By Anne Toole
The annual Game Developers Conference is right around the corner. This year, the concerns about the console market have given rise to more content for alternate platforms, most notably Facebook. To help you manage the deluge of content, WIGI would like to draw your attention to a few sessions and summits of interest. Whatever your specialty, take time to visit a session in another track. It could be fun, and you just might learn something.
Best title ever:
How to Survive the Inevitable Enslavement of Developers by Facebook [SOGS Vision] Speaker/s: Daniel Cook (Spry Fox)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 10:00-11:00 Room 134, North Hall
Track / Format: Social & Online Games Summit / Lecture
Description: On October 17th, 2010 Facebook shut off access to developer LOLapps. 14 million users lost service. In the history of games, platform owners and publishers have wielded immense leverage over individual game developers. This strategy talk covers the economic, historical and strategic forces behind platforms, aggregators and developers. Daniel Cook, CCO of Spry Fox, will discuss how these forces lead to consolidation and creative disenfranchisement of developers. Social games are currently following a similar path that rhymes with history. There is still hope. Savvy teams of creatives can A) diversify risk by creating a portfolio of customer sources and B) escape to the cloud. This talk will include concrete examples from previous platforms and current social games.
Takeaway: Attendees will gain models for understanding how the social gaming ecosystem is likely to evolve in the future and how to roll with the trends. Youll also learn how to identify and tap secondary sources of customers that give your company the ability to say No when your primary platform transforms from a partner into a predator.
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Summits and Tutorials Pass
Production/Business and Management:
This Is Your Brain on Game Development Speaker/s: Scott Crabtree (Intel Corporation)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 9:00-10:00 Room 132, North Hall
Track / Format: Business and Management , Production / Lecture
Description: Grounded in respected scientific data, this talk gives you actionable steps to become smarter, more productive, and even happier doing game development. Brain science has made tremendous strides in recent decades, and we know now a lot more about how the brain worksand fails to work at its best. Come and learn:
What makes logical thinking more difficult
How memory worksand fails
How stress affects thinking and creativity
How happiness results in better workand how to be happier at work
Smart, happy productivity is no accident. It comes from better understanding your brain. That starts when you decide to attend this talk.
Takeaway: How to hush your pre-frontal cortex to allow your own insights to emerge.
How to both teach and learn more effectively.
How to manage stress & negative emotions to allow maximum brain function.
How to become happierand therefore more creative, productive, and resilientat work.
Intended Audience: Everyone can benefit from brain science. From programmers to artists, recent college graduates to executive producers, we can all learn to be smarter, happier, and more productive on the job. No previous knowledge is required.
Eligible Passes: Main Conference Pass, All Access Pass
Diversity – Wait, What Happened? Speaker/s: Sheri Graner Ray (Schell Games)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 12:00- 1:00 Room 308, South Hall
Track / Format: Business and Management , Production / Lecture
Description: 10 years ago the cry went up for diversity within the game industry. Conferences were held, talks were given and the industry seemed set for change. Now, 10 years later, diversity is considered old news, diversity conference attendance is dropping, diversity talks at conferences are almost nonexistent and yet minorities still occupy less than 10% of our workforce. What happened? This talk will deal with the history of the diversity movement within the games industry and where it got off track. We will discuss strategies for reframing the diversity message so as to reestablish a productive and profitable relationship between diversity and business.
Takeaway: The audience will come away with:
A better understanding of the diversity movement within the games industry, where it started and how it got where it is today
An understanding of how the framework of the message affects the message of diversity productive force rather than a negative, destructive force
A firm strategy for moving diversity forward in conjunction and as an asset to business for the benefit of all
A concrete list of steps individuals can take to help restructure and reframe the concept of diversity in order for it to become a constructive force rather than just
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Main Conference Pass
More Pirates on a Burning Ship and Other Leadership Challenges Speaker/s: Laura Fryer (WB Games Seattle)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 4:30- 5:30 Room 303, South Hall
Track / Format: Production , Business and Management / Lecture
Description: Leaders lead from where they stand, wherever that may be in an organization. True leadership means helping people, appealing to their better natures, and building the foundation of trust necessary for great work. Drawing upon lessons learned from shipping the Xbox and GEARS OF WAR, and building WB Games, we’ll explore the challenges of leading passionate and creative people to greatness.
Takeaway: Participants will learn how to make a lasting impact on teams. We’ll discuss how to lead smart and creative people. The talk will give new ways of thinking about old problems and concrete techniques that are immediately applicable.
Intended Audience: This talk is intended for developers from any discipline whether they are technically in a leadership position or not. Anyone can lead and everyone should.
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Main Conference Pass
Game Design:
The Failure Workshop Speaker/s: George Fan (PopCap Games), Brad Wardell (Stardock), Chris Hecker (definition six, inc.), Kyle Gabler (2D Boy), Matthew Wegner (Flashbang Studios) and Kyle Gray (Tomorrow Corporation)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 3:00- 4:00 Room 134, North Hall
Track / Format: Game Design , Production / Panel
Description: A series of rapid-fire presentations by successful developers on their less-than-successful projects, the Failure Workshop focuses on the glorious failures we all have, and the successful games that emerged as a result. Each speaker will have less than 12 minutes to showcase a game or feature that has never seen the light of day and explain:
1) why they thought it was a good idea
2) why it failed
3) what they gained from the whole experience
Takeaway: Attendees will observe how other developers have crashed and burned in the past, and how they’ve recovered successfully. Failures range anywhere from just not fun to the world wasn’t ready. The experience should be informative, humanizing, and schadenfreudistically entertaining.
Intended Audience: This session is open to attendees of all experience levels, especially attendees who are interested in learning how to fail better.
Eligible Passes: Main Conference Pass, All Access Pass
To heckle, or to learn… decisions, decisions:
Designing Games for the “43-Year-Old Woman” Speaker/s: Chris Trottier (Zynga)
Day / Time / Location: Wednesday 3:00- 4:00 Room 308, South Hall
Track / Format: Game Design / Lecture
Description: Chris will pull from her experience working on games like The Sims and FarmVille to explore what factors make a game take the leap from approachable to mass market phenomenon. This session is not about all women or female game developers. It is about your cousin’s wife who’s obsessed with collecting FarmVille animals or Sims custom content: what her day is like, when and why she turns to entertainment, and how you can best engage her when she does.
Takeaway: If gamers are from Mars; moms are from elsewhere. Designing for them requires rejiggering the toolbox: magnifying some tools, adding others, and discarding a few. Chris (a failed hardcore gamer, closeted casual gamer, and 40-something mom) will share some observations that have helped her serve these (somewhat accidental) players.
Intended Audience: Experienced game designers who believe that: 1. there is ample opportunity for more breakthrough titles for women, and that 2. The current crop of titles is just scratching the surface. New blood is extra-welcome.
Eligible Passes: Main Conference Pass, All Access Pass
Programming:
Inside Kinect: Skeletal Tracking Deep Dive (Presented by Microsoft) Speaker/s: Zsolt Mathe (Microsoft)
Day / Time / Location: Thursday 9:00-10:00 Room 123, North Hall
Track / Format: Programming / Sponsored Session
Description: What exactly is the magic behind Kinect? Find out the inner workings of the Kinect sensor, the skeletal tracking software, gesturing, and how games are using the provided data. Real-world API usage is discussed along with typical game pipelines. Finally, we dive deep into advanced topics such as predictive and probabilistic filtering and depth mapbased techniques.
Takeaway: 1
Eligible Passes: Audio Pass, Main Conference Pass, Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass
ZOO KINGDOM: Building and Scaling a Facebook Game Server Speaker/s: Jeffrey Kesselman (Blue Fang Games)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 9:30-10:30 Room 130, North Hall
Track / Format: Programming / Lecture
Description: When BlueFang Games decided to take our award winning ZOO TYCOON gameplay to Facebook, we had to radically change our approaches to engineering. Where as the ZOO TYCOON games had a whole computer dedicated to each player and development cycles that were many months long, ZOO KINGDOM had to handle thousands of players per server in a sub-week release rate. Other new issues such as game security and network latency also had to be addressed. To address these challenges, we developed a secure, highly scalable and extensible back-end architecture that has supported and fueled our growth — at times the highest growth rate of any game on Facebook. This talk will deep dive into all parts of that back-end as well as the game design decisions made to help support that back-end’s scalability.
Takeaway: Attendees will leave fully understanding one practical and battle-proven approach to building efficient, secure and massively scalable facebook games.
Eligible Passes: Main Conference Pass, All Access Pass
Audio:
Composer Challenge GDC 2011 Speaker/s: Andrew Aversa (Zircon Music), Kenny Wood (Intrinsic Games), Thomas Hohl (Periscope Studio Hamburg), Lennie Moore (3l33t Music) and Joe Thwaites (JoeSound)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 12:30- 1:30 Room 3010, West Hall 3rd Fl.
Track / Format: Audio , Production / Panel
Description: Panel moderator Lennie Moore presents the GDC 2010 Composer Challenge, where last years champion, Joe Thwaites, takes on three new challengers of experienced and emerging videogame composers to see who can create the most interesting music under a difficult design challenge.
Takeaway: Attendees will see and hear how composers think on their feet as they address important game design dilemmas, offering a sneak peek into their music design process.
Eligible Passes: Main Conference Pass, Audio Pass, All Access Pass
Visual Art:
Faster, Better, Cheaper: Pushing the Artistic Bar in Portable Game Development Speaker/s: Nathan Phail-Liff (Ready At Dawn Studios)
Day / Time / Location: Friday 9:30-10:30 Room 3006, West Hall 3rd Fl.
Track / Format: Visual Arts / Lecture
Description: Ready at Dawn has always strived to dispel the myth that portable game development means sacrifices of player expectations over their bigger console brothers. In this presentation, Nathan will give insight into the art and technology production philosophies at RAD, as well as concrete examples from their latest game, GOD OF WAR: GHOST OF SPARTA, of how the art team lies, cheats, and steals to push the limits of the portable platform.
Takeaway: Attendees will gain an understanding of how our focus on creative, but very much low-tech, artist driven solutions to solving challenging visual problems allow us to both push the technical boundaries of our target platform as well as often spare our programming team from implementing more costly and time consuming technical solutions. We are very much fans of classic film visual effects ingenuity, and tapping into the creativity born out of limitations, so if attendees leave thinking of us as the ‘Ed Wood’ of video games, we will take it as the highest of compliments.
Intended Audience: Most applicable to artists working on portable platforms, with a focus on environment and fx disciplines, but the general concepts and production philosophies still may be of interest any artist in the industry.
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Main Conference Pass
Smartphone Summit:
Creating a Social, Location-based Smartphone Game in 5 Weeks Speaker/s: Jennie Lees (Google)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 4:15- 5:15 Room 303, South Hall
Track / Format: GDC Smartphone Summit / Lecture
Description: Lean and agile development are becoming more popular in game development, especially for platforms with short release cycles. Learn how a team of four strangers took a mobile game concept from idea to working prototype in five weeks (while keeping their day jobs). The session covers lessons learned and best practices in customer development, storyboarding, metrics and landing page testing. By using the approach of customer first, the end result was a game that people already wanted to play. The session will also have time for discussion on how lean and agile methods can be applied elsewhere in game development.
Takeaway: How to build a game people already want to play by understanding your players before you write a line of code. Best practices in lean, agile, customer development and concept testing.
Eligible Passes: Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass
Indie Games Summit:
From AAA to Indie: Three Start-Up Stories Speaker/s: Daniel Cook (Spry Fox), Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games, LLC) and Jake Kazdal (Haunted Temple Studios)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 4:15- 5:15 Room 135, North Hall
Track / Format: Independent Games Summit / Lecture
Description: Whether by choice or by circumstance, the number of developers striking up new indie startups is clearly on the rise. And while much has been said about moving from the bedroom to your first office, what lessons can be learned from developers that have spent a decade in the company of thousands, now working in companies of less than 10? In this session, Daniel Cook (originally at Epic MegaGames & Microsoft, now designer on STEAMBIRDS), Jake Kazdal (part of the team behind Space Channel 5, Rez and Steven Spielberg’s ‘lost’ game for EA, now co-creator of SKULLS OF THE SHOGUN), and Ichiro Lambe (developer on foundational MMOs like LEGENDS OF FUTURE PAST, now creator of games like AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!) give us an inside look at how they’ve managed to make the transition.
Eligible Passes: All Access Pass, Summits and Tutorials Pass
AI Summit:
AI Unplugged: How Experienced Devs Think Through AI Speaker/s: Chris Jurney (Double Fine Productions), Brett Laming (Rockstar Leeds), Dave Mark (Intrinsic Algorithm), Brian Schwab (Blizzard Entertainment) and Borut Pfeifer (Independent)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 5:25- 6:00 Room 3002, West Hall
Track / Format: AI Summit / Lecture
Description: Sometimes the hardest part of constructing game AI is not writing the code, tweaking the formulas, or even deciding on which technological framework to use. Often, designing good AI depends upon analyzing the specific behavior or problem that needs to be addressed and decomposing it in such a way that it can be dealt with in the first place. In this panel, we present experienced game AI designers and programmers with examples of typical (or odd!) game behaviors and watch as they walk through the process of tackling the problem — long before the programming suite is ever opened.
Eligible Passes: Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass