GDC 2006
GDC 2006 Notes and Lessons.
GDC 2006 was kind of an off year. It felt like the industry was holding its breath, waiting for the Revolution and the PS3 to come out so it could start chugging again.
Every year, I try to pick out the one phrase or word that would make GDC a grand drinking game. The phrase for this year was “Next Generation”, followed by “Casual Games”. These two topics were the core of the conversational whirlpools that flowed throughout the conference. The next generation (drink!) is upon us, and everyone is watching to see what will happen, and, with the huge success of XBOX360 Arcade, a good bulk of studios are thinking of adding a casual game to its development cycle to add a stream of revenue. In fact, I heard that Midway is going to be creating a specific casual games studio meant to port all of its old arcade titles over to the new formats.
For programmers, the core topic for this convention was “Tools”. Everyone is refocusing their efforts on getting better tools out to content providers like Designers and Artists so that content-heavy Next Generation (drink!) titles can have faster pipelines from creation to realization.
For artists, the acquisition of Alias/Wavefront by Autodesk was very much in evidence, as Softimage raced to become the number 2 in the industry. A lot of artist’s middleware was being peddled on the expo floor, including facial expression, mocap and animation software. Facial expression was very big this year, it seemed.
For designers, there was a lot of massively multiplayer stuff, as the bulk of future games will have at least some rudimentary MMO-like attributes, including dedicated forums, guilds, leaderboards, economies and other aspects of the communication metagame.
Monday, March 20th:
Emotion Boot Camp: Nicole Lazzaro and Katharine Isbister. Amazingly enough, I went to the same tutorial Josie went to. This tutorial covered putting more emotion into your game.
Highlights: A professional actor showing what can be done to show emotion using only body stance while wearing wooden Balinese masks.
Lessons learned: Stance and Posture can show a lot of emotion. These stances and postures start with feet placement, and build up into the body. The wrong foot placement can muddy the intent and diffuse the emotion you want to show. Also, factoring the mass of the person into your animations can create better immersion. Josie and I thought this was fairly applicable to the robots in our game, especially the big Ice Robots. This was a good tutorial for beginning animators.
Tuesday, March 21st:
The Changing Landscape: Navigating Between the Big Console Dev Deals and Other Formats: Jim Charne and others: This was a business and legal talk where lawyers and business owners talked about their thoughts on the past year in terms of the business side of the gaming industry.
Lesson Learned: The takeaway I got from this talk was that third party developers are a little nervous about Next-Gen titles. Given that these deals are generally around 20-30 million dollars, it was conjectured that, to make a profit, you would need to sell about 2.5 million games. If the console you are aiming at only has 1 million units out in the field when you ship (such as during launch), each person who bought one of those consoles would have to buy 2.5 copies of your game before you saw any money. On the other hand, 2D titles (not 3D, but 2D) for the PC are seeing tremendous growth, and the success of the XBOX360 Live Arcade is driving a lot of people to make casual games. Probably too many people.
Wednesday, March 22nd: Starting on Wednesday, the lecture portion of the conference began, with about 5-6 lectures per day.
Roundtable: MMO Economies: This roundtable talked about how to achieve Pareto Optimality, or perfect economic balance, in massively multiplayer games. Steps to achieve this are:
1. Numerous Buyers and Sellers
2. Homogeneity of Product
3. Freedom of Entry and Exit into market
4. Perfect Information – being all the same information. No one is able to be an inside trader.
5. Low or no transaction cost
6. Infinitely divisible goods (you can buy as much or as little as you want).
Overall, the lesson here was that, if you are going to have any economic trading in your game, it won’t work (well) unless you build the tools necessary to achieve the above conditions.
PS3 Keynote: I’ll just run down the takeaway from this:
1) PSP:
a. Flash enabled browser coming soon.
b. Ability to download games from the web onto memory sticks coming soon.
c. Connectivity to the PS3 like the Gameboy Advance to the Gamecube.
2) PS1:
a. We’ve stopped making them, but they are still selling like hotcakes in third-world countries even after 12 years!
3) PS2: Will continue to support the PS2 for a while yet. Look at those PS1s!
4) Graph: PS2 outsells PS1 even though presented at a higher pricepoint:
a. Meaning: PS3 is going to be more expensive than PS2.
5) PS3: Isn’t it pretty? Wow! OOOOH! AAAAAH!
a. Hey, the internet connectivity will make you lots of money! Let me show you charts! Look at all those revenue streams!
i. By the way, the internet server stuff is being made by SOE and Gamespy. We just thought of it a month or two ago, so it will be perfect when we launch. Just watch!
Panel: Developing Franchise Properties for Simultaneous Release in Comics, Games and Film: This panel had a bunch of people on it, most notably the president of Top Cow Comics (Rob Liefeild’s comics) which makes “The Darkeness” which, I believe, we are being accused of making.
Takeaway: There wasn’t much to the panel until the very end. Mostly, launching a successful Franchise that is equally valuable in many different medias has never been done. Usually, there is success in one media, and then it spreads into another. Sometimes, like with Men In Black, the initial media (comics) isn’t successful, but the follow-up media is. Further, when you launch something in multiple media, you need to add it all up: movie + comic + game + soundtrack + whatever = Expensive. Personally, I think the film industry doesn’t think of games as adding to a franchise. I think they feel it is simply “Merchandising”. Anyway, thanks to a good question from my friend Mike, the audience found out that a 4-part comic mini-series can cost as little as $50,000.00. If needed, you can pitch, write and publish a comic within 2 weeks (quality may vary). Finally, a single half-hour animated tv episode or pilot can cost around $300,000.00 and up depending on where you have it made.
Roundtable: Rights and Responsibilities of Video Game Creators: This roundtable focused on the Hot Coffee incident and how it effected making games. It was a good conversation, having Doug Lowenstein, spokesman of the ESA, speaking up about the fact that we should defend our right to make any game we want, but we shouldn’t whine if we produce stuff that makes everyone angry.
Thursday, March 23rd.
Lecture: Designing Tabula Rasa: Lessons from the World of MMOs: Richard Garriot. Takeaway:
1) Only have one “vision guy”. Too many cause delays.
2) Hiring only veterans creates a “too many cooks” situation that can cause difficulties.
3) Americans don’t get Asian architecture. When we try to model it, it always comes out phony looking and cartoony.
4) Americans aren’t that familiar with wuxia-style Chinese film, and find games about it strange.
5) Tabula Rasa will still ship though, dammit! Really!
Lecture: How to Generate PR for your games and build a franchise for company skills: Sue Bohle.
Takeaway: A good PR agency can help you advertise your game in a lot of good ways. If you do it yourself, always be respectful of the press, always pitch your product as part of an interesting story (especially to columnists), and try to find the balance between being forgotten and being a nuisance.
Roundtable: Counter-Intuitive Creative Direction: Harvey Smith: Takeaway: Creative Directors really don’t have any idea of what they are supposed to do, so they “wing it” a lot, and try to use their power for good, not evil.
Roundtable: The State of Game Industry Crediting: This was my roundtable, as I’m chairman of the IGDA Credits and Standards committee. Basically, the focus of this committee is to try to standardize the titles and roles of the jobs in the games industry so that when we label ourselves as “producers” or “designers” or “lead technical artist” people will know what that means. Too often, we get credited as something like “lead script monkey” and find that that doesn’t have any weight when it comes to writing it down on a resume, as potential employers have no idea what that means.
In any case, I did two of these roundtables, and we had very good conversations about the current state of game crediting and what we should do in the future. I was surprised that, at one of the roundtables, I had attendants from the Writer’s Guild of America and the Grammy association, both of whom are seeing their members (writers and musicians) enter the game field. They are concerned that their members are being credited correctly and are wondering if we, as the game industry, are being as professional about it as they would like. Other topics of conversation included the importance of correctly crediting people who work on mobile games, casual games, serious games and ports.
Panel: Burn Baby, Burn, a Developer’s Rant: This panel was also done last year, but with different industry veterans serving up the rant. The panelists ranted about all the pin-up models on the conference walls, about how silly it is to make games extremely realistic, how game developers should try to recognize the business side of their titles before pitching them, how everyone should stop ranting and start doing something positive, and how the game industry is dead and interactive fiction will be the predominant media of all time. It was pretty fun, except for that last one, which was just crazy and was treated as such by the hecklers in the audience.
Friday, March 24th
Lecture: Designing to promote Intentional Play: Clint Hocking. Takeaway: this talk basically covered designing game systems that allow your players to use emergent behavior to create their own games. Not an incredibly valuable talk, as the people who will do this comprise about .005% of your audience. However, those guys can create stuff with your game that can lead to a lot of interest in your more normal players in the way of gameplay movies and such.
Roundtable: Security and Privacy in Games: Elonka Dunin. Takeaway: If you must take personal information, try to keep that information separate from in-game information so you can respect that person’s privacy. Laws for privacy are much stronger in Europe than they are here. Never trust anything from the client, only the server.
Lecture: Defining the Assassin: Designing Next-Gen gameplay in Theory and in Practice: Takeaway: This lecture talked about a new Ubisoft game from the designer of Prince of Persia. They showed us early gameplay examples of some of the physics implemented in their game that they feel will really enhance design. I think the best thing was a converter program that made every bump that extended more than a couple inches from a flat surface become a “climbable” object. Other cool things were body physics that made a character moving through a crowd of people look more realistic. Otherwise, this was a lecture that tried to say that more realism = more fun, which the audience wasn’t buying.
Panel: Game Studies Download: Top 10 Research Findings: Takeaway: This detailed ten research studies from colleges around the world about game-related subjects. Many of these didn’t really have a lot of use in them, but they were all very interesting. For the sake of completeness, I’ll copy someone else’s notes here so you can see what the research findings were: these notes were taken from here.
As always, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t get to go to, and wish I did. GDC is always well worth going to, especially as it really invigorates your desire to make better games. It’s always easy to slip into dealing with the small stuff of your job; moving a vert here, placing an object there, writing a subroutine to cause some small effect over there. GDC allows you to take a step back and think about your overall objectives for your games. It also gives you a good taste of the business side of things, as well as giving you an inside look at what everyone else is trying to do to stand out in the field.
GDC 2006 was kind of an off year. It felt like the industry was holding its breath, waiting for the Revolution and the PS3 to come out so it could start chugging again.
Every year, I try to pick out the one phrase or word that would make GDC a grand drinking game. The phrase for this year was “Next Generation”, followed by “Casual Games”. These two topics were the core of the conversational whirlpools that flowed throughout the conference. The next generation (drink!) is upon us, and everyone is watching to see what will happen, and, with the huge success of XBOX360 Arcade, a good bulk of studios are thinking of adding a casual game to its development cycle to add a stream of revenue. In fact, I heard that Midway is going to be creating a specific casual games studio meant to port all of its old arcade titles over to the new formats.
For programmers, the core topic for this convention was “Tools”. Everyone is refocusing their efforts on getting better tools out to content providers like Designers and Artists so that content-heavy Next Generation (drink!) titles can have faster pipelines from creation to realization.
For artists, the acquisition of Alias/Wavefront by Autodesk was very much in evidence, as Softimage raced to become the number 2 in the industry. A lot of artist’s middleware was being peddled on the expo floor, including facial expression, mocap and animation software. Facial expression was very big this year, it seemed.
For designers, there was a lot of massively multiplayer stuff, as the bulk of future games will have at least some rudimentary MMO-like attributes, including dedicated forums, guilds, leaderboards, economies and other aspects of the communication metagame.
Monday, March 20th:
Emotion Boot Camp: Nicole Lazzaro and Katharine Isbister. Amazingly enough, I went to the same tutorial Josie went to. This tutorial covered putting more emotion into your game.
Highlights: A professional actor showing what can be done to show emotion using only body stance while wearing wooden Balinese masks.
Lessons learned: Stance and Posture can show a lot of emotion. These stances and postures start with feet placement, and build up into the body. The wrong foot placement can muddy the intent and diffuse the emotion you want to show. Also, factoring the mass of the person into your animations can create better immersion. Josie and I thought this was fairly applicable to the robots in our game, especially the big Ice Robots. This was a good tutorial for beginning animators.
Tuesday, March 21st:
The Changing Landscape: Navigating Between the Big Console Dev Deals and Other Formats: Jim Charne and others: This was a business and legal talk where lawyers and business owners talked about their thoughts on the past year in terms of the business side of the gaming industry.
Lesson Learned: The takeaway I got from this talk was that third party developers are a little nervous about Next-Gen titles. Given that these deals are generally around 20-30 million dollars, it was conjectured that, to make a profit, you would need to sell about 2.5 million games. If the console you are aiming at only has 1 million units out in the field when you ship (such as during launch), each person who bought one of those consoles would have to buy 2.5 copies of your game before you saw any money. On the other hand, 2D titles (not 3D, but 2D) for the PC are seeing tremendous growth, and the success of the XBOX360 Live Arcade is driving a lot of people to make casual games. Probably too many people.
Wednesday, March 22nd: Starting on Wednesday, the lecture portion of the conference began, with about 5-6 lectures per day.
Roundtable: MMO Economies: This roundtable talked about how to achieve Pareto Optimality, or perfect economic balance, in massively multiplayer games. Steps to achieve this are:
1. Numerous Buyers and Sellers
2. Homogeneity of Product
3. Freedom of Entry and Exit into market
4. Perfect Information – being all the same information. No one is able to be an inside trader.
5. Low or no transaction cost
6. Infinitely divisible goods (you can buy as much or as little as you want).
Overall, the lesson here was that, if you are going to have any economic trading in your game, it won’t work (well) unless you build the tools necessary to achieve the above conditions.
PS3 Keynote: I’ll just run down the takeaway from this:
1) PSP:
a. Flash enabled browser coming soon.
b. Ability to download games from the web onto memory sticks coming soon.
c. Connectivity to the PS3 like the Gameboy Advance to the Gamecube.
2) PS1:
a. We’ve stopped making them, but they are still selling like hotcakes in third-world countries even after 12 years!
3) PS2: Will continue to support the PS2 for a while yet. Look at those PS1s!
4) Graph: PS2 outsells PS1 even though presented at a higher pricepoint:
a. Meaning: PS3 is going to be more expensive than PS2.
5) PS3: Isn’t it pretty? Wow! OOOOH! AAAAAH!
a. Hey, the internet connectivity will make you lots of money! Let me show you charts! Look at all those revenue streams!
i. By the way, the internet server stuff is being made by SOE and Gamespy. We just thought of it a month or two ago, so it will be perfect when we launch. Just watch!
Panel: Developing Franchise Properties for Simultaneous Release in Comics, Games and Film: This panel had a bunch of people on it, most notably the president of Top Cow Comics (Rob Liefeild’s comics) which makes “The Darkeness” which, I believe, we are being accused of making.
Takeaway: There wasn’t much to the panel until the very end. Mostly, launching a successful Franchise that is equally valuable in many different medias has never been done. Usually, there is success in one media, and then it spreads into another. Sometimes, like with Men In Black, the initial media (comics) isn’t successful, but the follow-up media is. Further, when you launch something in multiple media, you need to add it all up: movie + comic + game + soundtrack + whatever = Expensive. Personally, I think the film industry doesn’t think of games as adding to a franchise. I think they feel it is simply “Merchandising”. Anyway, thanks to a good question from my friend Mike, the audience found out that a 4-part comic mini-series can cost as little as $50,000.00. If needed, you can pitch, write and publish a comic within 2 weeks (quality may vary). Finally, a single half-hour animated tv episode or pilot can cost around $300,000.00 and up depending on where you have it made.
Roundtable: Rights and Responsibilities of Video Game Creators: This roundtable focused on the Hot Coffee incident and how it effected making games. It was a good conversation, having Doug Lowenstein, spokesman of the ESA, speaking up about the fact that we should defend our right to make any game we want, but we shouldn’t whine if we produce stuff that makes everyone angry.
Thursday, March 23rd.
Lecture: Designing Tabula Rasa: Lessons from the World of MMOs: Richard Garriot. Takeaway:
1) Only have one “vision guy”. Too many cause delays.
2) Hiring only veterans creates a “too many cooks” situation that can cause difficulties.
3) Americans don’t get Asian architecture. When we try to model it, it always comes out phony looking and cartoony.
4) Americans aren’t that familiar with wuxia-style Chinese film, and find games about it strange.
5) Tabula Rasa will still ship though, dammit! Really!
Lecture: How to Generate PR for your games and build a franchise for company skills: Sue Bohle.
Takeaway: A good PR agency can help you advertise your game in a lot of good ways. If you do it yourself, always be respectful of the press, always pitch your product as part of an interesting story (especially to columnists), and try to find the balance between being forgotten and being a nuisance.
Roundtable: Counter-Intuitive Creative Direction: Harvey Smith: Takeaway: Creative Directors really don’t have any idea of what they are supposed to do, so they “wing it” a lot, and try to use their power for good, not evil.
Roundtable: The State of Game Industry Crediting: This was my roundtable, as I’m chairman of the IGDA Credits and Standards committee. Basically, the focus of this committee is to try to standardize the titles and roles of the jobs in the games industry so that when we label ourselves as “producers” or “designers” or “lead technical artist” people will know what that means. Too often, we get credited as something like “lead script monkey” and find that that doesn’t have any weight when it comes to writing it down on a resume, as potential employers have no idea what that means.
In any case, I did two of these roundtables, and we had very good conversations about the current state of game crediting and what we should do in the future. I was surprised that, at one of the roundtables, I had attendants from the Writer’s Guild of America and the Grammy association, both of whom are seeing their members (writers and musicians) enter the game field. They are concerned that their members are being credited correctly and are wondering if we, as the game industry, are being as professional about it as they would like. Other topics of conversation included the importance of correctly crediting people who work on mobile games, casual games, serious games and ports.
Panel: Burn Baby, Burn, a Developer’s Rant: This panel was also done last year, but with different industry veterans serving up the rant. The panelists ranted about all the pin-up models on the conference walls, about how silly it is to make games extremely realistic, how game developers should try to recognize the business side of their titles before pitching them, how everyone should stop ranting and start doing something positive, and how the game industry is dead and interactive fiction will be the predominant media of all time. It was pretty fun, except for that last one, which was just crazy and was treated as such by the hecklers in the audience.
Friday, March 24th
Lecture: Designing to promote Intentional Play: Clint Hocking. Takeaway: this talk basically covered designing game systems that allow your players to use emergent behavior to create their own games. Not an incredibly valuable talk, as the people who will do this comprise about .005% of your audience. However, those guys can create stuff with your game that can lead to a lot of interest in your more normal players in the way of gameplay movies and such.
Roundtable: Security and Privacy in Games: Elonka Dunin. Takeaway: If you must take personal information, try to keep that information separate from in-game information so you can respect that person’s privacy. Laws for privacy are much stronger in Europe than they are here. Never trust anything from the client, only the server.
Lecture: Defining the Assassin: Designing Next-Gen gameplay in Theory and in Practice: Takeaway: This lecture talked about a new Ubisoft game from the designer of Prince of Persia. They showed us early gameplay examples of some of the physics implemented in their game that they feel will really enhance design. I think the best thing was a converter program that made every bump that extended more than a couple inches from a flat surface become a “climbable” object. Other cool things were body physics that made a character moving through a crowd of people look more realistic. Otherwise, this was a lecture that tried to say that more realism = more fun, which the audience wasn’t buying.
Panel: Game Studies Download: Top 10 Research Findings: Takeaway: This detailed ten research studies from colleges around the world about game-related subjects. Many of these didn’t really have a lot of use in them, but they were all very interesting. For the sake of completeness, I’ll copy someone else’s notes here so you can see what the research findings were: these notes were taken from here.
As always, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t get to go to, and wish I did. GDC is always well worth going to, especially as it really invigorates your desire to make better games. It’s always easy to slip into dealing with the small stuff of your job; moving a vert here, placing an object there, writing a subroutine to cause some small effect over there. GDC allows you to take a step back and think about your overall objectives for your games. It also gives you a good taste of the business side of things, as well as giving you an inside look at what everyone else is trying to do to stand out in the field.
3 Comments:
Great stuff as usual John.
Thanks, Jonny! Amazing that I still have people checking my blog...
Not quite as often, but I still check. :) How's the new game coming? I didn't see any announcement yet.
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