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GDC 2007 Coverage Part 2: Wednesday

March 13th, 2007

I just got back from a great GDC 2007. As promised, here is in depth coverage of everything that Rohit and myself attended. We’ll be covering, sessions, parties, and random encounters we had at the conference. As a special prize, anyone I talked to and got a card with a weblink on it will get linked to in the coverage.

Wednesday Morning… March 7th, 2007

I arrived at the conference center and met up with Rohit early Wednesday morning after my 6:30 AM flight from Chicago. After registering and checking in my bags and coat we wandered around the Expo floor for a while looking for the IGF Pavillion. After asking multiple people, including Conference Associates and security guards in various buildings, we finally found it ourselves through exploring the Expo floor. I finally got a chance to try out Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter and BitBlot’s Aquaria. Both are excellent games, although Aquaria is the type of game that I’d have to sit down and play for at least an hour or so to get a good feel for, while Everyday Shooter is a pick up and play arena shooter that I could instantly get a feel for. I also got a chance to see Jetro Lauha’s Racing Pitch, a 2D racing game where you make engine noises in a mic and finally meet Miles Tillman from PixelJam. Warren Spector’s session on storytelling was up next so the game playing and schmoozing at IGF ended and we headed over there.

The Future of Storytelling in Next-Generation Game Development, Warren Spector

Warren Spector’s talk was pretty disappointing. It was basically a vague overview of what he would like from storytelling and complaining about how no one is willing to fund the things he really wants to do. He didn’t have much direction and went on a few tangents, but for the most part it was things he has already said about his game design philosophy. He wants to support a healthy mix of linearity and sandbox play through connected sandboxes. One of the take aways from this was using iconic versus realistic characters in games because they are inherently more expressive. Spector complained that he couldn’t get a publisher to fund a game with an iconic art style. I imagine this is because of the style of games and subject matter he tends to tackle, because there are plenty of examples of hit games and products with iconic art styles, just look at Nintendo’s output. Rohit left about 15-20 minutes early to check out Everyday Shooter, I stuck around until the end.

Lunch
After Warren Spector’s talk I headed back over to near the IGF Pavillion to eat lunch with Rohit. He acosted Russ Caroll of Reflexive arcade and Gametunnel about Boxen 3 not making it to the Gametunnel round up, or getting reviewed period, and got a variety of nice excuses. We then sat down and ate lunch, at first among ourselves, but then moving over to a table with Jon Mak, Collin (future proposee), a guy from MTV networks that Mak used to work for, and some other guy. After doing a little pass swapping (a man has to eat, I was there in 2004 so I know how it is) and chatting some, we headed over to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop.

Experimental Gameplay Workshop

Like last year, and I assume since it was first created, the Experimental gameplay workshop was excellent. Speakers included Chris Hecker (this guy will show up a lot…) on the 2006 Indie Game Jam , Heather Kelley, Phil Fish and Damien DiFede on Game Art Montreal , Rod Humble from EA games talking about his experimental projects, A Walk with Max and The Marriage, Alex Butterfield on Kuju Entertainment’s Crush, Kim Swift on Valve Software’s Portal, Frank Lanz on Sopranos A&E connection, Petri Purho of Kloonigames, Darius Kazemi of Boston Game Jam, and Greg Trefry and Nick Fortugno of Come Out and Play.

Gamasutra has a detailed write-up on the entire event, so I’ll skip the details and focus on critique and what really caught my attention. The Indie Game Jam, as always, was hit or miss. This one was much smaller and more personal, taking place at Chris Hecker’s house over Thanksgiving dinner. The theme was audio and Atman Binstock, creator of the 2D physics engine for Indie Game Jam 2, made an impressive sounding audio engine with advice from a sound designer and sound engineer. Hopefully we’ll be able to get a hold of the audio engine source code, because as far as I know the code for the 2D physics engine was never released.

There was a great parody of Gears of War called Ears of War. The gameplay involved an intro where you need to censor your foul mouthed commander and a 3D shooter where you need to make machine gun noises to fire and hum the games theme song to advance. There was also a cool game where you moved a sphere in time with the music and got pretty light shows from dodging lasers and using a shield. The name completely escapes me, so if you know what it was called please comment. In the WTF category was a “game” based on the Brady Bunch with people snoring and making weird noises with the mouse. I’m looking forward to downloading the games and the source code sometime in the next 6 months or a year, but knowing the Indie Game Jam they might never go up .

Game Art Montreal, or GAMMA, also followed an audio theme. Using beat detection technology the entrants created games designed to be played at a party. The contraints were interesting, the games had to be pick up and play multiplayer games and could only use gamepads to avoid people spilling drinks on a keyboard. The only issue with the theme was that beat detection seemed slightly unreliable and most games used it for secondary effects, not truly as a core part of their gameplay. Some of the highlights were I Have Big Balls a funky, abstract sumo wrestling game with a bumpin’ arena, CosmoCrash, a cool looking asteroid dodging game, and Glee, an abstract Processing game.

The Boston game jam had some interesting games, but the most impressive was Shift, a cool mini planet simulator where you build entire civilizations by creating mountains and oceans on a circle and spinning that circle to face the sun. Shift, and all of the Boston Game Jam games, are available on the site, in many cases with full source, so I suggest you check them all out.

The presentations on both Crush and Portal were similar, and limited by the games being commercial products. Portal is an polished commercial version of last year’s IGF student entry Narbacular Drop running in the source engine with Half-Life 2 features, graphics and feel. To my knowledge, most of the Portal team is the same as the Digipen Narbacular Drop team. Crush is a PSP 3D platformer where you literally crush space from 3D to 2D, allowing you access to places that would be otherwise impossible to reach. You can find ample information on both games , so I’ll spare the details. They were both somewhere inbetween advertisements for the game and postmortems.

With Crush, Alex Butterfield hinted at other possibilities like crushing space from any angle and crushing in 4 dimensions. Unfortunately, instead of demonstrating builds with this features implemented, it was just a quick sidenote and the end of his presentation. Both games are innovative, but the talks could have been more interesting. Last year’s Guitar Hero presentation at the Experimental Gameplay workshop that showed a free style mode that didn’t quite work and didn’t quite make it into the game highlights that commercial games can be looked at from a more experimental angle.

Rod Humble’s experiments were interesting abstract games. A Walk with Max was represented him taking his three year old son on a walk. He described it as a failure because it was representational, and would benefit from improved graphics. My dad played a similar game with me when I was that age at the exact time my brother was about to be born and got pwned.

The Marriage is an abstract representation of relationships. Two squares in love need to make connections and avoid problems in their relationship. He described The Marriage as a success because it was an abstract representation of a concept that would not benefit from added graphics or sound. When I first saw him present at the workshop I thought his explainations were BS and Walk with Max seemed more interesting as a game than The Marriage, but I would be proven wrong the next day at Nuances of Design session.

The Gamelab presentation was similar to their Downbeat presentation from 2006. They basically showed the evolution of a new casual game mechanic through a series of prototypes. This year they showed Out of Your Mind, probably the least experimental game of the workshop, but its still interesting to see a new casual game evolve and the iterations they went through.

Overall the workshop was excellent. Kloonigames, Come out and Play and Sopranos A&E Connection were all interesting presentations as well, I just don’t have much commentary on them. The Marriage and A Walk with Max will get much more coverage in Nuances of Design coverage tomorrow.

Booth Crawl
The booth crawl is an event on the expo floor where various companies give out free beer. Its supposed to encourage you to wander around and look at different booths, but we basically stopped by the Red 5 booth because they were the closest to the IGF pavillion with beer and then went back to IGF to chat with indies and play some games before the IGF awards. This is when we played through the level in The Behemoth’s Castle Crashers. This game will be a guarenteed hit on Xbox Live Arcade. We played through the first level four player co-op. The cool thing about it was after killing the boss, you have a fight to the death between players to determine who gets the princess (both Rohit and I got pwned in the end ).  I got stuck on the bottom edge of the screen during the boss fight, a bug they hadn’t seen before, so I did a little QA work for The Behemoth (maybe worth a free copy of Castle Crashers?) At some point we meet up with Hanford Lemoore, I introduce Rohit and we head over to the IGF Awards.

IGF Awards

Once we got to the IGF awards Rohit and Hanford had a long involved conversation about UI design and HCI before the awards started. The host was Andy Schatz all pimped out in a tux. The Independent Games Festival awards were full of great titles this year so competition was fierce. After playing Everyday Shooter we had a feeling it would be doing very well, and it did, winning three awards including game design innovation, audio, and a special GameTap distribution prize. Three Ring software’s Bang Howdy won the technical award and The Behemoth’s Castle Crashers won visual arts. Aquaria won best overall game. There were not just one, but two marriage proposals. One very real serious proposal by a creator of the surprise student showcase winner Toblo and another joke proposal afterward by Jon Mak to his friend Collin, who unfortunately had to turn him down. We wanted to eat and had to drop my stuff off at Rohit’s brother’s place, so we couldn’t stay for the Game Developer’s Choice awards as entertaining as they may have been (too bad I missed Tim Schafer). The next day I would find that my predictions about Gears of War were true at Cliffy B’s iteration of Gears of War talk.

Minna Mingle
After dropping my stuff at Rohit’s brother’s place and eating a large tasty burger while we discussed karma games and using Indian or African aethestics in design, we decide to try to get a cab to Ruby Skye to partake in the Minna Mingle. This is by far the most upscale Minna Mingle I’ve been to, and it really shows how big the casual games industry is. At Minna Mingle I ran into people I’ve met before, including Mike Boeh, Brian Fischer, Tim Scheiman, Action Merchant , Andy Schatz, Hanford Lemoore and Humuhumu as well as meeting a few new interesting people. I finally got a chance to meet Gabe Carter from Oberon and we talked Boxen and a few other things. I can now also attest that Andy Schatz’s skills with women are amazing after watching him try to pick up one of the few women in the place (that alone is worth like 15 points on qatfish.)

One of the sponsors of the party was Unity 3D, creators of an impressive 3D engine that I’ve blogged about before but haven’t actually had the chance to try because I don’t own a Mac. I asked him about the Wii support, a Windows toolset, and support for other platforms like PS3 or Xbox 360. His answer to everything was “we don’t have a timeline, but about 12 months.” I really talked up Unity 3D and he got me free drink, so I owe him to try it out, even if I do wait for the Windows client. We also ran into Cecilio Acosta and Casey Jones from Texas State Technical College. I talked to Brian Peltonen, a “Complexity Model Developer” (best… title… ever) from IcoSystem about random stuff like his A-Life projects. He said he didn’t have any demos online, but I’ll keep an eye out to see if anything gets around. At the end of the night I met Dave from Popcap and George from Gamemill, at least I think I did, neither of them gave me cards. We had an interesting coversation about developing games purely for profit versus developing games to make something truely great that puts you in the history books. Dave kept asking me “why I am here” in a deeper philosophical sense (a few too many drinks perhaps ). I’m not too great with questions like that, at this point I can barely answer “where do you see yourself in 5 years” so the conversation didn’t flow so well.

After the party was over I briefly talked to Adam Harte , a mod developer and podcaster looking to get into the game industry, because he mentioned a game development podcast and I’ve been looking for a good one. He also started to pitch me his superhero game idea (an idea that I would hear in full a couple days later) but we split up before he finished the entire pitch. At the end of the night some of the guys wanted to escape the sausage festivities and go out and find some women, but we were tried (I hadn’t slept the previous night) and had to get up kind of early to make the Gears talk, so we headed back.

That concludes the coverage of Wednesday night. Stay tuned for the insanity of Thursday! Get up early as fuck, experience the Gears of War, and learn the Nuances of game design with the Maw!Soft (BUY BOXEN NOW) crew.

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