Gamebryo for Casual Games

One of the initiatives I've pushed most recently as the Product Manager for Gamebryo at Emergent Game Technologies is making a bunch of waves in the industry:

Gamebryo Casual.

This is the full version of Gamebryo, targeted toward the real-world constraints of casual development timelines and budgets.

I'm stoked about this offering for a bunch of reasons.

First and foremost, I'm absolutely convinced we need to give developers and publishers the best tools so they can make great titles, and we need to meet teams where they're at with budgets, timelines, and other development restrictions.

Secondly, "Casual" is a bit of a misnomer, but the industry knows what it is. It's all of that stuff outside of "big box" development. It's also not "breezy, jump - in - jump - out - with - no - commitment" gameplay -- that's the player's experience with a lot of these titles.

The developer's experience is more along the lines of "holy - crap - I - have - no - money - and - no - time - and - I - have - to - get - a - high-quality - title - out - the - door - yesterday." There's an urgency and a desperation that requires the right titles to rise to the top to help folks see what the developer has to offer.

Gamebryo does that, and now we're raising awareness for casual game development on the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, and PC.

Lotta info follows below, but I'm trying to do at least two things with the recent push.

First, we're raising awareness of the product we've had, and will continue to have, for casual game developers (or whatever the market segment ends up being called).

Second, by way of short-term promotion, we're making it really easy for folks to do multiplatform casual game development. It's not a one-size fits all promotion ("casual" development isn't "hobbyist"), you have to qualify, pricing isn't public, blah blah blah.

But if you're interested, contact Emergent and see if you qualify for this product and promotion.

Keep in mind, this is the same tech being leveraged for the likes of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, Fallout 3 , and Spatterhouse, and is perfectly suited for developers faced with reduced budgets and development schedules who still want to make high-quality titles. Developers still have access to the same tools as big-box devs (content exporter plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, and SoftimageXSI, our Scene Designer and Animation tools, the new Emergent Terrain system, etc.).

Gamebryo's flexible and extensible, so devs can leverage the pieces of the product they want, remove unneeded others, and optimize their titles for their distribution and platform needs.

Speaking o' flexible, Gamebryo's geometry system lets developers export their assets to target platforms and balance maximum detail and minimal download size (more objects for a game with a smaller footprint). The new system has the previous runtime efficiencies, and in version 2.5 we added increased load-time efficiencies (makes it faster). Data files are now smaller, and the end memory representation of those data files can be smaller (with pretty much zero perceptible loss to the end of the user).

Hundreds of titles in virtually every genre have used and are using Gamebryo. Casual developers should have the flexibility to build the title they want, in the genre they want, with the gameplay they want (a small sampling can be found at http://tinyurl.com/EGTCAS). Even better, we're looking for you to create innovative new genres and gameplay models.

Casual titles need to maximize their commercial return. Using Gamebryo, developers can more easily put their same title on multiple platforms, increasing their additional revenue potential without significantly increasing their cash outlay.

And since we do technology integrations with other middleware, developers can leverage other technologies and systems for their use, picking additional tech to meet their game needs and distribution restrictions. Remember this post? Allegorithmic's offering is a great example of Emergent partner tech that meets challenges in the download / digital distro space.

So that's the skinny.

(This has turned out to be a pretty high-profile effort, so I'm curious to see what the competitive reaction is. Lately, other companies have been doing a lot of verbatim lifting of EGT messaging and collateral (which is an Unrealistic way to build credibility, and lacks Vision), so I'm curious to see what "me-tooism" comes in response to Emergent's focused efforts with this offering.)