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 bigger and worth more money.
LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.
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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 online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.
Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.
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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 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 this stuff, but that doing everything inside the IDE with no external clicks or actions (like a “check in to perforce” action) was also essential. You can’t do both 100% without modifying the IDE; I’ve done that before for stuff we did for PXC, and it works like a dream, ONCE you’ve got it working ;).
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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% hit rate on managing to get the slides online anyway!
- provide rich, public, feedback on what’s both good and bad in talks, making it easier for ALL speakers to improve their technique and content choices in future.
- get the honest feedback of industry insiders on what people are saying and doing at conferences, instead of only getting the opinions of journalists and players. Most of us in the industry have lots of extra non-public information about the context of what people are or should be doing. We can’t necessarily say that explicitly, but we can let it inform our judgements and intrepretations of what people say and present.
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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 direct clone of Team Fortress 2, but a bit simplified and less polished. Which is not a bad thing - TF2 is exceptional, but themed as nothing more or less than a quick fast battle - bolting on a more traditional game (by adding the spy game parts) could make for a very nice game.
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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 to be bland and sucky at games conferences. My own experience is that moderators of panels at games conferences often have silly / selfish reasons for the panel, and so they do a poor job. e.g. when they admit that they just want to meet / befriend / privately interrogate a particular person, so they create a panel session).
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May 14th, 2008 by adam
(Cross-posting to the GDC 2008 tag so it shows up in the RSS feed)
I’m at ION 2008 at the moment, the conference-formerly-known-as-Online-GDC. Just like with GDC, I’m doing full writeups for each session I’m attending. Watch this tag / RSS feed…
May 14th, 2008 by adam
No writeup from me (hey, I was giving the talk, I can’t do *everything*), but there’s already a good almost-transcript up over at massively.com which gets the gist of things pretty well.
To go along with that, here’s the full slides from the talk (6 Mb). The originals were Keynote (OS X only, much better software for actually giving presentations - has some special features that Powerpoint 2007 still doesn’t have), but I’ve exported them to PowerPoint so that everyone can easily read them - so some of the fancy anims have disappeared and some graphics might be slightly skewed.
Download: Web 2.0 - how i learned to stop worrying v1.1
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