Animated Travels

Origins returns BioWare to its roots.

written by Evan Goncalo

There’s no better way to start a day off, then with a panel of well-known press members presenting with attitude!  My first stop was “Burned by Friendly Fire: Game Critics Rant.”  The ideas represented by the press members in attendance were both refreshing and thoughtful.  N’Gai Croal, formerly of Newsweek, opened up with a presentation on the term “Hardcore Gamer” and noted that we had to stop using it and other words like “Casual” to describe styles of play.  The reason being, the game industry’s audience adapts to changes in the industry rapidly, and we as developers, journalists, and consultants need to do the same.

Stephen Totillo of MTV News encouraged gaming press to write better articles, and went over the four words that must be banned from game journalism – compelling, visceral, very, and “adverbs.”  Leigh Alexander of Gamasutra followed suit with a plea for better communication between the gaming trinity – press, developers, and fans.  Two guest speakers followed, writer from Wall Street Journal Jamin Brophy-Warren and head of IGDA, Jason Della Rocca. Brophy-Warren asked for developers to create more racially diverse characters for their titles and Della Rocca asked IGDA members to get more involved in the organization.
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David Crane (l) and Steve Cartwright.

Written by Evan Goncalo

I was off to an early start this morning – the good news being the hearty breakfast I wolfed down when I learned more about Adobe’s new Director 11.5 release.  Dr. Allen Patridge of Adobe ran the presentation, and he went over some of the things users can expect from the new Director software.  He approached this from three angles: Dominate, Accelerate, and Impress.”

The first item refers to Adobe’s high user and penetration numbers; Shockwave’s penetration is currently around 60% of all web users.  Accelerate is related to the “drag and drop ease” of the engine, and unified authoring across multiple platforms.  Lastly, the way Director impresses is with a rich feature list, including true 5.1 surround sound, flash media streaming video, Google SketchUp import/translation, and PhysX support.

After my breakfast with Adobe I got a chance to sit and speak with two game developer legends, David Crane and Steve Cartwright.  I asked some things to benefit the new aspiring artists out there, as well as some “just for fun” questions.
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Diner Dash's Flo is on the go to consoles.

written by Evan Goncalo

The first thing on today’s agenda was to head over to the W Hotel to meet with Hudson Entertainment.  I got hands on with “Military Madness”, “Diner Dash”, “Water Warfare”, “Help Wanted”, and some other new titles in their portable library.  All titles besides “Military Madness” are meant for anyone to play, both hardcore gamers, and families alike.

“Military Madness” is a full 3D remake of its TurboGrafx-16 predecessor but also adds new features like multiplayer (up to 4 players local and online) as well as a new upgradeable unit called the “commander.”  They are also bringing PC favorite, “Diner Dash,” to the console trio, also now fully in 3D.  The new “Diner Dash” played as easily as the original, and with the addition of multiplayer, now allows for endless fun with friends.

“Water Warfare” manages to bring the fun of a traditional FPS into the family living room arena without violence.  You play as a fully customizable playground kid, armed to the teeth with water gun weapons in the mold of machine guns and sniper rifles.  I learned along the way to be wary of committing “soakicide” while using the water launcher.  Water Warfare is also playable online with up to 8 players, and can make for some competitive game-play.

Last but not least of the console-based titles is “Help Wanted” – a light-hearted, comical, and simple game built around mini-games in the form of wacky jobs.  The game’s art style looks is very “anime” but also have a hint of “Mii” styling.
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GDC gets serious about Serious Games.

written by Chris Harz, Ed.D.

The Game Developers Conference 2009 featured several specialty categories of videogames with strong potential for new types of creative expression and careers (read: “jobs for animators”). The GDC’s Serious Games Summit was an object lesson on how many areas of the world can be affected by games—and how effective Serious Games can be in teaching, affecting opinion, motivating exercise, and medical healing, to name but a few. A Serious Game is one where entertainment is not the primary objective—though the game still needs to be entertaining, as many developers pointed out, else no one will use it.

The Serious Game segment continues to grow; it was estimated at about $2 billion in 2008. It is still a very new industry, based mostly in the US, which is not surprising, since the US government was and continues to be a major sponsor. The number of government agencies using games has grown since last year—if you want to work for the CIA, DIA, FBI, DHS or other “alphabet soup” agencies, this is a great way to do it (in fact, the CIA has supported many game companies through its investment arm, In-Q-Tel). The demand for medical games is expanding, and the business training market is becoming solid. Surprisingly, the one market segment where teaching games would seem to make the most sense—schools—has still not taken off yet; there are a few successful games for schools, but they are mostly bought by parents for use after school, not by the schools themselves. Teachers are still puzzling over how to use gaming technology in the classroom, and many of them seem afraid to use anything that their students would probably understand much better than they do, so the poor kids are still stuck with dry and hard to understand textbooks.

Some other trends are emerging. Whereas early Serious Games were often extensive 3D projects, more of them are now simple games, so they overlap two other categories—Casual Games (games that are simple to learn) and Mobile Games (for handhelds). This makes it easier for new companies to enter this area—instead of having to pitch an expensive 3D game to a client, creative developers can offer content that could be delivered via iPhones, where the content might be simple, but the total effect could be dramatic because of its outreach to an entire work force, and the ability to add and update content continually.

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Another busy day at GDC.

written by Evan Goncalo

Today was off to a good start with Khronos’ three press releases this morning during their “Developer University.”  They talked briefly about the all-new OpenGL 3.1 with a new streamlined API, and also covered their new OpenSL ES 1.0 API, which is coming close to completely converging with OpenGL – something that would enable a subset that could run anywhere, either on desktop or mobile.  They also unveiled their initiative to bring accelerated 3D content to the web.  Mozilla spearheads this effort with the support of Google.  The goal of the movement is to not only enhance current web applications, but to enable new innovations in web 3d created by any developer.  A call-to-arms was made for industry personnel to support and work towards this goal.

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Ngmoco founder Neil Young discusses the iPhone's influence.

written by Chris Harz, Ed.D.

This year’s GDC is expecting well over 14,000 attendees, at the Muscone Convention Center in San Francisco. This has become the epicenter of world game development, a gathering of game designers, producers, sponsors, and the tech companies that support them. The venue is friendly (formal wear is a clean black T-shirt), with over 2,000 volunteers to help gamers navigate through the huge show.

The very large ($25 billion+) gaming industry is one of the few that has not taken a major hit, and there appear to be major new opportunities out there for aspiring gamers and animators. The first major presentation at the show today was by Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco, who presented “Why the iPhone Just Changed Everything” to an SRO crowd. Neal speaks with some authority—his company recently received a second round of funding, for $10 million in venture capital (when was the last time you heard that expression?), 9 months after it opened up shop, an expression of the market’s confidence in this new gaming segment. Neil, who used to work for Electronic Arts, already has several successful titles out, including Dropship and Topple. He cautioned his audience to not believe the haters that don’t believe the iPhone can compete with Nintendo DS or the Sony PSP, because its total features are more than a match for those, and “the iPhone is connected, it’s always on, and always with you.” He noted that it was features, not resolution or technical specs, that let the DS beat out the PSP.

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It's standing room only at GDC.

written by Evan Goncalo

The Game Developer Conference, also known as GDC, is the end-all be-all event of the year for game developers.  You’ll find no fan-boys here!  Once a year thousands of developers, students, and press descend upon Moscone Center in San Francisco for a weeklong chance to network, learn, and most importantly, play.

Monday and Tuesday at the conference are completely dedicated to “summits,” each targeted at one aspect of the industry, with topics ranging anywhere from mobile games, AI, outsourcing, to localization.  Today, my flavor of choice was the Independent Games Summit, the place to be if you want to catch the new rising stars of the industry.  To take a line out of 2D Boy (World of Goo) Co-Founder Rob Carmel’s book, the folks here “value design over finances.”

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