ION 08: Understanding the Online Gamer

Edward Hunter, comScore

Summary

Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.

A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” – both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in bigger and worth more money.

LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.

ION 08: WoW vs. Facebook: Is social networking the new casual game?

Nicole Lazzaro

Summary

I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.

Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.

ION08: Measuring Secureness

Slides from my second ION talk are here (this was the last session on the last day, so very few people made it along – slides for the first talk (which are probably what you’re looking for) are here). I don’t think anyone blogged this talk – sorry!

Advice to students making games?

I’m helping out with a student game-programming competition at the moment – Dare 2 Be Digital – and we’ve just had a day of judging pitches from teams, trying to decide which ones to allow into the full competition. During the pitch process, a few pieces of recurring advice came to mind. We were allowed to advise, but since the day was mostly about deciding who to let through to the next round, there was very little time left over to give each team any specific comments (we had to focus instead on asking searching questions :)). For those that get through to the next round, they’ll get properly and intensively mentored, so it should be fine but I thought I’d throw my thoughts up here (and maybe some readers will want to add to them?)

ION08: Game Frameworks for Rapid Prototyping and Empowering Designers

Robert Mitchell, Sony Online Entertainment

Summary

Interesting to see what they’re doing, we’ve been looking at a lot of similar stuff recently. If I were in their position I’d want to try hacking the IDE to make it integrate with their build system directly – the speaker said that highly integrated build systems are a must for this stuff, but that doing everything inside the IDE with no external clicks or actions (like a “check in to perforce” action) was also essential. You can’t do both 100% without modifying the IDE; I’ve done that before for stuff we did for PXC, and it works like a dream, ONCE you’ve got it working ;).

The Game Conference Conglomerate Feed of Awesomeness

I’ve been nagging game developers to writeup every game-conference session they go to, and blog it. I think this will serve a bunch of extremely valuable purposes, including:

  • make sure that good talks and speakers get their work indexed by google; google isn’t great at finding stuff inside Powerpoint slides, and conferences only have a 30%-60% hit rate on managing to get the slides online anyway!
  • provide rich, public, feedback on what’s both good and bad in talks, making it easier for ALL speakers to improve their technique and content choices in future.
  • get the honest feedback of industry insiders on what people are saying and doing at conferences, instead of only getting the opinions of journalists and players. Most of us in the industry have lots of extra non-public information about the context of what people are or should be doing. We can’t necessarily say that explicitly, but we can let it inform our judgements and intrepretations of what people say and present.
Categories
computer games

ION08: John Smedley keynote – Reinventing the MMO

John Smedley, Sony Online Entertainment

Summary

Free Realms is generically a combined Runescape / Club Penguin clone with strong elements of Black and White – but all done in the EQ 3D engine (at least the graphical quality appears straightforward EQ client level of quality – low poly.

The Agency is a spy game set in a very direct clone of Team Fortress 2, but a bit simplified and less polished. Which is not a bad thing – TF2 is exceptional, but themed as nothing more or less than a quick fast battle – bolting on a more traditional game (by adding the spy game parts) could make for a very nice game.

Categories
computer games conferences ION 2008

ION08 – Changing a Live Game: Lessons Learned and Techniques Applied

Moderator: Jason Roberts, 38 Studios
Steve Danuser, 38 Studios
Darius Kazemi, Orbus Gameworks
Troy Hewitt , Flying Lab
Osma Ahvenlampi, Sulake

Summary

This was a surprisingly good session – not only was it 9am in the morning, the night after the official conference party, but it was also a panel session (which, as several people were commenting to me yesterday, tend to be bland and sucky at games conferences. My own experience is that moderators of panels at games conferences often have silly / selfish reasons for the panel, and so they do a poor job. e.g. when they admit that they just want to meet / befriend / privately interrogate a particular person, so they create a panel session).

Categories
computer games conferences games industry GDC 2008 ION 2008

New writeups for a games conference – ION 2008

(Cross-posting to the GDC 2008 tag so it shows up in the RSS feed)

I’m at ION 2008 at the moment, the conference-formerly-known-as-Online-GDC. Just like with GDC, I’m doing full writeups for each session I’m attending. Watch this tag / RSS feed…

Categories
computer games conferences games industry ION 2008 web 2.0

ION08: Web 2.0 – How I learned to stop worrying and love the internet

No writeup from me (hey, I was giving the talk, I can’t do *everything*), but there’s already a good almost-transcript up over at massively.com which gets the gist of things pretty well.

To go along with that, here’s the full slides from the talk (6 Mb). The originals were Keynote (OS X only, much better software for actually giving presentations – has some special features that Powerpoint 2007 still doesn’t have), but I’ve exported them to PowerPoint so that everyone can easily read them – so some of the fancy anims have disappeared and some graphics might be slightly skewed.

Download: Web 2.0 – how i learned to stop worrying v1.1

Categories
Uncategorized

Java Web Start / JNLP maker

A few years ago I wrote a web-service that would automatically create JNLP files, making it much easier to deploy java applications. They’re just XML files, but they have some very odd syntactical quirks and can be a pain in the ass to get working correctly. This post has an early alpha version that works as a downloadable application you can run from your desktop.

Categories
agile dev-process games industry

Problems to Avoid as a Scrum Project Customer

(I’m quoting a very handy short extract from Clinton Keith’s December 2007 Gamasutra article, so that I can find it again easily later. Clinton is/was the CTO of High Moon Studios, and is probably the most well-known proponent of Scrum in the games industry. Rather than wade through the whole article when I want to pass on some of his advice, I wanted to be able to copy/paste the relevant sub-bits)

Categories
agile dev-process games industry

Problems to Avoid When Introducing Scrum to Customers

(I’m quoting a very handy short extract from Clinton Keith’s December 2007 Gamasutra article, so that I can find it again easily later. Clinton is/was the CTO of High Moon Studios, and is probably the most well-known proponent of Scrum in the games industry. Rather than wade through the whole article when I want to pass on some of his advice, I wanted to be able to copy/paste the relevant sub-bits)

Categories
computer games games industry

“Games are mainstream. Drown, or learn to swim.”

We’ve won; get over it … says Dr. Bartle (although if you’re reading this blog because of any interest in MMO’s and don’t know who RB is already, then … you have some reading to do).

Categories
alternate reality games computer games games design

Review of The (Former) General (part of an ARG)

Introduction

Another story – The (Former) General – has been released as part of Penguin/STS’s current ARG, We Tell Stories.

This story, and the website it comes from, is all part of an ARG, from two of the key people (Dan and Adrian Hon) behind Perplex City (PXC). So … expect misinformation, deliberate errors, and stenography. I’m not playing the game (sadly; just too busy with other things at the moment), so I’m interpretting this completely cold.

Categories
computer games massively multiplayer mmog links networking programming system architecture

New page – MMOG Development Links

With some WordPress-Fu, I’ve added a page that’s a category and auto-includes links with custom meta-information.

Or, in other words, there’s now a page where I can effortlessly post all my various bookmarked links to do with MMO development – and add my own commentary to each link – which you can’t ordinarily do. Which is why it’s taken me some time to get around to it (previous efforts to do this without customizing WordPress, or using plugins only, failed).

The (practically empty) page in all it’s (non-)glory can be found here:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/category/mmog-dev/

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting much more stuff to it. I hope.

Categories
network programming

How to hack an MMO (Raph Koster)

“The first thing to realize is that encryption of the data stream isn’t going to stop anyone serious.” – this page lists half a dozen conceptual ways that people will try to hack your MMO. It’s nothing like as exhaustive as the title suggests, but given it’s on Raph’s blog, the comments section is likely to pile up with many different additional concepts and information from world + dog.

Categories
agile devdiary programming

Writing games in Korean – part 3

Computer grammars, Unicode in Eclipse, and problems with Java’s XML parsers…

Categories
conferences

[OT] Places to eat in Brighton

It happens quite often that I get a “surprise” dinner: friends turn up in Brighton and want to try out the great local food I … bore on about too often … or there’s an impromptu work event, or just people visiting the office want to know where’s good to go. At the last minute. When I’m walking out of the office, and I get a mental block and can’t think of anywhere.

So … from now on, I’ll be prepared. I’m writing it down here so I can find it later. By the magic of google, I’m going to explicitly mention “adams places to eat in brighton” (should be able to google that later; sod bookmarks and delicious, I’ve got an indexed blog).

That’s Brighton, England, in case anyone is wondering. This list might even be *useful* for some people come the Develop Conference this summer…

Categories
bitching web 2.0

Antiquated RSS feeds (Scott Hartsman, I’m looking at you)

I found Scott’s blog the other week, and liked it.

So, I added it to my feed reader.

Now, I’m removing it, because the way he’s got his RSS setup – http://www.hartsman.com/feed – is unreadable (literally – only the first 100 words or so of each post is included, the rest is all missing).

Incidentally, this is why – after many years of using the site as a primary news source – I no longer read Gamedev.net (feed) : a site that resorts to hiding its information and news behind extra links, sacrificing usability to gain advertising money, is not one I have time for. There are plenty of people who’ll provide the info I want in an easy manner, without this jumping through hoops.

Sigh. I have a feed reader to read feeds, not to get a “free sample of your brilliance” that I then have to go to a web browser to be allowed to actually read in full…