Category: Events

I’ve put this off for days, guess I’ll never be a real “blogger”, timely updates and all that :p
A few things I remember about GDC before they fade forever…

I’ve been dying to get a Cintiq for years but unfortunately for me the price is out of my range. At the Corel booth they actually had one. I tried it out, but alas found that it would be pretty annoying to use. My hand always seemed to be in my way as i tried to draw or pick things from the menus. Probably one could get used to it. But the person they had demoing the new version of Painter at their booth eschewed the Cintiq for one hell of a large Intuos tablet. He told me his weapons of choice are the hugest wacom in the world and his MacBook Pro (Althea ;)). I approve! And have adjusted my desires accordingly. About then it hit me… I just met Andrew “Andriod” Jones!… and I went slightly fangirl on him (sorry about that -_-) but the guy is a legend on the conceptart.org boards for his 1000 portrait project. It took a good look at him and then at the fantastic things he was drawing on the big LCD screen for me to recognize.

We spent various evenings dining with the lovely Cameo Wood and she introduced us to Adrian Hon who is lead game designer at Mind Candy who run an Alternate Reality Game (ARG for short) called Perplex City. They both proved to be excellent dinner companions. We also met up with Alex Mouton who has helped us out with graphics programming on 8 a few years back but is now working at Doublefine. It’s always a pleasure meeting people face to face for the first time that you’ve known only virtually. But these are fascinating folks that I would love to have around on a daily basis. I hope we all meet up again someday!
Over burritos at the Cancun taqueria together we witnessed a gang war shooting (o.0) San Francisco has got problems.

As for the conference itself. hmm… I missed the Phil Harrison keynote and the awards ceremony but I did make it to the Miyamoto keynote. It was like getting a lecture from your old uncle. I really appreciated hearing his point of view on things but lets face it… getting speeches through a translator would make anyone sound like your old uncle.

I loved our booth. We weren’t there enough… standing around the booth somehow didn’t seem like the best use of our time. So sorry if you came by and we weren’t there. Whoever left the SKOTOS comic book, Please contact us because we’d like to know who you are! thank you.

I saw flOw in its big fat hi-def format PS3 verison and found it, in atmosphere and motion, impressive in the extreme. Kris Force (who is working with us on The Path) came to me similarly breathelss about the sound design in that game.
Little Big Planet – hey, I like it ! Good on them.
Both of these games are made by small teams, look like quality products and they offer open gameplay experiences. I really think that The Endless Forest (no goals other than the ones you make, no game rules as such) is looking less and less like an oddity! The more games like this the better!

And speaking of quality… Aquaria, winner of the Independent Games Festival looks fairly spectacular. I only got to play it for a minute or two but I thought it was very charming. Derek Yu did a fantastic job on the graphics for this one.

But this whole meme Sony (and others) had going about user created content, “a Youtube for games, an iTunes store for games, a myspace for games.” uuugh.

I like to draw during speeches, it kind of started years ago as I realized I was good at remembering faces but not names. So now I draw the two together, and it seems Michael doodles like a madman =) I put up our notes in the Gallery section of the site here because there are (still) too many thoughts about the sessions for us to translate them into prose. Much will filter into our practice in the months to come, I’m sure. Particularly memorable was the micropayments round-table hosted by Daniel James of Three Rings makers of Puzzle Pirates. What a guy, he came in costume… I like to imagine he always dresses like that though. rock on!
You wouldn’t believe how sucessful something like Habbo Hotel is financially! And even games with much less of a reputation are incredibly sucessful. These developers running sucessful online micropayment games gave up some numbers and strategies in this discussion. Can’t thank them enough. It was fascinating, inspiring, gave us more than a few ideas… Mwuahahahahahaaaa!

Random people I went up to, spoke with, and gave a card include: Hiroshi Minagawa of Square Enix: after I walked in late to the FFXII postmortem talk (>.<). I told him, through a translator, how much I was awestruck and inspired by his work and tried to convince him to download The Endless Forest, I hope he understood, I hope he did, but yeah. The 1up show presenters Kathleen and Luke… told Luke that I deeply disagreed with his opinions on flOw. Hey, I shook Justin Hall’s hand and heard all about his Passively Multiplayer Online Game, I look forward to further developments there.

I couldn’t help being slightly disappointed by Suda51’s talk “Punks not dead”. He has an idea of punk that I do not agree with. Seems he’s got down the form but not the content. In my opinion punk is not about pleasing your corporate masters and getting to put in more blood. Punk is about daring to be (very) different from the status quo… now if he would make a game with no guns and no rules maybe i’d have more respect. 😉 I _am looking forward to the remake of The Silver Case on Nintendo DS though.

Lastly…
I swore to myself I’d make it to Cliffy B.’s Gears of War postmortem (I am morbidly fascinated by his game design philosophies.) But it was at 9am… it …didn’t work out. And by the time I got there the hall was full to capacity and couldn’t get in anyway. Guess I will have to pick that one up on GDCRadio.

It was the first time that we attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But we had attended the London version before (in 2002, 2003 and 2004). In fact, I had a personal ban on visiting the USA. For obvious reasons. But BGIn offered us an opportunity that we couldn’t pass on. We could have some space in their booth to show our work for almost no money (thanks to governmental subsidies), including access to the conference. It would also be a good opportunity to meet up with some friends.

So I had my privacy violated by the American customs in ways that would be illegal in my own country, while telling myself “this is for business, stay calm, don’t think, it’ll be over in no time”. A good thing we ended up in San Francisco, the most pleasant of American cities I have visited so far. A spring breeze and very un-Belgian sun shine eased the pain together with the marvelous American breakfasts Eva prepared for us every morning at the Country Cottage bed & breakfast -a very inspiring Grandmother’s House.

During the week we stayed, we divided our time between “standing on carpet” in our booth, meeting with friends and attending sessions. The schedule, as we knew from the London conferences (only even more so), was designed in such a way to make sure that session times inevitably conflicted with each other, making the conference feel extra hectic and busy. But in reality, while there were moments when there were at least five simultaneous sessions we wanted to attend, there was also ample time when nothing interesting was going on.

Oh, and we bought a cell phone for the occasion!!! We usually pride ourselves not needing such a thing as we’re always at home and very happy with our Internet communications. But since these days nobody seems to be able to make appointments any more, we decided to be assimilated. We got a cheap Virgin phone that did the trick. Though I never got used to it, really (I apologize to all the people who had awkward phone calls with me).

On Monday, 5 March, the conference was trying hard to fill up the oversized Moscone center with huge banners and flags in preparation of the crowds on Wednesday. We attended only one session: Andrew Stern‘s and Michael Mateas‘s talk about conversational characters in serious games. We were familiar with their excellent work on interactive drama, so it was surprising to hear them promote their technology for use in training similations and the like. But Michael made some good points and was very honest about the limitations of the application in casu. It was interesting to hear how modular the Façade concept seems to be. Obviously I was shocked to hear that Andrew had used the system in a serious game for the American military: to teach American soldiers to shoot communicate with Iraqi terrorists militants fundamentalists evil demons citizens. Shame on you!
During Thai lunch the next day, he begged for forgiveness and promised to never do it again.

On Tuesday we saw Jonathan Blow talk about prototyping. We wanted to attend this talk to learn why his almost released game Braid was getting such extremely positive response. (“Braid has the potential to change the way you think about reality.“)
Jonathan’s playful experimentation with prototyping seems like a lot of fun. But his focus is very much on gameplay. And I for one find it hard to get excited about gameplay. Whether a little guy jumps over a platform in one direction or in another direction, doesn’t make much difference to me. Braid looks like an excellent game, very well made, with good artwork. But it’s just a game. And I guess I don’t believe a game can be art. I don’t believe gameplay is sufficiently expressive. Interactivity wants to be free!

Next we heard Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago talk about the making of Cloud. I wish they had expanded a bit more on their pr and marketing than on the game itself, which, while interesting as a student project, I don’t see as such a major break with old play styles. I’m sure their heart is in the right place, though, so if they can focus on the emotional Direction they kept speaking of and not get distracted by game mechanics, I can envision a great future for them.

It’s good to know that people like Jenova and Kellee and Jonathan exist. And that they are getting some recognition. Even if their work hasn’t convinced me yet, I’m very excited about what all of this might lead to.

In general, the GDC seemed like a conference for independent games developers. The big publishers and developers seemed to just hang around a bit, if they were even there, with nothing much to say. But the indies displayed the vitality of their scene throughout the conference. And even though the famous speakers still attracted big crowds, nobody had much to say about their talks afterwards. Aquaria winning the Independent Games Festival was on everybody’s lips. And the interest of distributors in indie games contributed to the general excitement. Now all we need to do is make some games that are truly different…

More about the conference tomorrow…