On the third and last day of the Develop Conference, Susan Gold and I had our talk on the Global Game Jam entitled Games Designs and Lessons Learned at the Global Game Jam.
The talk went semi ok... We had a few small semi-annoying incidents; like when I showed one of the games, I could not quit or tab out of it, or as I have quite a powerful voice I don't usually use a microphone, so even though it was moved away it was still turned on, so I kept moving in and out of it's range.
However, the presentation itself went fine I think. For those who are interested, here are the slides:
On this day, I didn't really go to any other sessions, I mostly hung out, went to the beach, talked to Susan, etc. I also had to leave Brighton early to catch a plane, which I actually ended up missing because some dude decided to throw himself in front of a train..
Some more pictures from the conference (the Testronic mascot, Susan Gold and myself):
The Testronics mascot with a really funny character inside
Continuing the description of the DEVELOP conference, I went to the following sessions:
Online Functionality for Your Nex Game? Why Not Go 100% Online!
This talk was given David Jones, CEO of Realtime Worlds. His talk was focused on giving a description of what he has done before, and how this has lead up to the creative vision of Realtime Worlds and what they are working on today (APB).
Except for talking with different HR people looking for programmers at a couple of conferences, I don't really konw much about Realtime Worlds. For those of you who are like me, here is a trailer for APB:
Dave Jones has previously worked on several big titles, including GTA. Even though this inspiration and background can be clearly seen in Realtime World's previous game, Crackdown, as well as APB, Dave Jones was a real inspiration in that he seemed to have a genuine wish to move the industry forward.
Dave had 5 design principles that he talked about. Some of them were very contextual to the kind of games that he worked on so far, while others were more general in nature. All of them, however, was difficult to disagree with:
Attention to detail
Simple building blocks, compound effects
Great training, keep it contemporary
Humour
Innovate, Forge a genre
I am really looking forward to seeing APB, as I was exceptionally impressed with the production value and the ambitions of this game. The character customization part was especially impressive:
Playstation@Home - First Term Report
I don't know why a keep going to Sony sessions, as they continue to disappoint me. The ever so friendly Sony guys are never really able to divulge any information of real use. Don't misunderstand me, I really think that Sony has a cool brand, I appreciate their continuing support of innovative and cross-genre titles and as a programmer and old-time demo coder I have a special appreciation of the PS3 architecture. Though I must say that as long as I can remember, they have been botching up their PR with developers, and especially in this time of user-generated content (both in the sense of gamers creating content, and of small developers creating content for aggregators) I am fearing that Sony's persistent insistence on control may cause them to get so far behind that it will take generations to get ahead again.
In the face of all this adversity I do think Peter Edward, the Home Platform Director did an admirable job. Basically Home seems to be just a promotional platform for the big players, cleverly disguised as a social network. With more ambition Home could become the Facebook of the consoles and gain the popularity and cross-demographic profile of the modern social networks on the internet (which is also seem to profile Sony seem to want for the PS3). However, I don't think it can be done unless Sony agrees to give up an unprecedented amount of control as well as give out free access to their software development suites.
However, Peter did give out some interesting numbers about Home:
7 million users
3 million of them in Europe
only(hi!)80% of the users are 18 - 35 years old.
When a creative director attacks! or What I learned this year with EA!
Dollars, vegetables, ceci n'est pas une pipe(ed - reminds me of one of my textbooks on archaeology), games as art are twaddle - they must make a profit but can be artful, creative director as a muppet hell bent on design, creative director as number cruncher, creative director as bond-super-villain, EA course for designers, 3 things things that inspire you, to get inspired you think of the Eiffel Tower?, inspiration from office with walls painted green, green is the color of creativity and madness, old ideas can be great if exposed to people who don't know them, golden ages, games on socks, The Empire Strikes Back, you are defined by culture, creativity works better under constratins, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, police with big sticks, tapes, floppy disks, bank of England, no-one cares about history, Richard Wiseman, draw Q on head, be suspicious of people who has theories with several levels, be suspicious of people who do not name their theories after themselves, all managers are Captain Picard and Kirk who either see the tree or the forest, Confessions of a Madman, game design is compilicated because people make it complicated, EA has come to its senses,
You wouldn't know from the jumble of words above, but this was probably one of the best sessions I attended.
Bridging the Gap Experiences Learned with Agile Project Management Across Multisite, Multicultural and Multilingual Projects.
This talk was one of those I had been really looking forward to. It was given by Lisa Charman, Associate Producer at Ubisoft and Patric Palm CEO and Co-founder of of Hansoft. While I had been looking forward to this talk, I was also a little bit apprehensive as I was afraid it was going to be one big and very direct advertisement for Hansoft's Project Management software.
However, instead Patric and Lisa made a really good and informative presentation (though also at times a little bit comical, as it had tendencies to seemed like a well rehearsed act with bad actors).
A lot of the talk was focused on Scrum and other related agile methodologies. For me the most interesting part, was Lisa's experiences with cross-site collaboration. This is both interesting in relation to the Global Game Jam, which I am a co-founder of, as well as in a more professional context. I really see this as the way I would like to work in the future.
An interesting detail was that Ubisoft only uses scrum up to the alpha stage, where all features are done.
Last but no least, they gave us a lot interesting scrum and agile related references:
This session ended up being incredibly interesting talk about Bonsai Barber, a game which truly seems like a small gem. The talk was given by Martin Hollis, founder of Zoonami.
Bonsai Barbar had some really curious designs details that I have never heard about before; for one the game is designed to be played only for approx 30 minutes each day. This is a very interesting design constraint, as you really need to focus hard on a game design and reward system that keeps the player coming back every day. This idea also feeds into Martin's description of Bonsai Barber as a game that doesn't show all its cards at once.
Martin had some really interesting, and curious formulated design proverbs. Here are the ones I succeeded in jotting down (completely out of context of course!):
Before setting out to make an original game, you ned to have three hearts
Your foundation is the central meaning in your game
Documents are not the life force of your game
Martin also made a big deal on talking about tactility and approachability. For the latter, Martin posed the interesting question How easy is it for the viewers in the livingroom to become interested?
Among the many many interesting points that Martin made it, I think the last one I will relay here is when they made the game, they actually ended up taking score out of the game (in an effort to make the game more accessible and casual I guess). However, in the end, the game did not feel whole without it, and they put it back in.
