Day 1 (Evolve)

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Digital Distribution and Self-Publishing That You Must Understand to Succeed

A forthright talk from Martyn Brown, one of the founders at Team 17. They’re wading into self-publishing with a vengeance, ostensibly due to their inability to sign Alien Breed through normal publishing channels. And that’s fair enough, if they believe strongly enough in the product to publish it, they shouldn’t have to satisfy a close-minded publisher’s idea of what the market wants. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier when you’re sitting on the big pot of cash that is the proceeds from Worms XBLA, but fair play to them. They did stress the point that self-publishing brings with it many of the same challenges that regular publishing does (e.g. marketing, QA, platform certification), so if you don’t have the capability in-house to tackle that like they do, then you’d better be prepared to deal with others who can provide those services.

Evolve: A Game is a Game is a Game

A reassuring talk from Dave Thomson at Denki, that can be summed up quite succinctly: make the games that you’re interested in. While it’s not a guarantee that others will like the same things that you do, it’s a safe bet that if you don’t believe in the games you’re making, no-one else will either. While I have reservations about this – there still has to be a business case to support making a game. So maybe I’d paraphrase slightly and say “if you’re relatively normal, then the games you love to make and play will appeal to lots of other people too”.

Evolve: Panel: After the iPhone Honeymoon:Where Next for Apple’s Mobile?

This one was of interest because I’ve been thinking about the merits of developing for the iPhone. While I’m definitely a convert to the use of one (I bought a 3GS recently), I’m still not convinced about the merits of the app-store as a distribution platform. And sure enough, the panel were quick to agree on the difficulties of reaching your market. The driving down of price to the 99c point, while bemoaned by some small developers, is indicative of what the market wants. Too many consumers have been burned by poor apps (even ones with good reviews), so they’re not prepared to risk higher prices to be burned. Lite versions are key, but care must be taken not to give away too much. Marketing is key, although it’s very much about advertising through social networks and similar mechanisms. Allowing people to share knowledge of your app through the phone itself is a good thing. There is a market for niche titles, but it is substantially smaller, clearly the cheap/small titles which make high volumes is an easier strategy. If you’re happy with a niche and higher price point, the quality has to be high enough to justify that higher price point. That needs to include update support. Getting the first few positive reviews up there is key, so giving away the first few hundred units to friends for positive reviews is a useful tactic. Above all though, the platform is still the limiting factor in getting true volumes – you need to crack the top X lists to get any sort of decent volumes. Which says to me that the search functionality is still too weak to truly support a quality based market.

Evolve: Panel: Crossing Over: How Working With Other Industries Can Improve Your Games and Your Bottom Line

I’ve talked on this blog in the past about the overlap (or lack thereof) between television media and games. Ofcom’s Public Service Publishing talks in particular have been frustrating to me, because there is clearly money, concepts and talent there, but what is essentially a language barrier prevents us from collaborating. Games developers can’t relate to the funding models, and the glacial pace of motion getting projects going. TV people get the idea of ‘games’, but are unable to grasp what goes into making them, their limitations or the practicalities of producing a title. So this talk about organised brainstorming workshops which aim to get people from all industries together, piqued my interest. Basically locking people away in a hotel together for a week, forming teams with a spread of talents, making them brainstorm ideas for interactive entertainment. Everyone on the panel was overwhelmingly positive about their experience doing it, and it sounded like it did exactly what was needed – breaking down the communication barriers between those in the different industries, and allowing them to collaborate to deliver something interesting. Schedules willing, I’m definitely enthused about the idea of attending one of these workshops, and see what I can get out of it in terms of a better perspective on the wider media industry.

Evolve: KEYNOTE: The Long Tail and Games: How Digital Distribution Changes Everything. Maybe.

The long tail. A lot of this felt like Eberly marketing his own services, but there were some good points, backed with stats. Basically the gist of the talk is that digital is great, it’s the future, but it’s not perfect. There was a lot of puncturing of the idea that digital is without drawbacks, which I think is something that is needed. It’s way too easy to pin all your hopes on the next platform. I think he draws an erroneous conclusion from the current platforms that digital distribution isn’t valid; because he’s basing it on platforms which are severely lacking in the fundamentals needed to make for a healthy digital distribution platform: search, navigation, rating and cross-linking. Amazon has those, but the current games platforms don’t. I don’t believe that we can write off digital distribution as a viable market for the small studio until we see a platform which has all of those things and still fails.

Day 2

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE: Online functionality for your next game? Why not go 100% online

“Hey folks – look, isn’t APB shiny?” Okay, maybe I’m just bitter I got there a little late and couldn’t even get in the room, but it didn’t strike me that the talk had a lot of content. APB did look very shiny though.

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

Basically two old school devs playing each others games. And I’m a sucker for an Elite talk. The actual playing of the games, lots of faffing around and not much shown. I think had they prepped a bit more and showed a bit more of the strengths of the respective games. But it was still interesting to hear stories from the old days. Clearly the majority of the people in the room were Elite fans though; although there were a decent amount of questions for Dave Jones, most of them were about Elite and all of the various things. And of course every time I see Elite again it makes me want to make that sort of game again. Someone on The Chaos Engine made a good point – the fact that Elite 4 hasn’t been made has probably been the best thing this industry could hope for, because it’s made everyone else want to step into the gap and has resulted in a bunch of good games. Had Elite kept churning out sequels, I think there might have been that little bit less enthusiasm in general in the industry.

Business: Panel: Why Grey Matters – How to Grow Your Business

This was an interesting and frank panel talk, with some of my colleagues from the Scottish industry – notably Brian MacNicoll and Paul Farley. They talked about the merits of the scheme, which pairs up experienced business people with directors of newer start-ups, giving them an opportunity to benefit from the others’ experience and an independent point of view. It sounded like a fantastically useful programme, I can’t count the number of times when I could have used an outside opinion as to whether I’m doing the right thing with the business or not. I can only hope that TIGA or another UK body will be continuing the scheme once the pilot is complete, and encouragingly the TIGA contingent was present at the talk.

Design: The Life Cycle of The Bonsai Barber for WiiWare

Fun looking little game this, and I can respect the deliberate choice of design principles to keep the gameplay simple and clean. Interesting choice to limit the amount of time the player can play each day, which is a risky tactic, but good if it pays off. Similar to Car Jack Street’s tactic of using real world deadlines to encourage you to come back at least once a week, Bonsai Barber has the opportunity to to make the game more attractive by rationing out the gameplay. While you might easily glut yourself on the game in the first day and never return, by restricting what can be done, you leave the player that little bit hungry for more. Of course, it only works if the game leaves you with a good feeling at the end of each play session, but I think I shall pick it up to see.

Develop Awards

Thanks to my benefactors at Microsoft, I managed to get a seat at a table at the Develop awards, which was nice. Lots of hob-nobbing with industry legends, and a nice meal to go along with it. Sadly I had to leave after the main course to head back to Reading, so I missed the awards themselves. I gather that Media Molecule cleaned up some, but then that’s probably not much of a surprise; these things rarely are. I couldn’t help feeling like something of a small fish in a big pond though, and I’d probably have made more useful business contacts drinking out in the bar with the other indie devs. Still, I got to chat some with David Braben, and avoided gushing over the original Elite, so that’s something.

Day 3

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

I was somewhat hung over for this one, so thankfully it’s on a topic I know well. Looks like the Eutechnyx guys are going through pretty much the same learning curve we did with Brave – the initial excitement of wanting to write all of your game logic in script form, discovering the performance and practical problems with maintaining things in scripts, and shifting some part of the way back to logic in C++. They’ve come to many of the same conclusions I did, which is pretty much that you should use scripts for what they’re good for: broad, high level glue logic, fast iteration without recompiling, and expressive forms for structured data. Scripting is no silver bullet, and its pros always need to be balanced quite carefully against the cons. I think this is an interesting topic, and I’ve some thoughts written up on it that I’ll put into blog form at some point soon.

BUSINESS KEYNOTE: Ship Your Game On Time, On Budget: Seven Highly Effective Practices

Not really much for me here – very much a talk from one of the old school development houses; how to manage large teams, business relationships with large publishers. Nothing too surprising either – knowing when to cut features, knowing how important it is to hit your dates (the developers don’t see this as nearly as much of an issue as the publisher does), and how to manage communication and planning with your publishing partner.

Coding: CODING KEYNOTE: Playstation PS3: Cutting Edge Techniques

Someone here at MGS pointed out to me that Kish Hirani is the same Kish that used to be mentioned a lot at VIS; for some reason I never connected the two names. Now that I’ve seen one of his talks in person, that makes a lot more sense. Some interesting displays of the new motion tech which we weren’t allowed to photograph. It has its own pros and cons when compared to Microsoft’s Natal, but to be honest I think both platforms will stand or fall on the quality of the games made for them, and the PS3 is still fighting its price and install base handicap.

More interesting was the definite sense of sharing, that Sony have a lot of library and middleware code, all of which they’re throwing at developers for free. They don’t want developers suffering on their tech, they know its hard. While the libraries approach might be a little disjointed, it’s good to see that they’ve thrown themselves into developer support so wholeheartedly, and it certainly makes their platform a lot more attractive to us as a small developer now. I can’t quite see us pitching a PS3-only title, but I’m a lot less downbeat about the platform than I was 6 months ago.

Design: DESIGN KEYNOTE: Building LEGO Worlds – online, offline, and everything in between

This talk was mostly only interesting to listen to some of the challenges involved in taking an underlying core concept (LEGO’s concept of play) and applying it to a variety of games, and trying to maintain that concept through-out everything they do. I’ll be interested to see LEGO Universe when it comes out, but mostly only because it will need to do well if NetDevil are ever to put the money into Jumpgate Evolution that they need to. Especially now they’ve saddled themselves with the ailing Codemasters as a publisher.

Design: Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

I know a lot of people at TCE are dismissive of Ernest Adams’s credentials, but to be honest I’ve always found his articles to be interesting and well written. His talk at Develop was similarly interesting, covering a lot of topics relating to play mechanics, and exhortations to designers to break out of the traditional stifling models of play. But to be honest by this point I was exhausting from a gruelling week, and was happy to just listen to a fun talk before heading back to Reading.

Definitely looking forward to meeting up with my contemporaries who I have been sorely neglecting, and finding out about new opportunities, and just generally being nosey about other people’s business (and in certain cases, other business’s people).

It seems like in all of the conferences, there is a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation, but little self-examination. Yes, there has been massive growth in the last couple of years, and the transition to the new generation of consoles has gone pretty well (as long as you’re not Sony). But it has done well on the back of innovative titles, which push away from the hard-core gamers, and the ridiculously over-specced hardware, and back to what it should be: making fun games, that people like to play.

I’d like to see a conference where we look at the issues that are important to the average game developer, not just the EAs and Ubisofts (and companies who wish they were that size) – about what we can do about the recruitment crisis, about what we can do to make better games, more polished games. I’d like a conference that addresses issues like why we keep re-inventing the wheel every time we make a game, and why we don’t collaborate on technology and sharing of knowledge to benefit the industry as a whole.

Above all, I’d like to see a conference that dwells on the success stories, and how we can learn from those developers/publishers and emulate that success. With that in mind, I’d rate Hilmar Petursson’s talk on EVE as the talk of the show for me, not because I learned a whole lot from it, but because it was good to see a developer that stuck to their guns and made a game they were proud of, and have been proved right by the game-playing public.

One of the interviewees who works for Linden Labs brought up the point that I thought was most relevant was that Linden Labs is forming a bottleneck to the continued development of the possibilities involved – the space and the users are growing at a faster rate than LL can grow to support. So by opening the API and allowing content developers to extend the world in unusual ways there is the possibility of refining the virtual experience, and perhaps polishing it in a useful fashion.

Of course, I’m a little bitter right now, as Second Life are unable to charge either my credit card or my Paypal account, due to some internal uselessness in their systems, and so have disabled my account, so you should take all this with a pinch of salt.

If I was to have any criticism of some of the titles on display it would be the lack of polish, but really that would be unfair of developers new to the work of making games to a fixed time-scale! Certainly the results are very impressive for the 10-week project, and the students involved all seem to have enjoyed the game and coped well with the pressure they were under.

I caught a brief glimpse of the PS3 home interface as well – again it looks like Sony are trying to push the integration aspect. They want users to use their virtual interface to be the social community/lobby aspect to all of their multiplayer games. A laudable goal, but I can’t help but think that it will take a while to smooth out the rough edges of the new style of play. XBox-Live took years to mature into the capable interface it has now, I don’t see that being any different for Sony. However, if they do it right, and the poor uptake of the PS3 doesn’t kill it first, I think it’s got real potential. Certainly Sony seem to be in it for the long haul, rather than the short term success.

Basically I can sum up the whole talk in a few bullet points:

• Develop the character first, give them background, identifiability, and depth.
• Build the character first, and the story second.
• Decide on visual style, make it fit the game, make it a unique selling point if possible.
• Decide on audio style – give them a voice, make it an emotive one. Use professional voice actors!
• Choose the right name. Make it memorable

19% of females game, and make up 41% of all gamers in Europe. Similarly in the UK, 24% of females game, making up 43% of gamers. In the 6-15 age range, more than 79% of people play games regularly, dropping to 50% in the 15-19 age range. Beyond that, it tapers off to below 30% and diminishes roughly proportionally to age.

More interestingly, in the last 3 years, although boys still play for longer and spend more on games, girls are catching up somewhat. So although there is still an issue, perhaps we’re addressing it. Certainly Nintendo’s work is reaching more female gamers than I would have expected, and there is a realisation in the industry in general that non-traditional games more popular with women are not only possible but profitable.

Key points from Pauline Jacquey (Ubisoft producer, heading up their accessible games drive) about improving accessibility in games:

• Shorten gaming sessions (10min)
• Invest heavily in UI development and polish
• Allow players to track their progress

In addition, although it’s easier to create ‘shrink and pink’ versions of games, in reality those types of games are rarely big hits, and in the long term it is better to create products with real value (such as The Sims, Brain Training, or Nintendogz).

Anyway, Hilmar told a story of a rocky start, with a long pre-production time for EVE, including a period of a good 6 months where they ran out of start-up capital and relied on the goodwill of their staff to keep working for free essentially, entirely based on their faith in the product. After their rocky start, and some publishing woes (they sold the rights to a book publisher which then decided to neglect it entirely in favour of their book business), they eventually started to self-publish EVE, based on an entirely digital download model (no boxed game = no distributors). With a solid core of 30,000 players, they’ve grown their player base continually (and sometimes exponentially) since then. The amazing growth of the player base is matched only by their loyalty and immersion in the game, to the point at which they now have over one hundred thousand subscribers, and are on track to hit 200,000 before the end of this year. Soon, it seems, they will be the first developer to have more subscribers than the population of their home country (Iceland only has 300,000 residents)!

It’s this massive player-base, all sharing a single virtual universe, which leads to the parts of the game-play which captivate the players. Simple but solid core mechanics, closely modelled on their real-world equivalents (markets with bid/buy/sell systems, corporations with management structure, etc.) provide a framework on top of which the players operate rich social structures. It is these social structures which provide the real interesting play in the game; very much an example of emergent game-play.

Hilmar differentiates between two different styles of MMOG – the ‘theme-park’ games (EverQuest, World of Warcraft, etc.) where play is rich, but tightly scripted and given to the player in neat, measured doses; and sand-box games (EVE, Ultima Online), where a virtual world with some basic rules and mechanics is presented to the player, and they are free to create whatever interesting systems within that world that they like.

My favourite part was some video and concepts of the upcoming revisions to the game, which extend it to allow users to walk around inside space stations as a 3D character avatar – a vast improvement over the user-is-a-ship mechanic currently employed. CCP feel that it is this limiting factor which is skewing the player-base massively in favour of men (95% of the players), and hope that the new focus on personalisation in the game will redress that balance. Certainly this means that they are one step closer to my own vision of a virtual universe which scales from the personal scale to the universe scale, although I can see the technological challenges remain massive. It seems like they are feeling their way gently towards that system, with the personal avatars initially being limited to wandering around some lovely interior environments and chatting. They hope to eventually move to allowing indoor combat, but I think it is wise to work out the teething problems with the system first! They are also re-visiting the graphics of EVE – always one of its strongest points, to scale it up to current hardware levels.

Regardless, I think it may be time to re-visit EVE once again – the last time I played was a couple of years ago, with a much smaller player-base, and fewer features. Certainly the growth of the player-base makes me think that it is worth another try.

Mostly this talk was telling us things that we already knew – that TV producers take a blinkered view of content production, and that kids and younger people prefer interactive media to non-interactive (TV and films). Web-based content, both games and social networking, are being used increasingly to maintain the reach of traditional platform holders such as the BBC or Channel 4.

Most interestingly, they claim to have done research that shows that as users grow past 18 and school leaving age, they tend to be less biased towards interactive media, and tend to start using their mobiles and PCs in ‘more adult’ ways. Personally, I suspect this is an outgrowth of the free-time factor, that the younger audience spends more time on interactive media because they have more time to spend! Once they have more interesting pressures on their time, the desire for interactive content drops away.

Still, a long talk for not very much reward.

Certainly the last couple of weeks have been bad for the majority of the stock market, and in general terms that means that risky investments are the first to be dropped. Unfortunately, games development is always a risky investment! Even the big players have suffered in the last couple of months, lots of volatility caused by a real lack of predictability. Not so good.

In Ed’s opinion, there were still opportunities, but they are in the low cost markets which are up and coming: mobile, downloadable games, casual titles, etc. Again, showing the risk aversion here – the big budget, big risk titles are not the sort of things investors want to deal with. Small scale, fast turnover games can show predictable results, without the all-or-nothing issue a AAA title might have.

Also covered was the massive growth shown in 2006, certainly a big surprise to me, but good news. Income across the market is up 68% to $995m, of which subscriptions make up a tad more than two thirds. Forecasts for 2008 are for more than $1.3bn, which is optimistic but doesn’t feel like crazy numbers to me.

More interestingly for us, the massive growth of outsourcing we were talking about in 2005 has outstripped even those projections, $1.1bn in 2006 (40% of costs). For a lot of companies it’s still about off-shoring to cheaper countries, but even local outsourcing is shown to keep costs under control, and reduce the risk that the publishers/developers have to take on for any given title. More work for us then.

The overriding theme was that of large market growth (backed up in a later talk quoting 68% growth of income in 2006). Ubisoft see the growth as being driven by 3 things: the new generation of console (increased power -> improved immersion -> increased sales). Not sure about that, but my cynicism relating to the new generation is well known. Also driving growth: accessible games, as evidenced by Nintendo DS and Wii. It definitely felt like Ubisoft view the Nintendo platforms as only good for family friendly, casual fun and learning titles, and the traditional AAA blockbuster titles are reserved for the 360 and PS3.

Finally, they echoed the sentiments from last year that user-generated content is driving growth too. Frankly, this rings hollow for me – where are the increased sales from this sort of content. Perhaps I’m too disconnected from the reality of mass marked gaming these days, but I’m just not aware of where this obsession with user generated content is coming from, or what evidence has appeared since last year to convince us that this new way of making games is actually here. I can understand wanting to build good community tools to improve the way people play their games and interact, especially in multi-player titles, but I’m not sure how that ties in to user generated content.

Onto Ubisoft’s actual strategy – for accessible titles on the Wii and DS, they’re focusing massively on usability and polish, and implied much smaller teams, and much smaller titles, developed quickly.. Fthey’re going for the big team, big cost approach for their AAA titles (200+ experienced staff is their idea of a ‘good size’ for teams). They know they need to increase sales to amortise their costs, but I’m not sure that they have any real way of doing that effectively. However, they do have the economies of scale, and the intelligence to try and maximise re-use of tools and engines to minimise their development costs.

Crucially, they know they face recruitment issues with such massive teams, not to mention the cost implications. As such, they are building whole teams (note, crucially they’re not outsourcing to independents, they’re building Ubisoft Studios), but in places where the cost is far cheaper.

Well, it must be nice to be such a big fish, but I’m not sure just how relevant that sort of strategy is to us, the little fish in the pond.

• Sector likely to experience most growth in the next year: spread results, favouring casual, handheld, mobile and MMO. Few people liked packaged console or PC titles to grow.
• Genre likely to experience most growth: Virtual life (a la Second Life or Home) topped the poll, with music titles a strong second. Not sure if I agree with that assessment, but that’s probably reflective of the general sentiment that virtual online communities are going to grow in popularity generally.
• Percentage of overall revenue to come from online (downloadables, subscription, ad-revenue, etc.): 20-40%. Fair enough – it’s definitely growing and becoming far more relevant, not just in our industry.

Day 1

So aside from a fire alarm that left us outside of the Royal College of Physicians for the better part of an hour, this day was most enjoyable.

Keynote – View From The Top by David Gardner of Electronic Arts. Some predictions of the future – nothing particularly surprising or radical there. In-game advertising is a fact of life – we should deal with it. The rise of girls in gaming is coming [but then people have been saying that forever]. User generated content is key – multi-tasking users like to play games and use other content; as a demonstration he showed in-game ESPN footage and live radio – they want people to be getting that content through the console rather than having a TV (or PC) running in the background serving that content.

The Wall Street View by Edward Williams: echoed thoughts from “Money for non-suits” at Develop. Investors like predictability, stability, and profits (pretty much in that order). Basically they like large companies who gain stability through diversification, so that even big flops don’t significantly hurt earnings [that would be Take Two out then]. They like companies with muscle who push to expand the market. On that basis, they like mobile lots, based on massive ‘install base’ figures and perception of growth. I don’t agree with this one, but that’s based on my (probably biased) view of the mobile sector.

Games That Heal, chaired by Ben Sawyer from Serious Games: Serious games guru, pushing use of games in medicine, teaching and e-learning. Talking about the massive budgets available (far beyond the average game development budget) and corporate/government’s increasing desire to make use of games development existing technology and skills. Interesting example was the re-purposing of Full Spectrum Warrior to help combat post traumatic stress disorder in Gulf War victims.

So You Think You Know Games, presented by Nick Parker, Analyst: Talking about development past, present and future. No real surprises here, but interesting nonetheless. There was talk about Nintendo DS and Wii having sales pushed by a few innovative titles, compared to PS3 and 360 more likely to publish more traditional titles. No predictions as to the winner, rather voicing the expectation that households will buy multiple platforms: PS3/360 and another, as the different consoles target different markets, especially with the PS3/360 focus on multi-media. Personally I think the multi-media focus is a mistake – the majority of people aren’t tech-savvy, I don’t believe they’re interested in figuring out how the box under the TV works – they want to push in a disc and have it work. They know if they put a music disc in a hi-fi it plays, a DVD into a DVD player and it plays, a game into a console and it plays. Whether HDTV and Blu-ray/HD-DVD will change that dynamic I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that the multi-media support will remain chronically under-used, as it was with the PS2 generation.

Ofcom’s PSP And The Era Of Public Service Games, chaired by Peter Phillips of Ofcom: This talk was very interesting, although I have a bit of a vested interest in this sector. Basically it was to highlight the existence (or potential existance) of a public service publisher – essentially a vessel for routing public money to content developers, in the same manner that the BBC receives money to make quality content. There is an acceptance that the BBC is not in the best position to produce interactive content for the public benefit – as its a little stuck in its ways. There is also acceptance that interactive media is on the up, just as linear television is on the way down.

Games to make you cry: best presentation of the day in my opinion. Its patently not true to say games can’t make you cry and that because of that they’re not serious art. I can think of three times without breaking a sweat where games have made me feel something intense while playing. Knights of the Old Republic – while trying to turn Bastila back from the dark side, I had almost managed it but then failed and had to kill her – a real sense of loss; Homeworld, when the pilot of the ship is crippled late on in the game – sorrow and anger; and Call of Duty, in the night assault on Carentan I was cowering behind a wall with a sergeant shouting at me to flank a nasty looking machine gun nest that had already torn lumps out of me – fear. The presenter came up with examples from her game history, but the point was clear – games can tug on heart strings, but game developers need to understand why, and how to do it properly; only then can we make games with real emotional impact. The presentation was also made more fun by me slyly watching Ken Perlin who was sitting next to me, working on some animation things on his laptop, very distracting!

Day 2

Convergence: Hollywood take

Rosanna Sun – Matrix game producer. Pushed by Wachowski brothers into game development from a film role. They were keen to have the game development tightly integrated into the development of the films. She noted difficulty in managing inter-medium dependencies (e.g. VFX are usually done late in film, but she needed them early for the game). Assets were done and re-done to work better with games, Film costumes/sets for example were developed far beyond what was necessary for normal film production because the game needed far more content than the film. She also noted a general push from Hollywood to get better creative integration between films and their licence games. No-one likes to see a great licence used badly in a cheap and cheerful game, which bears little resemblance to the tone and quality of the original.

Convergence: Literary take

The developers/writers of Interactive Alice presented here. Developed essentially as back story for film, they use various techniques flesh out the main character of the film through interactive media. The story of the childhood of the main character in the film is told, and gives depth and reason behind her actions in the film. They premiered the third episode of the story at the presentation; I must admit to liking the story, but not really the presentation. It seemed interactive only in the loosest sense of the term; supposedly this is consistent with the character development, but I was unconvinced. Apparently they plan to improve the interactive aspects in the future, and plan much more complex episodes of the content for the future.

Convergence: my take

Its vital to make good game, regardless of whether it’s well integrated with the film/book/television. Technology and medium of delivery is irrelevant, what matters is that the content is fun, engaging, and develop the story and characters.

Mobile talk

A fairly unconvincing talk from various mobile developers, touting the death of desktop/fixed devices, and the rise of portable devices over the next half dozen years. I find this hard to believe. They raised the point of mobility of data, and the rise of online storage systems for holding user content (see YouTube, etc.) They glossed over some fairly serious flaws in the model however, and came up with no convincing arguments to support the ‘death of PCs’ argument. Degenerated into a demonstration of some new phone the presenter had purchased the week before. However, the theme of content rather than technology was revisited here, and I’ll cover that in a more general evaluation of the themes in the conference.

Machinima

This was a fun presentation, if not very illuminating, and was given by the guys from Red vs Blue (who I’ve been a fan of for a long while). Basically they revelled in the wonderful worlds that games developers create as a background for their stories, and loved the fact that those complex and impressive worlds can be adapted by amateur film-makers to tell their own stories, at minimal cost. Great for the artistic medium certainly – especially with the rise of video sharing sites making it easy for good content to be widely and cheaply published. A good question from the audience concerned how we as game developers make it easier for machinimists to work with our games – the RvB guys asked for user-controllable mouth animation on a button, free camera control (within reason) and the ability to have characters all look at the same point (I’m sure its very useful for them, even though there’s no call for it in game). All very easy for developers to do, its just that machinima is the only reason to have such features, so they don’t tend to make it into actual games.

Ken Perlin

Probably the best talk of the conference for me – Ken is an engaging and interesting speaker, and a genius at animating emotion. He makes simple code to procedurally generate animations which I’ve seen animators take days to do by hand. If anything, I think this work is the kind of thing which can make content generation for next-generation consoles achievable in some kind of sensible budget. I’m not advocating getting rid of animators, but getting them to use procedural tools to make their content rather than hand animating the position of every single joint, every single frame would massively increase their productivity, and I think open up a world of new possibilities. I’d heartily recommend visiting Ken’s website, there are a wealth of little Java applets to demonstrate the sort of things which are possible.

BBFC/PEGI Rating talk

I skipped half of this while trying to see the Lord of the Rings Online screening (which I still missed as it was delayed), but the gist of it was covering the reasoning behind the ratings the BBFC/VSC give. I’ve always thought that we had a sensible ratings system in this country, and I don’t understand the US reluctance to go with a legislated approach. We do need to regulate what titles go to what age groups, and if a regulated system avoids some of the royal screw-ups that have gone on recently, then it should be the solution. A voluntary system is nice when it works, but provides little defence against trouble makers who want to see games banned, rather than regulated. As always though, the body regulating the ratings will never be able to make an exact science out of the system, the best they can hope for is to build a reputation for sensible, predictable decisions; and then when an unusual situation comes up, the public can rely on them to make a reasonable decision.

Educational talk

Basically this talk covered the large use of interactive entertainment as a means for teachers to improve their children’s learning. Figures quoted: 11% of teachers actively using games already, with another 40% actively learning and trying to use games. Teachers will use off the shelf titles, custom built software, free software, whatever it takes and whatever suits their needs at the time. A custom version of Myst is being developed which the teachers like, but even Zoo Tycoon is a valuable resource for primary children. Teachers want anything they can to help get the message across, and there is a lot of resources beginning to be pushed into making games specifically to fit their needs. In addition, there is software available which allows the teachers themselves to author content which they can then use and share.

Reservoir Dogs screening

Exactly what you’d expect. Lots of gun-play, references to the film. The lack of voice actors from the film jarred a little, but not terribly so. They made a big deal over the choice the user has to play professionally or like a psychopath (based on body count basically) – didn’t seem like a huge deal to me but it’s nice to have a choice in your play style, and have it affect the game’s outcome (even only in a limited manner). Some basic driving gameplay in there as well. All in all a solid looking title, but didn’t make me think – “wow I want to buy that”.

Summary

Out of the whole conference, I picked up on two main themes (both from the presentations and from talking to people).

1. Don’t mention the MMOs. Seems the development community is no longer favouring MMO games as ‘the way of the future’. Most likely due a combination of the difficulty of competing with World of Warcraft and the doubtful financial feasability of building a decent MMOG. It costs a lot to make a massively multiplayer game, and unless you get it right, it will suck cash faster than it generates it.

2. Content is king. No-body really cares which box wins, nor is anyone sure who to bet on. What matters is making the right games, and delivering them to the consumer. The means of delivery is evolving, and is no longer as simple as a box on a shelf in a shop; X-Box Live Arcade, downloadable content, episodic delivery, all change the classic model. That big up-front cost and then forget about the title is no longer going to cut it – the massively rising costs mean that even a single title has to be milked for all its worth to try and break even (so handheld/online tie-ins, ports, additional content). To me this smacks of desperation in an attempt to save dwindling profit margins, but in the absence of anything better to recommend, heck why not?