Thursday, March 08, 2007

GDC 2007: Day 4 ...

  1. Nintendo / Shigeru Miyamoto keynote
  2. Developers Choice Awards
  3. Independent Games Festival Awards
  4. More Warren Spector
  5. How to Pitch an XBLA Game
  6. Chris Taylor says "no more overtime"
  7. Inafune b*tch slaps Clover Studios
  8. Games I'm watching

Again, this is just a sampling of some of the things that caught my attention -- see links at the bottom for more complete coverage for these and other things.

1. Nintendo / Shigeru Miyamoto keynote

Seriously, I can't argue with the Lifetime Achievement Award Miyamoto took to the hotel last night.

A lot of the coverage of his speech today is in that "Live blogging" stuff that trades up-to-the-moment information for any sense of cohesiveness. GameSpot's got a decent summary that pulls out what I want -- a legend's comments on game design and the market (codified as an expansion of the "Nintendo Difference" -- the company's vision).

The 3 key components of the vision / design ethic are "Expanded Audience" (getting "cat people and dog people to play together; seriously); "Balance" (played out in collaboration and team work and interdisciplinary benefits); and "Risk" (and "none of the company's past risks hold a candle to the Wii").

Bridging the corporate vision to his personal vision, it sounds like Miyamoto is all about fun -- but not transient fun so much as creating a lasting, positive upswing for gamers from his games. And he's self-admittedly tenacious about it.

And he said creative vision isn't one element of game design--it is the very essence of it.

Lofty stuff from a guy who makes fun games.

2. Developers Choice Awards

Gears of War topped the GDC Developers Choice Awards, taking Best Game, Technology, and Visual Arts awards.

In news of local import, Austin's sound genius George "The Fat Man" Sanger took the Community Contribution award. He's actually not at all fat.

3. Independent Games Festival Awards

Indie's got their time in the limelight, with perhaps the only generally recognized game being The Behemoth's (Alien Hominid) upcoming XBLA title Castle Crashers, which picked up the Audience Award.

But if you haven't checked out the "Where-the-Wild-Things-Are(esque)" Samorost 2 (Amanita Design) -- which picked up the Best Web Browser Game -- you should.

Also, I really like the Technical Excellence Award winner from Three Rings Design, Bang! Howdy -- a tactical/strategy title that's slick and poppy.

RoboBlitz (another XBLA title) from Naked Sky Entertainment also picked up one of the GameTap awards.

And a mod I had been watching and didn't know was done won the Best Mod award and the Best Single Player FPS Mod -- Cut Corner Company Productions' "Weekday Warrior" Half-Lfe 2 mod (a "corporate office adventure mod", and really a total conversion mod). Who do I get to beat with that crowbar? Seriously, though, check out the site -- it's a slick little work of art in and of itself.

4. More Warren Spector

Like the Warren Spector stuff I posted before? Value more insights from the man?

Good. I respect you more. And I don't even know your name.

Spector spoke at GDC -- again on narrative. And he had some pithy, sometimes tough things to say to about it.

Spector broke out three narrative types

  1. "The rollercoaster", where it feels like a lot is going on, but it's really constructed on non-linearity (I'd put Gears of War in this bucket).
  2. The "Will Wright" -- The players really create the entire narrative (I'd put, uh, Will Wright's games into this; and to a lesser degree, sandbox games; and Crackdown more than others).
  3. Procedurally generated stories -- Games with a mutable story, and allow gamers to "explore the innerspace of personal relationships as much as the outerspace of the game world". Scary, that.

He criticized his peers for not offering enough non-violent play options -- "I want the opportunity to play a game and not play the part of Vin Diesel" (And I want to be able to play Crackdown without killing innocents). He also advocated the building of fully explorable worlds, not superficial environments that are "just an excuse to shoot stuff" (this "Massive D" movement -- BLACK, upcoming Stranglehold and The Force Unleashed -- may be guilty of this, but wicked fun).

My favorite quote is probably his directed at developers:

"Get over yourself. Your story isn't that interesting. Trust the players a little bit ... let them off rails. ... This is as much a design issue as a technology issue at this point."

Not that I have anything against developers -- I just think this is an applicable quote for all of us (writers, designers, developers artists, voice actors, and players).

5. How to Pitch an XBLA Game

Here's a gift -- get from the horse's mouth how to get a game to them. If I'd waited 4 months, I wouldn't have had to figure it all out on my own as Microsoft was doing an internal transition.

And it's changing, thanks to Microsoft's evolving mindset and inclusion of XNA.

The bummer (at least from the IGN coverage), is the revelation that while "Microsoft has funded the development of XBLA titles in the past (Small Arms), they aren't doing so at this time."

6. Chris Taylor says "no more overtime"

I manage development teams, and quality of life for me and for them is important to me. So I hooked onto Gas Powered Games honcho (and Supreme Commander designer) Chris Taylor's success story of developing under sane hours.

"We would have made a worse game [Supreme Commander] if we had worked 14 hours a day. Dungeon Siege would have been a better game if we worked the way we did on Supreme Commander. It's just the right way to work, and it puts fun back in the business."

My experience is insane hours occur for a lot of reasons (poor scheduling, inappropriate staffing -- numbers and skills, etc.) but more often (and more severely from a breakdown in communication between the business and the technical folks, where business folks are trying to meet bottom lines and technical folks are stuck on the "you can't have a baby in one month if you add 8 more women".

Or, at BigHugeCorp, I see the breakdown when product decisions are made for a development organization -- and the rules aren't the same. I have to think there's a nigh perfect mapping to the developer/publisher relationship in the video game vertical market.

7. Inafune b**ch slaps Clover Studios

Not really, but it makes for an interesting title. Plus he kind of did.

When Capcom R&D head Keiji Inafune was questioned about the closing of innovative design studio Clover (Okami, Viewtiful Joe), he blamed the Clover producer(s).

The interview has an interesting breakdown in what Inafune sees in the roles of Director versus Producer, and I'm curious as to how much of this is Japan-games-industry-centric.

Games are not a work of art. It's actually a product. If we think of it as a work of art, then... when we think about Picasso and Van Gogh's paintings, the end result is beauty, so it doesn't matter if you sell it or not. However for games, it's a product. It is a commodity. The producer has to think about that.
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The producers work is to make the team make good games and then sell those games. The producer has to do the promotion. They have to think about the promotion. The producer has to take those good games and think about how to deliver it to as many users as possible.
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Great directors may exist in great numbers, however, if you don't have a good producer it won't lead to sales. And I think this Clover Studios example is a really good example of that.

Inafune also revealed that Capcom offered to take those roles for Clover, but Clover refused. I wonder if there's more there.

Now Inafune is the guy behind many stolen hours of my life (a la Dead Rising, Lost Planet, and Mega Man), so I'm inclined to listen a wee bit.

8. Games I'm watching

I mentioned in my first GDC post there are a number of games I'm watching, and several made GDC appearances.

Killzone 2 actually showed during Sony's Edge presentation (their suite of PS3 development tools). I've heard mixed things. Like some of the footage sucked. And that it's like "BLACK for the next generation" (which will have some competition, since Electronic Arts confirmed in a conference call last year that there's an actual now-gen BLACK sequel in the works).

Tabula Rasa got a lot of time, both with new video footage and insight from Richard Garriott. After a redirect a year ago, the game sounds like it'll be an MMO with less of the MMO annoyance and more of the single-player bennies for which I'm looking. According to GameSpot coverage, the "game will make smart use of instanced content and branching story-driven quests to help players feel like they're more involved in the game's story." And in a move that might make his peer Warren Spector nod and smile, this might "also to offer a more mature overall story that offers moral ambiguity and shades of gray, as opposed to the conventional structure of most online games."

Hellgate: London continues to look great, and introduced the Templar class, which looks pretty sweet.

My other watched games haven't seemed to have made it in any noticeable form to GDC.

Except Fable 2.

Fable 2, Peter Molyneux revealed, will have 3 big features -- but he only talked about the implemented one (I think he's learned since the first Fable). And people are badmouthing it online because its ... a dog. But it's not just a dog. We're talking a Black & White AI flavor of dog. We're talking there-is-no-HUD-in-the-game, and the dog is a little map finder. We're talking he put the four-legged furred thing in there to create a form of emotion -- a form of love -- for the player. And there is some brilliance in many of his statements. About game design. About people. About life.

The dog won't leave you. It will follow you if you leave it. It will fight for you in battle. It will trail after you whimpering and bleeding and devoted.

And he hinted at downloadable content related to the dog.

Amazing stuff. Add Spore and whatever the hell Junction Point Studios is doing (and Mass Effect and the like) and we've got some heady stuff coming up.

To get caught up, check out the updating GDC summaries below (and if you know of more / better ones, let me know):

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