also search.twitter and hootsuite. Google alerts can tell you when your blog is mentioned on the web

Independent Self-Publishing on PlayStation®Network

• Gabe: why self-publish? You keep creative control, own your own IP, get larger royalties, no external producers
• >20M PSN registered users, >380M downloads wordwide, >60% PS3 consoles registered on PSN, 175 d/l games since PSN launch
• 79% users are aged 18-34 (ages are self-reported however - lots of teenagers reporting 18+). 6% female
• contact SCEA Developer Relations to apply for Licensed Developer Status (SCEE in Europe)
• Remember, as @tinysubversions reported yesterday from the keynote - you need to sign with EACH regional Sony office to distribute Int'l
• DiRT, Flower, and Burn Zombie Burn are all games that shipped powered by the PhyreEngine Sony pushes for PS3 platform development
• PSN has no restriction on the amount of content that you have to upload
• there is however a 1.8GB PSP restriction
• 2-5 weeks after passing QA/metadata approval is typical time frame for your game to appear on PSN
• Gabe: Game Developers Conference 2010? Or will it be Game *Publishers* Conference 2010? Digital distribution makes everyone a publisher
• while we're talking about digital distribution, if you're interested in Live Arcade, here's a great lecture summary on it: http://tr.im/kRK0
• Sony gives you stats and such on your sales, but no spiffy web portal yet like Google Analytics or anything - they're working on it tho

I emailed Gabe for the slides to his talk but he was unable to provide them. Here is some additional information from him:

The submission is pretty straightforward and guided through two stages. Stage 1 involves receiving a game concept and we will examine game design documents to focus on game features in order to quantity the competitiveness of the game and fit for various Playstation platforms it's under consideration for. Once the approval is attained, the production schedule is dictated by the development team including setting Stage 2 deadlines. Stage 2 entails code submission and primarily checks the completeness of the game and fulfillment of the game features stated in Stage 1. During the stages, the developer is welcome to request Work In Progress (WIP) reports to get objective evaluation on the game. Once the Stage 2 looks good, they are given green light to schedule a QA slot. From QA check to Playstation store will typically take 3-5 weeks for most cases.

I hope that gives you a clearer picture on the submission process. In terms of the cheaper kit, the PSN development is certainly more budget conscientious and we've adjusted to this fact by releasing the cheaper Mini Tools. There is a bit of misnomer even on the Test Kits that are exactly the same as consumer PS3s but can run unsigned code and primarily used for production testing environment. These units can run and debug code and actually perfectly fine for development as well. Lots of developers already take advantage of this fact and already do this. However, preproduction code may require the additional memory but usually not too much of an issue for PSN titles due to their smaller scope. These are pretty cheap at around $1K and coupled with PhyreEngine, it's makes a complete springboard for accessible development on PSN. Of course, the Mini Tool and Dev Tool is always an option too. Unfortunately, I can't talk about the details of the hardware specs, tools and SDK details, and pricing much to non-licensees so my apologies in that regards.

Introduction

The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas within the course of one night. Therefore the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6 minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up.

So how did the event turn out? Well for one it was another jam-packed event, although the room was not exactly set up properly for the kind of seating that was required - but that was no fault of the organizers. The majority of the presentations worked out very well, it really ultimately fell to the presenter to give a compelling talk within the time limits imposed upon them. A few weren't properly prepared and didn't quite stay in-sync with their slides, or just didn't have the material suited to this type of presentation. One was a bit confusing to even listen to, and another tried to evoke audience participation using the 20-second time limit to create a sort of game show atmosphere. It was a nice attempt but the problem was that it was identifying pictures of old consoles and/or when they were released. In this case, no one wants to blurt out an absurdly wrong answer in a room filled with fellow gaming geeks. So unless people knew 100% what the answers were, they kept their mouths shut (including myself).

But still - was it fun? Yes. While it does prove that there's really nothing you can do to save a bad presenter from themselves by doing things like limiting the amount of time they have to talk, it also challenges presenters to be creative and witty in giving their lecture. It's very much akin to those 48 hour game development jams, where you are forced by neccessity to whittle down your game idea to the very core if its mechanics in order to complete anything on time.

Pecha Kucha night is planned to return sometime in '09, and we'll be there to bring you the second coming.

Video Coverage

The event was taped, like Demo Night, and all the footage is available online at NY IGDA's YouTube page. However all that footage is also embedded right below. Additionally, you can download all the slide decks from the event right here. [Ed note: coming soon!]

The Ninja Writer: Using Agile Methodologies to Achieve REAL ULTIMATE POWER!

Presenter: Coray Seifert (Kaos Studios | THQ Inc.)

Synopsis: An examination of the awesomeness of both A) Ninjas and B) The Agile Methodology. Specifically, how these two concepts of excellence can be applied to the always challenging prospect of writing for games. There will be lots of pictures of ninjas.

Simple 3D Content Creation Tools: How Much Freedom is Enough?

Presenter: Andrew Nealen (Rutgers University)

Synopsis: Andrew Nealen presents his research on modern 3D content creation. He will compare consumer aimed 3D tools like the creature creator found in Spore to industry-standard tools like 3DSMax and Maya. Can new technology help close the gap between the two?

Everything I know about games I learned from Bebop

Presenter: Joshua DeBonis (Sortasoft)

Synopsis: Joshua DeBonis relates his experience as a jazz saxophonist to game design, by discussing several specific lessons learned through playing music.

All I Really Needed to Know ... about customer contracts

Presenter: Steve A. Augustino (Kelley Drye & Warren LLP)

Synopsis: Steve's presentation covers everything you wanted to know about how to draft your EULA or Terms of Service -- but didn't think you could afford to ask. This includes the five most important principles that should be considered in your customer contract.

The Evolution of The Maiden, Monk, and Ogre

Presenter: Shane Culp (MTV Networks)

Synopsis: This talk chronicles the evolution of a casual title, from the discovery of a prototype on the company server to spearheading a new story and theme through development and completion. This game follows my entire 6 year career at Blockdot, a Dallas based casual and advergame development shop, through starts and stops, juggling client work, and the growth of the company from 6 to 50 employees.

Music from Metroid

Presenter: Stephen Harwood Jr.

Synopsis: A fun look at Hirokazu Tanaka's music from the original Metroid, featuring compositional analysis and some attempts to translate this material into an orchestral setting.

A brief history of Reality on the Norm

Presenter: David Gilbert (Wadjet Eye Games)

Synopsis: “Reality on the Norm” is an open-source world for point-and-click adventure games. It started the concept of “user created content” before it became a buzzword, and gives newbie adventure game developers an evolving universe to create a game in. A wacky town full of wacky stories and characters, Dave will give you an overview of the world and the impact it had.

Image Gallery

GC Europe 2007 by Numbers

• 208 exhibitors (including Epic Games, Kuju, Rebellion, Quantic Dream, Massive Black, Virtuos, Widescreen games)
• 150+ publishers/distributors (including Activision, Atari, Eidos, Electronic Arts, Koch Media, Konami, Lucas Arts, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, THQ, Ubisoft, Vivendi)
• 35 countries represented
• 12 associations from 10 countries (including the UK, Nordic countries, Thailand, Brazil)
• 94 service providers
• 148 game development and distribution companies
• 34 companies attending as both service providers and game developers
• More than 5000 meetings scheduled
• More than 220 projects posted online (games + services) including Adventure, Real Time Strategy, Sports games and more
• 30 different kinds of services (Game Design, Graphics, Level Design, Localization, Mobile Services, Modelization, Programming, Test/QA) available to improve the quality and lower the cost of production
• Most represented platforms for game projects : Nintendo DS, PC, PS3, Wii, Xbox 360
• Most represented platforms for services projects : Mobile devices, Nintendo DS, PC, PS2, PS3

GC America @ GDC 2008 by Numbers

• 157 exhibitors (including 10 Tacle Studios, Acquire, Mere Mortals, Pixelux Entertainment, Rebellion, Running with Scissors, Stainless Games, Team 17, Virtuos)
• More than 80 Publishers/Distributors (including Activision, Atari, Eidos Interactive, Electronic Arts, Konami, Microsoft Game Studios, Namco Bandai, Nintendo, Sega, THQ, Ubisoft)
• 36 countries represented
• Developers organizations and delegations from 9 countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, Nordic countries, Thailand, UK)
• 29 service providers
• 27 companies attending both as service providers and game developers
• About 4000 meetings scheduled
• Hundreds of projects posted online (game + services) including adventure, first person shooter, real time strategy, role playing game, sports games and more
• 21 different kinds of services (Character Design, Cinematics, Graphics, Level Design, 3D, Test / QA, Motion Capture, Modelization) available to improve the quality and lower the cost of production
• All platforms and genres represented, including next-gen, handheld, online, casual (Xbla, PS Home, Wii Ware)

Game Connection Interview: Pierre Carde

The Game Connection history began in 2001, when Pierre Carde, Director of Connection Events, decided to set up a professional event for the video game industry focused on one objective : doing business. Game Connection’s first edition took place in December 2001 and attracted 27 French developers and 20 international publishers. In 2004, the Game Connection went abroad to San Francisco and joined the Game Developers Conference. Two years after, the Game Connection flew away to Tokyo and Shanghai. Initially separated, Games and Services at Game Connection have been gathered to give you a more global experience.

Nowadays, Game Connection America and Game Connection Europe have become must-attend events in the videogame industry. With a range of 500-600 international attendees (including around 350 exhibitors/sellers and 330 visitors/buyers) and a 1 million $ average revenue generated per attendee, Game Connection is THE place to do business internationally.

Do you see a lot of new studios signing up or is it mainly the mainstream companies looking for new contacts?

It seems GC US still trails behind GC EU in numbers, do you think that's due to GC US's relative youth, the american marketplace or that GDC is pulling away attendees and GC EU benefits from being a dedicated event?

Is there any other way you think having GDC running concurrently affects GC US, good or bad?

Can you give some detail into the process of selecting a Level Up winner? What qualities are sought after?

Is there anything out there remotely similar to Game Connection? If so, how do they compare?

What's a memorable GC moment for you?

So just to be clear: you can schedule as many meetings as you can fit into a day?

What advantages are there of having your own social network (GC Marketplace) rather than just simply providing tools to let attendees connect via other networks like Facebook and LinkedIn?

How would you like to see the GC event grow in the future?

Has anyone ever found your merged-man image to be creepy?

If you missed the Europe Connection this time around, get your act together for GC America 09, being held during GDC in March.

The conference, run by Digital Media Wire (DMW), was very business-oriented and thus was packed with a great many middle-aged men and women wearing suits. DMW reported 300 registered guests, but the theater never seemed to hold more than half that at any given time, although certainly many of the registered attendees weren’t interesting in the full conference, as it spanned many areas of the games business, from core to casual to mobile. While the first day only ran from just after noon until five, the second day offered a full 8 hours worth of material. Each morning the conference was opened with a few words from DMW CEO Ned Sherman.

There were a lot of panels; in fact the majority of sessions were panels, but that makes sense when you’re trying to condense as much material as possible into two days (really a day and a half) by having as many people as possible participate. The biggest panels brought 6 panelists and a moderator up onto the stage. The thing I hate about panels though is that not only are they hard to cover because you have people tossing things out left and right and keeping track of who says what while you’re writing (or typing) and trying to listen to any responses is a pain – but they also are entirely dependent upon the moderator and the direction of the conversations the panel takes. Essentially you have a bunch of people jabber on for 45-60 minutes and hopefully someone says something meaningful every now and then that’s applicable outside the direct scope of the current topic under discussion. In other words, relevant to people as a whole.

Still, DMW did take measures to curtail rambling panelists by having a second, slightly smaller projection screen offset from the large center screen where one technician was using an online countdown timer to give each panelist (in some cases) a certain amount of time in which to respond. That second screen was also used to display an online message board called Mozes that posted up anonymous questions or comments people texted in from their cell phones. I thought this was a really cool idea and I was sorely tempted to see if it was being moderated at all by texting something obscene, but I managed to (barely) restrain myself. Several of the conversations in the panels were directed by comments people texted to the big screen. It did have a slightly annoying drawback though of refreshing the whole damn screen every half-minute or so, which on a rather largish projection screen can become quite distracting after a while.

Of the various panels and sessions, the ones that I (personally, mind you) found interesting are covered in the next few pages. The variety of content made this a rather broadly-appealing conference to many business executives. If you’re in a position at your company that includes understanding various aspects of the games biz and are looking for insight from other professionals, it’s a conference worth attending.

Analysts Panel

A panel of analysts, one each from NPD, CEA and Gfk, were on hand to drown the attending developers with numbers and data sets, which they did with great success with many a pie chart and bar graph and pretty diagram. CEA’s analysis from chief economist Shawn DuBravac brought along with it the “recession proof” statement that’s been circulating throughout the industry the last few years as the financial world took its slow tumble to where we are today (as in, as of this writing), showing the industry’s continued growth in various sectors from mobile to console. They also did a bit of PC game death toting by noting how over 36% of homes have HD with a console hooked up and are bypassing the PC with said console or a set-top box to distribute content, including video games. One of the more interesting factoids they put forth was a study showing that 54% of people who played sports games were more driven to actually watch them on TV, which is a similar correlation to people watching sports on TV and then wanting to actually play them - in real life. Or perhaps they’ll just game more instead and create a feedback loop. A survey result showed that the number one feature people wanted in future games was friends list or buddy-linking integration, while being able to download a game came in dead last. It’s obviously so high school sweethearts can continue their relationships online through games, as another study shows is happening. Watch out Dad, now you have to stop her from seeing the guy virtually too.

NPD’s game business senior manager Michael Klotz of course brought along even more numbers, kicking off with the game industry’s 40% growth from 2006 to almost 19 billion dollars in 2007, with a +28% growth predicted for 2008. Of course this is taking into account all facets of the industry, not just software. In an echo from the CEA presentation, a lot more women are becoming involved with gaming, mainly thanks to the Nintendo Wii, which sports a 60% share of women players. Overall though the amount of women and men playing games has almost reached a balance point, and gaming in general has become ever more a part of America’s daily lifestyle with 59% of the US population playing games. We’re still outranked though by wholesome activities like simply going online (questionable wholesomeness), watching TV (less questionable I suppose) and spending family time (ah, there we go). Michael also pointed out what sites like Kotaku have been mentioning for a while now, in that NPD’s numbers only cover retail and not online subscriptions or digital downloads, although they are starting to pull those numbers down as well.

Jen Wu from the Gfk group put up numbers more catered to the mobile side of the market, showing how 21.4% of the US mobile population, or 48.4 million people, play games on their phone each month. Of these, about half (51%) play games only occasionally (which is a point brought up later by Justin Ficarrotta in his iPhone dev talk). The other half plays either almost every day (21%) or at least once a week (29%). The iPhone currently has a 12% lead over smart phones when it comes to gaming, but they are all still a small slice of the mobile gaming pie at only 21% while 50% of gamers use a DS and 28% use a PSP.

The Console vs. PC Debate

This debate session covered was on the following question: which platform is the future entertainment hub and which one is struggling to stay alive? Two teams, pro-console and pro-PC (or con-console) duked it out over the course of 45 minutes. In the beginning, moderator Mike Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, asked the teams to close their eyes and took a silent poll of hands from the audience as to who was pro-console and who was con-console. Only about 20-30 people out of about 150 raised their hands against the console. He then gave each panelist three minutes to state their cases.

On the pro-console side sat Justin Townsend, CEO and co-founder of IGA WorldWide, and Robert Stevenson, VP/business development of Atari Group. Robert’s argument is that the console is situated in a social environment, the living room, while a PC is usually relegated to a corner or basement. This provides for greater social experiences matching those that players are increasingly enjoying online, while easily hooking up to HD devices and stream in content from Netflix or the Playstation Store, or stream out content to a PSP or DS. Or just outright play media in DVD or Blu-ray. Justin’s argument focused more on the failings of the PC to build a full entertainment system, saying how much easier and less expensive it is to build a complete entertainment system with a console rather than a computer

The con-console team consisted of Alex St. John, CEO and founder of Wild Tangent (also one of the original DirectX creators), and John Welch, president and CEO of Playfirst. Alex’s argument against the console was very heavy indeed, and was of course delivered in his usual strong and confident manner that tends to make people sit up and listen. Looking back at consoles throughout history, like Atari and Sega, Alex sees the failure of both the PS3 and the Xbox as just another part of the “photonic collapse” (I like that quote) in the console hardware industry. Sony is no longer the company it once was thanks to the enormous losses they’ve taken on due to the PS3, and Microsoft is still struggling to sell their consoles, slashing prices wherever they can, and their software sales can’t even match the number of World of Warcraft subscribers. In fact, due to Sony saying the PS3 is forecasted to last 10 years Alex went so far as to say “there will never be another console. Ever.”

Right, taking a break here for some of my own insight. It’s a strong statement that Alex proclaimed and that was bounced around several media outlets later that day and the next, but then again there are also stories circulating now about Sony’s plans for the Cell processor and the PS4. So is Alex wrong? It depends on how you look at it. Even today, it’s hard to define these boxes called PS3 and Xbox “consoles” in the traditional sense. According to Merriam-Webster, a console is still defined as “an electronic system that connects to a display (as a television set) and is used primarily to play video games”. Note that last part. While I don’t personally use my PS3 often as a video player or music repository, it does support these functions. The Xbox as well can be extended to other forms of media besides games. So, although Sony is developing a PS4, it could be a multimedia box that happens to be able to play games, but also equally services other forms of media and entertainment. It that case, it would be hard to call it a console, and Alex would be correct. In fact, the console may have already died with the Sega Dreamcast, Sony PS2 and Nintendo GameCube.

What about the Wii? Getting back to the debate, Alex stated that Nintendo didn’t really make a new console, they created a new device. Nintendo could still come out with an entirely new console, and in fact a high-definition system is making its rounds through the rumor mill at this time, but according to Alex they’re still now more of a device company than a console company (Wii Fit, anyone?).

At the end of the debate, several more hands were raised when asked who was con-console, but it wasn’t a substantial shift. A Mozes poll was run that let people text in a vote for which team made the better debate, with con-console pulling in all the votes – of which there were only two, but I hadn’t even noticed that the poll was running on the second screen. I don’t think the debate remained properly focused on the original topic, and kind of degenerated into an economics war at one point, but it still exposed some interesting views into what a console is today, and how it compares now to a PC, which has become a lot cheaper but still too much of a do-anything machine for a lot of people to consider as strictly a multimedia center (excluding, I suppose, those PCs built expressly for such a purpose? That was actually never covered, I don’t recall. It was always PCs in the general sense).

iPhone Development Insights

In what was the only development-oriented session of the conference, Justin “Fic” Ficarrotta, game designer and programmer for Brooklyn, NY-based Freeverse, talked about developing games for the iPhone platform. You may also know him from the Best Damn Podcast Ever. He’s currently developing two un-announced iPhone titles and brought a wealth of information from his development experiences to share in his talk.

So what’s the upshot of developing for the iPhone? Well, perhaps you haven’t heard of the cool quarter-million Demiforce raked in from Trism on the App Store. That’s right, the simple answer is that the iPhone is still a hot gaming market for anyone who can get in before it starts to cool. Your entry ticket will run you $99 per app, and you take in a rather generous 70% cut on sales through the App Store - Justin of course couldn’t give many details of signing your app over due to NDA.

On the software side, Justin said that after downloading the SDK you’re up and running in minutes, and it’s completely free. He also proclaimed a low learning curve to programming for the iPhone, moreso if you’re already familiar with both OpenGL ES and OpenAL. You can also program using Mac-specific APIs but more than likely you’ll want to stick with OpenGL ES, which is an OpenGL subset equivalent to OpenGL 1.5, and OpenAL, which is the audio side of the OpenGL system.

There are several design considerations to take into account when developing for the iPhone. First, Justin cautioned that a lot of people play games on their iPhones because they have nothing else to do at the moment. So, waiting in a long line, on the subway, during a boring shift at work – the vast majority do not take out their iPhones just to play games. Remember that it is still a mobile device and focus on the byte-sized gameplay, letting people accomplish things in small sessions. If you try for any full immersion into a game it won’t have the same effect as people who dedicate time to a platform, like the PC or Xbox.

Love the accelerometer, but recognize that it has its limits as well. For example, don’t think of the iPhone as a Wii controller. It would be nice to have a golfing game where you swing the iPhone like a golf club to hit your shot – but there’s the small problem of not being able to really see the screen while you’re doing it. Oh and the iPhone has no wrist strap. Imagine breaking a TV and your phone. (though they are pretty damn durable) Still, there are many other cool ways people have put the accelerometers to use, as steering wheels, rolling balls through labyrinths, shaking dice to roll them, and having the orientation of the iPhone determine the force of gravity. The accelerometers track all three axis of movement.

Then there’s the multi-touch capability, which can be exploited in just as many ways including pinches, flicks, swipes, drags, taps, gestures and a variable number of fingers tracked simultaneously. Already games are using gestures (The Force Unleashed) and most commonly sliding or dragging (brickout clones). Along with multi-touch comes the issue of controls, and the iPhone has no buttons (none that you can use, anyways). Until iPhone game pads come along, you’re stuck with the following d-pad options:

• Mapping them to the accelerometer. Tricky to do without making the game too sensitive but at the same time allowing the player to still see the screen properly
• On-screen buttons. Better, but there’s no tactile feedback in the iPhone’s screen (yet) and the buttons will ultimately take up screen real estate (like in the NES emulators)
• Virtual joystick. The best option, if you have to take it. Wherever a player places their finger at any time is the center of the controls, and sliding left/right or up/down creates input based on that initial location. It feels more natural and still covers the screen, but not as much as buttons

Publishing, as mentioned before, is done completely through Apple and the App Store. There is a certification process, but nothing nearly as rigorous as, say, Microsoft’s XBLA process - which makes developers cry on a regular basis. Justin has been given approval the same day, other times it’s taken up to 2 weeks for Apple to push the game through, but on average the turn-around times have been around a week or so. Apple does not allow people to download priced games to try out, so the common practice is for developers to create a “Lite” version that they then sell on the App Store for free.

The Paid/Free options make up the breadth of the App Store, and you can choose one, another or both in which to publish your games (it was never mentioned by Justin whether publishing a free and paid-for version requires you to pay $198). iTunes also gives apps the normal exposure, like music, in terms of What’s New, What’s Hot and Staff Picks lists.

Since the app market is still fairly fresh, price wars are running rampant. One game, Cro-mag Racing, used to be $10, and since its release it’s quickly dropped to $5 and then to $2. Justin says that if there exists a sweet spot, it’s very low. As with any free-for-all market, he says, it’s important that you provide lasting value and that it gets into the hands and eyes of the players.

One notorious method of getting noticed as a paying app that Justin balefully spoke of was taking advantage of the fact that apps in the Top 25 list hold their place if they switch from paid-for to free or vice-versa. So companies have been releasing their apps for free until they climb to the top of the Top 25 Free Apps list, and then start charging $.99 and wind up at the top of the Top 25 Paid Apps list. Sneaky, sneaky.

Don’t forget too that there are other ways to cash in on the App Store, like advergames along the lines of Audi Racing or utilities that service games such as Warcraft Characters or Armory Spy Lite.

Sony Online Entertainment Keynote

Sony Online Entertainment’s president John Smedley took the stage to speak about SOE’s upcoming free-to-play (FTP) title Free Realms, and how SOE was evolving to match the pace of gamers in the online virtual space. John opened up with a bit of history about himself, how as a kid he would enjoy playing board games around the table with his family, and as he grew into his teens became immersed in Dungeons and Dragons with his friends. This was the experience he had always looked to craft with online games, to bring players and even families together.

Everquest was his showcase example. People play this game 20-30 hours a week, many times at the expense of other things, like their own friends and family. But they make up for it with a rich interaction in an online world, especially now that Sony has deployed Station Voice to a number of its online worlds, including Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies. Already over 70% of users are interacting via voice. He highlighted the numerous conventions for Everquest, most notably Fan Faire, and showed a video of a couple who had met online getting married at a Fan Faire, both in real life and in the game right afterwards.

In detailing Free Realms, John pointed out the fact that today, kids have no concept of a world without online interaction. Even when they’re younger they have sites like Webkins or Club Penguin to get them started in virtual worlds, from there they’re off and running. To capture the most out of young audiences, Free Realms is targeted both at girls and boys – one of the ways they’re doing this is to have combat enabled only by choice by placing them in well-defined locations for players to access if they wish. The majority of the gameplay is spent on mini-games or tasks that are associated with your player class, like making up new recipes if you’re a chef. The game also lets you change player classes at any time during the game, so you can be a ninja (no, really – they have ninjas!) for a while, and then become a farmer. You can also own pets, which are each uniquely crafted personality-wise – the dog that John showed us, for example, would express much love for penguins waddling around, but when John went cow-tipping (yea, it was hilarious) the poor pup stood off at a distance shaking with its tail between its legs in fear of the cows. You can also teach them how to do tricks. More expansive than mini-games are events like racing and soccer (the latter to be included about a month after launch in January, with more planned) that people can participate in online. You can join a racing team and keep a car at your house in a garage.

Like all FTP games, monetization comes in the form of subscriptions and an in-game store that lets players add credit through various means that parents can set up for their kids. A $4.99/mo membership will also net players some exclusive content and other goodies not accessible to players participating for free. In order to get people playing quickly, the Flash-based website streams the client to the player so they can access the game and start playing in under one minute.

In closing, John showed off trailers for other upcoming SOE titles The Agency and DC Universe.

Teen Gamers on Gaming

An interesting panel comprised of male and female high-schoolers ages 14-17 and moderated by Jacquie Lane, VP of C&R Research, was given to take a look into the lives of actual teenage gamers. I say “interesting” in reference to the concept, in actuality the takeaway was rather small. The crop of teens didn’t seem to have a good range of interests and the moderator didn’t really direct discussion towards areas of real relevance. Still, a few tidbits eeked out:

• A majority of the kids voted gaming as one of their top 5 activities, said it was better than just watching TV
• If they didn’t have any games to play, they would probably be outside instead
• The Wii was generally accepted as a “cool” console, the Xbox was a bit too core for some of the female gamers
• One girl mentioned how she liked playing co-op with her brother so they could psyche each other up while playing together
• Some said they didn’t like playing online because there was no storyline to follow
• A lot said they still like to play their older consoles, like N64
• ne girl said she only joined Facebook because she learned that Pokemon was on it
• A majority of them did not download much in the way of online content, a few were even unaware you could do so (on a Wii)

The Life of a Pro Gamer

Another seemingly off-track session was by pro gamer Kyle “ksharp” Miller, who was interviewed on the stage by Michael Kane, an entertainment features writer from the NY Post. I’ll be honest when I say that I really did want to be a pro StarCraft player back when I was in high school – but sneaking a few hours on the computer every few nights just wasn’t cutting it for me. Kyle was lucky enough to have parental support, and his mother even drove him to his first tournament in Dallas. He started as a casual Counter-Strike (CS) player when he was between 14 and 15, then joined a team and started playing online once he got wind of competitions.

Kyle was on the scene when competitive gaming was just getting its start, and so he rode the wave once he had become a successful CS player and joined up with a sponsored team. Back then team prizes were only around $5,000, but when you’re only in your late teens with little or no expenses, that’s a decent chunk of change to pocket. He did various competitions around the world up until the age of 22, when he retired. It was time to seek richer pastures in the workforce.

He only worked government contracts for a year or so before being called back to pro gaming by the Championship Gaming Series (CGS) to be a part of their New York 3D team playing Counter-Strike: Source. Although he got out of gaming because the money no longer matched his lifestyle, the CGS was a new breed of tournaments, and case in point – this year’s world finalist team took home 100x the amount of prize money Kyle used to be fighting for. He now practices 3-4 hours a night with his team mates.

Ahhh the good life…

Photo Gallery

For more photos, check out the photo album on the GDNet Facebook page.

The theater at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

A secondary projection screen showed a web forum that people could text message to from their cell phones for comments and questions - great idea!

upstairs in the exhibition room, which also doubled as the reception area

Ned Sherman, CEO & Publisher of Digital Media Wire and producer of the NYGC

The analyst panel, moderated by Ned Sherman. (L to R) panelists: Shawn DuBravac, NPD; Jen Wu, Gfk; Michael Klotz, NPD

The console vs. PC debate, moderated by Mike Vorhaus, Magid Advisors. (L to R) Panelists: Alex St. John, Wild Tangent; John Welch, Playfirst; Justin Townsend, IGA Worldwide; Robert Stevenson, Atari Group

a panel of 14-17 year old gamers answers questions on their gaming habits, moderated by Jacquie Lane, C&R Research

Justin Ficarrotta (center) prepping for his lecture on iPhone game development (yes, that guy to his right *is* wearing a camera over his shoulder)

Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley talks about online community SOE's goals for the online marketplace

Michael Kane from the NY Post interviews professional gamer Kyle "kSharp" Miller, from the CGS team 3D New York

Page 1: Online Games Under Construction: Run Your Beta Right

Online game betas are about more than just testing your product and are often a missed opportunity for developers. Though it takes planning, betas can be an effective part of your marketing and community building efforts and in many can help grow your potential audience more than traditional marketing alone. This lecture will discuss the best practices and tactics on how to get the most out of your beta.

Page 2: Pirates of the Burning Sea: A Post-Partum

Well, it took five years, but Flying Lab Software has finally launched its Age of Sail MMO! Come hear the ups and downs of the project and all the things the team learned along the way. All of the successes and failures encountered while building a new MMO with a new team are presented.

Page 3: Special Ops: The Writer of the Future

SPEC OPS – THE WRITER YOU WILL NEED TO BE: The future writer will need to be fast and versatile to survive in a constantly changing and adapting mediasphere. They will have to be adept at boldly assault mediums that don't use writers and work with clients don't know they need writers –ex: social networks, virtual worlds and casual games will find unexpected need for writers. They will have to survive both on the assigned project and the spec project and must know how to budget time, effort and resources to balance their attack. This talk will also cover the skills, tools and attitudes the future writer will need. Flint Dille is an Austin Speaker Vet and writer/designer of over 50 games. Currently, he’s also designing for virtual worlds and social networks. His new book, The Ultimate Guide to Videogame Writing and Design, co-written with John Zuur Platten, was released last month.

Page 4: Wake Up and Smell the Metrics! A Rant on Metrics-Driven Development in Online Games

We live in Darwinian times as the traditions of the old boxed goods industry shift online, investigating entirely new ways of reaching and retaining customers. But in many ways we have retained the old mentalities of guessing and hacking our way to success or failure. Running an online game is a service, and we have unprecedented access to customer and operational data. This session presents a business case on applying metrics to lower recurring costs and make games stickier based on measured data, not risky guesses. Some basic implementation plans are given to jumpstart your game into the world of metrics-driven development.

Page 5: It’s Who You Get to Know

"It’s not who you know – it’s who you get to know.” In this session, you’ll learn where to meet people in the game industry, how to impress them, and what to say when you don’t know what to say, starting with your fellow Career Seminar attendees. Will they become future competitors in the job market, or will they become a supportive network of industry insiders? Darius Kazemi will teach you how to make sure the latter is the case.

Online Games Under Construction: Run Your Beta Right

Jonathan Hanna (Sr. Producer, John Galt Games), Richard Weil (Director of Community Relations, Cartoon Network), April Burba

Treat your beta as Live

When you run your Beta, don’t just pretend that the game has gone live, act as if the game has gone live, because it has! Sure you’re not opening up to hundreds of thousands of players but you’re still servicing the game to several hundred, maybe even several thousands of people and they will demand a service equivalent of the kind they get for a regular online game. So obviously you won’t have everything that the final live service will have, and your players will understand that the game is not complete, but do not use this as an excuse to hide behind when things go south for some reason and people get upset. For instance if a batch of players get their accounts wiped without being notified because a database was reset to get new metrics data, they won’t be like “oh, well – it’s a beta so no big deal.” No, they will be very upset because they won’t know it was a wipe, will think it’s a service issue and will believe that perceived quality of the product will carry over into the final version and stop playing. So treat it as a live service and keep all your players informed. Many may sign up for a beta without a full understanding of what it means to participate in such a program, so make sure that every player involved understands what will be expected of them during the process.

Players are not testing during a beta, they are previewing. During their play the development team is pulling down data and using that to clean up the experience and squash any bugs. You should not have to make your players directly participate in the testing process by having them submit bug or crash reports themselves – they should be left alone to play the game and have fun while the game logs any errors or crashes to send back to the dev team. If they come across a problem with the game play, you’ll no doubt have forums set up where they can voice those complaints.

Goals for a beta

Several things you want to strive for when carrying out a beta:

• Building Community – keep players involved in the beta process by giving them reasons to play the game and work with each other to explore areas and uncover any problems.
• Setting a tone – take this time to work out with your dev team how to approach communicating with the community. Obviously you don’t want the dev team becoming too chummy with the community, as that can lead the players to believe they carry great weight in design decisions. On the other hand you don’t want the team being too stand-offish and making the community think their ideas are not being heard. Strike the balance.
• Building a contact list – get to know valuable players in the community; they may be leveraged later on as managers for various contents and community events.
• Define internal processes – work with your dev team on how to handle community issues (issues players have with each other) and how to support the players that have issues with the game.
• Marketing/PR – use the players to hype up your game. Get them hooked on cool features that they can use to tease any of their friends not involved in the beta. Find out what works and what doesn’t and apply that to your overall campaign.
• Testing new ideas – this is the best time to implement new ideas or features, when the impact is relatively small and maneageble. Beta considerations

Expect churn. Churn is the term used to describe the turn-over of players in your beta. You will have beta players become discouraged for many reasons, including them just not liking the game. Whatever the reason is, let them go and don’t try to force them to stay – take their reason for leaving into account.

Necessary evils will have to be performed over the course of a beta, and you should both make players aware of this at the start, and make them have to deal with it as few times as possible. These include character resets, server downtime, stress tests and lots of game updates.

Don’t muddle your player’s minds with over-complex NDA’s. If you must make players sign NDA’s so they can’t blab about the game, be sure to lighten-up on the legalese and make it clear what players can and cannot talk about in relation to the game during the beta process.

Getting and keeping players

Let players be able to form guilds or groups in the game from the start. Better yet, make it available for people to register for the beta as a group.

Once a player registers for the beta, let them come back and update their registration (if they have not yet been selected) in case they made any changes to their hardware configurations. Obviously make sure the dev team is notified of these changes in case they’re looking for more people running, for instance, a certain graphics card model.

Allow players to turn around and invite friends into the beta. This doesn’t have to be at the very start, but at some point when you’re ready to expand the beta, instead of selecting new users, let the current player base bring in new users. This is a nice “reward” for beta players, and makes them want to play more now that they have more friends in the game as well.

Run lots of events for focus-testing purposes. For example, if there’s a new dungeon that you want stress tested, challenge players to beat said dungeon in a certain amount of time to win a prize. Contests like these are good ways to energize the community while taking in valuable data. City of Heroes ran a costume contest to test their costume design feature. Be careful though that you don’t make such things appear to be common-place, or beta players may feel like the service has been devalued once the switch is made to live and less contests are offered (unless you plan to keep up regular events into live).

Beta lessons

Your beta is a huge focus test for your game, be sure to record as much data as you can!

Use aggressive surveys, give out rewards for completing them, and let them be completed both in-game and out, as well as anonymously.

Talk to churned-out players and learn why they’re leaving.

Metrics! (for more on metrics, see this talk)

Speak up on issues you receive from the community and address them. Ask yourselves: why will your product fail?

Using your beta for sales

As mentioned before, don’t let the NDA ruin the player’s ability to talk up your game to their friends and even the world at large. Be specific but at the same time clear enough that player’s understand what they can and cannot say, rather than be confused and choose not to speak for fear of legal action. If NDA breaks do happen, combat them in a positive way.

Run journals, Q&A, etc., that keep the public in the loop about what’s going on with the beta. Don’t forget about your non-beta audience that is still waiting to hop into the game.

Have a link to the beta signup page placed in publicity pieces.

Coverage by Drew Sikora

Pirates of the Burning Sea: A Post-Partum

Joe Ludwig (Chief Technical Officer, Divide By Zero Games)

Pirates of the Burning Sea is a game that includes 4 nations, 5 careers, 3 sword fighting schools, a player-driven economy and tactical ship combat (one of its main highlights among fans). It began in October 2002 with 4 people planning on a 6-12 month development schedule. It was launched January 22nd, 2008 after accruing 66 additional development team members – and oh yea, over 5 years had passed too. D’oh!

Here are some lessons that the team learned over the years.

Lesson #1: Know how big your game is when you start

For five years, the team was constantly only 12 months away from being done, increasing the scope of the game a little bit each month. This scope creep also led to several downsides:

• Shoddy tools – development of new features constantly had tools being tossed out and new ones being created. There were never any well-polished and useful tools
• Never a good time to hire – bringing a new programmer to the team brought many months of training along with him to get him up to speed and keep him up to speed with the constantly increasing scope.
• Never good time to fire – once a programmer was trained up, letting him go became an insanely expensive proposition.

Lesson #2: Figure out what game you’re making as quickly as possible

Four separate visions of the game led to conflicting ideas as to what the game should be.

• The lead designer wanted deep combat simulation and a realistic, historic setting (this became the core vision eventually)
• The executive producer wanted an MMO, but with good graphics, foundation in naval traditions, and Starfleet Command-style combat.
• The content lead wanted rich single-player style content and an emphasis on storytelling
• The lead programmer (Joe) said “no” to everything and wanted a 6-month project, a minimal feature set to grow after launch and keeping the costs low so a tiny player base could pay for the team

The team is still paying for the decisions made. Good graphics caused higher system specs and needlessly complex ship models; naval traditions caused a decrease emphasis on the Pirate flavor; single-player content caused lack of focus on group play.

Lesson #3: Don’t make scheduling harder than it has to be

The team over-thought many of their scheduling issues, using Excel for simple task lists, which was easy to track but did not support dependencies and were only able to focus on one milestone at a time for 2-3 months. It did not scale well past 15 people. They also tried critical chain using Project, which worked well from 20-50 people and tracks dependencies, but it carried a high overhead. When the team grew even larger to 60-70 people they started using task lists in email and agile development in 1 month sprints, which shoved more scheduling work onto leads and required some QA time after sprint (3wks developing, 2wks fixing bugs).

Lesson #4: Don’t save polish for the end

The game launched with thousands of known bugs, which the testers were good at finding but the programmers had no time to fix because the service was now live. Only critical bugs ended up being fixed in the last 6 months. Programmers would leave uncommon bugs for later and never return to them, but with thousands of players, uncommon bugs become common. Because mission designers always had new missions to create, basic playability problems existed in many.

Lesson #5: Don’t abandon content quality in pursuit of content quantity

At some point they decided it would be a great idea to have 1000+ missions, but ended up instead with cookie-cutter missions and a lot of repeated content between nations.

Lesson #6: Deal with client performance at the start

Make sure you target the minimum spec for your game from the start. It’s easier to scale up than down so make it as low as possible. Make the game look great on the minimum spec and test it there constantly. Define art budgets based on the minimum spec.

Lesson #7: Make sure everyone is on the same side

Mission designer were throwing incomplete missions over to QA which was reporting back a lot of legitimate bugs but also a lot of spurious bugs. Both sides developed an antagonistic relationship with each other rather than learning to work together. One tester even posted countless unimportant issues just to try to draw attention to himself as a diligent tester – make sure only bugs that need fixing are the ones getting reported.

Lesson #8: Don’t be afraid to get rid of people who aren’t working out

The team let go 5 people in 5 years – make firings strategic. If a person fights constantly against the team or makes all the people they come in contact with unhappy, they are simply not worth keeping. Period.

Lesson #9: Take care of your company culture

Make sure your team is happy. People enjoyed working on the project (good-natured ribbing and photoshopping, afternoon coffee trains). There was an open door policy and only minor crunch time at the end of some sprints. The CEO was quite the cheerleader, motivating people, and there was a very low turnover.

Lesson #10: Closed beta shouldn’t take two years

2 years of beta burned out valuable community members and distracted the team from implementing core systems. It also didn’t provide much actionable feedback as the game was constantly in too much flux and the population was too low for too long.

Lesson #11: Hire some experienced people for key positions

Only three team members had previous experience launching an MMO title, and only two of them were in lead positions. The art department was staffed mostly by former interns, who were not entirely reliable at first. The content department was mostly entry-level people. Contracters were never very well implemented thanks to the projects shaky schedule. Some more veteran team members could have avoided problems.

Lesson #12: Build more tools

One of the biggest regrets was not having the proper tools to make many tasks easier. Don’t just build them, make sure they become an integral part of the development process and are not tossed out with each iteration.

Lesson #13: Hire a great art director

But do it at the beginning of the project instead of halfway through

Lesson #14: Players love character customization

17 slots with a dozen different pieces per slot and two colors per piece equals millions of combinations, almost all of it available at initial character creation. Data showed that players were spending 45-60 minutes creating their characters – not out of frustration or difficulty, but just playing with all the options, including peg legs of course. Unique clothing could be unlocked by missions and appearance didn’t depend on stats.

Lesson #15: Unique combat systems are a blessing and a curse

Combat system hailed as best aspect of gameplay, with simulation of armor faces, gun recharge (up to 5 batteries), crew status, sail status, position of ship to enemy, land and wind. Very polished and well tuned after 7 major iterations, places great value on player skill.

Unlike any other forms of MMO player combat, which makes it hard to teach, and is slower-paced than many other game’s combat systems. Also requires much more attention that standard MMO combat as well as more skill at the high-end.

Lesson #16: Don’t try to cram and entire new combat system in a year

Team attempted to implement avatar PvP combat, but did not come out nearly as clean as ship-to-ship combat, was added too late to have time to iterate.

Lesson #17: Love your community and they’ll love you back

Everyone on the launch team writes dev blogs and posts to the forums. When they screw up, they own up to it immediately. The team listens to players and often makes changes to the game based in their feedback. Community relations are considered every employee’s job.

Even negative game reviews have pointed out how active the team is. Players ended up being more likely to give team the benefit of the doubt. Forums matured much more than many other games’. Team cites use of a dedicated community director for success of forums and the community as a whole.

Coverage by Drew Sikora

Special Ops: The Writer of the Future

Flint Dille (Writer/Game Designer, Ground Zero Productions)

The writer of the future

The main thing facing writers in today's media-rich atmosphere is change. Constant, unending and rapid change. Therefore, adaptation is key. This, according to Flint, is the main trait that writers have to have to be able to succeed in today's industry. Having written for over 25 years, Flint brings a lot of experience to the table, and not just in terms of games – he's also done various other media including TV, movies and comics. This versatility has allowed him and other authors like himself to keep pace with the evolving industry, especially during a time when everyone is able to express themselves on the internet through blogs and personal websites.

These days, extensibility is also a key trait for writers in terms of the material that they create. Products today are not staying within one medium any longer. Books become movies, movies become TV shows, games become books or movies – there are no more one-off stories. Everyone is looking for the next franchise or a way to move a story beyond the medium it was originally created for. Not only that, but everyone's still crazy about prequels and sequels and spin-offs.

Flint also points out the the line between fiction and non-fiction keeps getting blurred more and more. The DaVinci Code can have you believing that it's real, and a lot of it actually is. This mixing of fiction and non-fiction will give people pause and make them think about what's real in a story and what is fake. Some may even get it wrong. With interactive mediums like games, this can become even more surreal – take for example the Pini Society.

Only in the last few years have games reached a point where story has become as involved with the game as the gameplay itself, and developers have been brought to task for blending the two in a not-so-favorable manner. To allay this, more studios began hiring real writers from movies, TV, books and other media to create more compelling stories for their games.

Becoming a writer

While many of you reading this no doubt seek to become involved with writing for games, Flint spoke more about being a writer in the general sense. Sure, you can say that you specialize in games, but don't plan on writing just for games. There still isn't so much of a demand for writers that finding a job at a studio will be easy. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

Start off by gaining cred, as in credibility. Make sure you have published work to shop around to people in the various media industries. If you're not good at the whole networking thing or don't yet have a lot of contacts, you'll probably going to want to look into getting yourself an agent that can sell you properly. You can even take an entry-level industry job as a means to build cred and make contacts in the industry – it doesn't have to be a writing job so long as your getting experience working in teams and on games.

While you're building your cred, also be sure to work on your persona, or the distinctive traits that people can recognize as you. Flint pointed to a guy in the room with a fedora hat and was like “I'll remember the guy with the hat.” I have a friend who likes to wear orange shirts to conferences. Besides appearance, make sure you come off to people as like-able and easy to work with. Be humble above all else.

Once you're established, you have the choice of going freelance or exclusive. Flint warns against signing any sort of exclusive deals early on in your career, even several years into your career. Why? Well personally Flint just doesn't think he could stand working on the same project for 2 years. Besides that, there's also the facts that you won't be seen as “on the market” and your contacts may dry up, and once the job is done – then what? There's no guarantee you'll have another project starting up right afterwards.

Going freelance means you're working more than one project at a time, possibly even across more than one type of media. Not only do things stay fresh, but your constant searching for work brings more people to you and allows you to grow your network of contacts so that one day you may actually have people calling you up with projects to take on. If you're a freelancer, it will also be worth joining up with the Writers Guild of America. The WGA can provide you with the benefits you need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. These benefits usually come with an exclusive deal when working at a studio.

Writing lifestyle

Once you're established, you want to keep a steady stream of projects coming in to pay the bills, but you also want to keep a side project or two active that will really revitalize your career. Don't focus so much on pulling down the dollars that you lose sight of any of your own goals. Flint is friends with Frank Miller and cited how Frank walked away from many a lucrative contract when he finally could afford to, in order to retreat to Virginia and work on his graphic novels. Now he's back into movies and doing better than ever, because he was able to stop chasing the money.

Make sure you realize and address your weaknesses. Not good at editing your own editor? Make sure you find a good editor to work with. Not good at selling yourself to get work? Hire an agent to take care of that for you. A lot of companies only work through agents anyways. Take classes to improve your writing in areas you feel you don't have a lot of confidence. Not good with the legalese? Hire a lawyer. Generally you should always consult a lawyer when dealing with contracts, especially when you first start out – but if you deal often enough, having one on tap is beneficial.

There are a few cardinal rules to keep in mind when writing:

• Never ever miss a deadline, either by simply failing to submit work on time or rushing and handing in work that is not up to par.
• Write every day. Whether you decided to write for a certain amount of time, a certain number of pages or a certain number of words, set a goal and stick to it.
• Have something deliverable each week – whether you wrote it all in a day or over the entire week, this is the only tangible progress you are able to show to a client.

Flint also likes to use templates, like a script layout or a novel outline, to quickly draft ideas and in a format that people will expect and be able to interpret.

Don't forget to keep developing your “soft skills”, as Flint calls them, or your people skills: working/relating in a team or group. Flint says one of the most common traits that he finds among writers of his experience still active in the industry is that they are willing to do favors, many times for free, with the understanding that they will be repaid in kind eventually.

Flint described his workspace as simple – a laptop that traveled wherever he went (the proverbial hat you hang) a phone, Internet (although he does admit it can be more of a distraction than anything these days) and quiet space. He also like to shake up the environment to keep

Coverage by Drew Sikora

Wake Up and Smell the Metrics! A Rant on Metrics-Driven Development in Online Games

Larry Mellon (Virtual Worlds Consultant), Darius Kazemi (President, Orbus Gameworks)

If you don’t know what metrics are, then you should refer to a talk last year by Darius at the Online Games Developer Conference. His slides contain copious notes and offer a great in-depth look into what metrics are and how they’re useful to game development. If you don’t want to take the time to read the slides, the short and skinny version is that metrics are data that you collect, collate and correlate from the game world. How many people are using this item? How many players know this player? How many players that know this player share this item with that player? As you can see, the queries can quickly become complicated and many levels deep into data pulled from a game. How do you know what data to pull? How do you use the data? What effect does this knowledge have on the development of your game?

These are all questions that metrics evangelists Darius and Larry are out to answer for people. Many companies these days that are using metrics are either using them incorrectly or poorly by not using the data to corroborate facts or simply not investing enough developer dollars into the proper tools needed to collect the data that would be useful to them. This is mainly because a lot of studio executives do not understand the need for a metrics system. All the more frustrating is the fact that metrics are being used to great effect in all other industries, including TV, cell phones, casinos… in fact back in 2000, John Boushy, Harrah’s CIO stated “[implementing metrics tracking] is one of the best investments that we have ever made as a corporation and will prove to forge key new business strategies and opportunities in the future.” What’s even more flabbergasting is that by their very nature online games are built from databases – the infrastructure is already there! Companies like Harrah’s have to spend extra millions of dollars to set up the infrastructure their metrics system relies on, whereas games merely need to build on top of existing databases.

Seeing that Darius and Larry have released the slides to this presentation, along with the notes they basically read word-for-word, I’m going to stop here and let you get more from the slides. Larry includes a number of examples with his work on The Sims Online that help drive home the usefulness of a proper metrics system, but one example I don’t believe was included was from Darius when he was working on Dungeons & Dragons Online. He came across a group of designer arguing over this one item in the game that was being abused and throwing things out of balance, and they were trying to decide whether to just cut it or keep it but redesign it so they don’t totally piss off the players who own it. Darius went back to his desk, pulled up that item’s usage in the game along with the number of players who own it and found the numbers to be absurdly low. He came back to the group and told them and the lead designer said “argument over” and they cut the item out.

Coverage by Drew Sikora

It’s Who You Get to Know

Darius Kazemi (President, Orbus Gameworks)

“It's not what you know, it's who you know.” Sound familiar? Everyone hears this quote at some point in their lives, because it's so true. Once when I said it to my Grandfather during a conversation he came back at me with “it's not who you know, it's who knows you”. That one gave me pause for a second. It's important to remember that networking goes both ways. Not only are you meeting people to gain contacts in the industry, the people you are meeting will also be adding you to their contacts.

Darius has used networking to his advantage since college. He read a book that included a passage about Linden Johnson, when he was just starting as a secretary for congressmen. In the dorm where the other page boys lived, his first day he took 4 showers, and the next morning brushed his teeth 5 times. He did this so he could meet with as many other page boys as possible and start to get ahead, which he said was the same as meeting as many people as possible. Then he went on to become president of the United States. Darius took this story to heart and spent three hour dinners in the college cafeteria during freshman year – by the time he was a sophomore he knew everyone in his class.

Where do you meet people?

The best place to meet with other game developers are conferences like GDC, or consumer shows like PAX. If you can't afford the cost of travel and passes, a more local option may be a chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). They have chapters all over the world in addition to many states and cities in the US. Darius' first job, with Turbine, was obtained through a Boston chapter member that he knew who offered him the QA position before it was even posted on the market. This is something that happens very, very often. In fact, the majority of game positions are filled without posting anything to the job market. If you attend a chapter meeting, don't bring your resume or accost people asking for jobs. Chat and be social, hand out your card and they'll see you're a student or freelancer.

If you don't have a local chapter in your area, start one! Alternatively you can leverage the web by creating a personal website or blog that you can use to attract people to you or your project. Also go out and find blogs of other game developers to read. Leaving insightful and helpful comments on their posts can bring attention to you as well, be sure to link back to your own blog if you have one. It's harder to distinguish yourself if a lot of people are posting as well, so be sure to appear knowledgeable and concise.

How to meet people?

When people are out at conferences, Darius finds that most of them chase after the luminaries, the well-known developers. The problem with this is that they're well known, which means everyone else will also be chasing a moment of their time, they're most likely not going to remember you (I've re-introduced myself to Warren Spector three times over the years – but who can blame the guy?) and they usually don't have a lot of time to talk. However, if you do manage to get some extended face time in a more informal setting, like perhaps knowing a friend at Maxis who knows Will Wright and invites you out to dinner with Will and several other Maxis employees – that's not an opportunity to pass up.

The best thing to do is get to know other attendees at a conference or chapter meeting, as there are tons of other developers with just as much game experience as Dave Perry but without the well-known persona. Also, there's no reason not to become friends with other students and industry hopefuls as well. You may think they don't have anything to offer you, but this short-term thinking is very bad. Eventually these people will also have industry positions, some maybe before you, and you can then turn to them for help in getting your own industry position.

Parties and other events can be awkward for people who aren't very out-going. If you're shy and at a social event, the first thing to do is find the person in the room who looks even more uncomfortable then you. Go over and try to strike up a conversation, they'll probably be surprised at first that someone is talking to them but are no doubt hoping someone will at the same time. Sometimes groups of people cluster in a loose circle that you can sort of edge into. It's perfectly acceptable to stand off and just listen, see who's a part of the conversation and what it's about. If you have something you can add that is beneficial to the discussion, do so. If the circle of people is tight and secluded, you can generally assume it's a private conversation.

If it's your turn to talk to someone, make sure you have a quick pitch about yourself – nothing longer than 10-15 seconds or 2-3 sentences – that describes who you are and what you do. Make sure you don't ramble on and give the other person or persons plenty of time and opportunity to talk about themselves as well.

At the end of the day many people (like me) like to go home and make notes on the business cards they collected as to who they met, where, why, and any other random facts. Darius liked to do something similar, but a bit more involved. He would write down in a notebook the person's info like name, title and company, where they met, how they met, and anything key things he could remember from their conversation, like whether they were married, about to publish a new product, had kids, looking for work, interested in a new tech coming out, etc. This also helped him to train his mind into remembering important things like names and titles.

One of the most important things Darius stressed is not to wait until you're ready to join the industry to go out and start meeting people. You want to have contacts in place already so that you can turn to them for help in getting your first job. Darius attended the GDC when he was still a sophomore in college, three years out from getting a job. When he graduated, his industry contacts helped with lots of advice in landing his first position.

Coverage by Drew Sikora

AGDC Image Gallery

Our humble abode at the Homestead Studios (photo by Drew Sikora)

My half-rack of ribs with fixins at the Ironworks Barbecue right outside the convention center. One hint: if you show up at noon, the line extends out the door. If you show up right when the place opens at 11, you'll get right in. As a bonus, the blackberry cobbler (pictured on the right) is right out of the oven and is still warm. Oooooh (photo by John Hattan)

Grant Skinner (gskinner.com) Graham Wihlidal (bioware) and Drew pose in front of Ironworks (photo by John Hattan)

Looking down one of the conference halls (photo by Drew Sikora)

The IGDA presence, reduced to a small booth area in a corner of the convention hall (photo by Drew Sikora)

Across from the sequestered IGDA area was the equally sequestered IGF showcase pavilion (photo by Drew Sikora)

Traffic did pick up a bit once the Expo opened, as the main doors were around the corner (photo by Drew Sikora)

Some shots from the only second-floor booth on the Expo floor (Photo by Drew Sikora)

Getting some spy shots of the GG booth. Hey GG, what's that running on a Mac? ;) (photo by Drew Sikora)

The lovely Deborah working the booth during a rare quiet moment (photo by Drew Sikora)

Crowds check out the Torque games on display (photo by Drew Sikora)

Roller derby chicks skating the Expo floor, checking unwary developers (photo by Drew Sikora)

Most comfortable with their own goofiness were the group from Frozen Codebase (http://www.frozencodebase.com). I still don't know what they were selling, but they certainly appeared to have fun selling it, what with roller derby girls giving away skateboards (photo by John Hattan)

RGNGames.com. They have some exciting things coming out for independent game developers. Keep an eye on 'em (photo by John Hattan)

The usual comfiness of the Intel networking lounge (photo by Drew Sikora)

BioWare outdoes Intel with bean bag chairs FTW (photo by Drew Sikora)

Interzone pwns them all with this nicely-design booth (photo by Drew Sikora)

C'mon, say it with me now: "something, something, something.... Darkstar" (photo by Drew Sikora)

Intel fights back tho with a cool LED-lit clear plastic case mod (photo by Drew Sikora)

The Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium (http://www.bradic.org) had the finest selection of freebies. While the USB plasma-sphere was cool, I felt that the mini USB hub (the silver Zippo-lighter looking thing) would've been more useful in the long run, so I took that (photo by John Hattan)

You can't see it in action, but the chair has a blue Cylon eye on the back of it under the Sparco tag (photo by Drew Sikora)

The UT Videogame Archive was a great idea, but their presentation could've been better. It took 'em most of a day to get their ancient pong-prototype (the wooden boxes at the base of the TV) connected to the TV. This gizmo was ancient even by pong standards, as it had no scoring or ability to control the ball's direction with the paddle.

Now look at those pong-paddles on the screen. Now that's what you call a pixel! You can barely even see pixels nowadays. Back in the heyday of pong, pixels were as big as your thumbnail!

Actually the archivist corrected me. Turns out that the paddles are 2x2 pixels. The ball itself (not pictured) was a single pixel (photo by John Hattan)

Can't come home without the swag! Those are candy cigarettes in the red box. Candy cigarettes!! (photo by Drew Sikora)