May 30th, 2008 by adam

I’ve been using FF3 and FF2 in parallel for the last month, and FF3 has some cool features that definitely make life better. The most noticeable so far is the new address-bar, which has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Until now, it was still using the very very basic (and [...]

May 22nd, 2008 by adam

I’ve created a new category/page for all JNLP Creator stuff.
Almost complete now, still has a few missing features (e.g. no way to add the JAR files for your app yet; e.g. although it can add extensions, if you try to edit an existing JNLP file, then it doesn’t load them from the source JNLP) and [...]

May 22nd, 2008 by adam

Edward Hunter, comScore
Summary
Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.
A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” - both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in [...]

May 22nd, 2008 by adam

Nicole Lazzaro
Summary
I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in [...]

May 22nd, 2008 by adam

Slides from my second ION talk are here (this was the last session on the last day, so very few people made it along - slides for the first talk (which are probably what you’re looking for) are here). I don’t think anyone blogged this talk - sorry!

May 21st, 2008 by adam

I’m helping out with a student game-programming competition at the moment - Dare 2 Be Digital - and we’ve just had a day of judging pitches from teams, trying to decide which ones to allow into the full competition. During the pitch process, a few pieces of recurring advice came to mind. We were allowed [...]

May 15th, 2008 by adam

Robert Mitchell, Sony Online Entertainment
Summary
Interesting to see what they’re doing, we’ve been looking at a lot of similar stuff recently. If I were in their position I’d want to try hacking the IDE to make it integrate with their build system directly - the speaker said that highly integrated build systems are a must for [...]

May 15th, 2008 by adam

I’ve been nagging game developers to writeup every game-conference session they go to, and blog it. I think this will serve a bunch of extremely valuable purposes, including:

make sure that good talks and speakers get their work indexed by google; google isn’t great at finding stuff inside Powerpoint slides, and conferences only have a 30%-60% [...]

May 14th, 2008 by adam

John Smedley, Sony Online Entertainment
Summary
Free Realms is generically a combined Runescape / Club Penguin clone with strong elements of Black and White - but all done in the EQ 3D engine (at least the graphical quality appears straightforward EQ client level of quality - low poly.
The Agency is a spy game set in a very [...]

May 14th, 2008 by adam

Moderator: Jason Roberts, 38 Studios
Steve Danuser, 38 Studios
Darius Kazemi, Orbus Gameworks
Troy Hewitt , Flying Lab
Osma Ahvenlampi, Sulake
Summary
This was a surprisingly good session - not only was it 9am in the morning, the night after the official conference party, but it was also a panel session (which, as several people were commenting to me yesterday, tend [...]