The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
From a GDC slide, on a presentation about how to build the first five minutes in the game:
“Your game needs 6 things:
3 HOLY SHITs!
2 OH MY GODs!
1 NO FUCKING WAY!”
Speech by Dan Arey, although he gave credit for the slide to someone whose name I didn’t catch.
I’m currently sitting in a tutorial at GDC. I love it here.
I’ve always been surprised that many of my coworkers and colleagues don’t like GDC. Some see being sent there almost as a sentence. To me, it’s mandatory – it’s my annual battery recharge. Every talk, I either (a) learn something or (b) end up feeling smart because I already knew that. Either is a nice feeling. Continue reading
E3 may be dead and gone, but come next October, L.A. will once again be overcome by sweaty geeks walking the streets of LA, trying not to meet anyone not wearing a schwag game T-shirt in the eye. I present to you the GamePro Expo.
The short article suggests the expo could have more of a consumer focus, right down to a massive LAN party in the Staples Center. Thank the gods – I was worried about hundreds of workless booth babes, being forced to live on the streets with no E3 to work. Those outfits don’t keep them warm, ya know.
On the heels of E3 effectively becoming a non-event, we have word that AGC has been swallowed up by the suddenly borg-like CMP, who currently run GDC.
SAN FRANCISCO – Oct. 9, 2006 – CMP Technology, the premier global marketing solutions company serving the technology industry, and parent company of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference (GDC), has acquired The Game Initiative, a producer of conferences and events targeting game industry professionals. The deal, effective immediately, will allow CMP to expand its offerings to the burgeoning game development community in the areas of online game development, casual games, and other topics that the Game Initiative serves so well.
The Game Initiative’s crown jewel, the Austin Game Conference (AGC), took place September 6-8, with 2400 attendees and 150 vendors, featuring top-caliber speakers including Michael Dell, Jon Landau and Rob Pardo. The CMP Game Group looks to build on the success of the AGC, by leveraging their deep conference management experience, marketing resources, and exhibitor support from the industry-defining GDC.
I’m really hoping this doesn’t mean that the price of AGC quadruples. But I’m not getting my hopes up.
My talk was today. It went well. You can find a writeup on gamespot as well as a writeup on Gamasutra. Also, Raph Koster live-blogged the thing.
This was one of the harder talks I’ve ever had to give. My first draft of this talk read almost like “do exactly what’s been done before”, whereas I wanted the message of the talk to really be “Innovate, but stop innovating in stupid ways”. Put another way, if you’re going to come up with a replacement for a class system, be sure your innovation is actually better than a class system. (But please, come up with something better than a class system!)
I may respond more in depth tomorrow. Been drinking tonight (as I’ve been forced to hold off on the conference partying the previous two nights due to working on the presentation).
Update: Here’s the Terranova thread on my talk, which they’ve somewhat merged with Rob Pardo’s talk from Blizzard. Here’s the Slashdot story. Slides coming tonight – and yes, I know I’m a slacker.
Update 2: Here’s the slides (7 MB due to excessively large art).
So E3 isn’t dead, just ’stripped down’ and moved to July. That’s cause for elation and depression. Elation because, hey, two more months to make that kickin’ demo. Also elation because there’s more separation between it and GDC.
What’s depressing is that, in the new stripped-down, all-behind-closed-doors format, being sent to E3 to pitch your game is going to suck. Continue reading
I haven’t been to E3 the last two years. Three years ago, I was so appalled by the endless array of Vietnam shooters, mediocre racing games and licenses slapped onto ‘me-too’ gameplay that I left convinced that Playboy: Mansion was the most innovative game at the show. As such, when it came time the next two years to ask whether or not to splurge for plane tickets and hotel rooms, I decided to pass. Too much noise, too much hype, too little innovation – it had actually grown to be more depressing than anything else. Continue reading
One of the true pleasures of living in Austin is the Alamo Drafthouse, a movie house in Austin that shows off-beat films, all served with food and drink (I prefer the ‘Godfather’ pizza with a sangria). The reason why Alamo is so successful is that it is run by a man who truly loves and embraces film – not from a pretentious art-film vantagepoint as much as from the view that film is a wonderful social event.
The Alamo runs Mr. Sinus Theater, which is basically Mystery Science Theater 3000 done by live comedians. The primary difference is that, instead of mocking obscure ’50s sci-fi films, they aim both barrels at the movies that our generation is ashamed to admit we loved as kids: movies like Top Gun, Xanadu and Red Dawn. Their send-up of the Karate Kid is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen in my life. Continue reading
Below the break: GDC In A Nutshell
So on top of a tall pile of design tasks at work, I’ve been keeping busy outside the office as well. I’ve done a fair amount of speaking lately. I spoke at eGaDs last Tuesday, giving a version of the Casino talk I did at AGD. The interesting thing is that I’ve been to Vegas since then, of course (that update is still coming!), so I actually was adding new material to the speech, based on some observations I made on Superbowl weekend. Giving the speech was wierd, because eGaDs focuses almost exclusively on programming, and no one there expressed much interest in breaking into a designer role, but many felt after the speech that they had learned a lot anyway. So that felt good. Continue reading
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