AGDS 2006: Tracks
Opportunities in Serious Games
Speaker: Noah Falstein
Track: Business
Serious Games are games that have a purpose beyond entertainment - often training, education, or research-oriented. Whether you are new to the games industry and looking for an area to specialize in, or an industry veteran, hoping to utilize your work experience in a new career direction, Serious Games may be the choice for you. This talk is designed to guide game industry people who are curious about what this new field may offer to them.
Dealing with Scope - the Time, Quality and Resources Problem
Speaker: Feargus Urquhart
Track: Production
As teams have gotten larger, games more complicated and budgets skyrocketing, how can a development team control projects? The key is focusing on the scope of a project by planning for it, managing it and always understanding where it is and where it is going. Looking at such games as Fallout, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2, methods for understanding and managing scope will be given with specific examples that can be taken away and applied to projects starting up or already in production.
Developing Games to Fill a Niche Market
Speaker: Thanit Anantasomboon
Track: Business
As the cost of development of games increase due to both technology and user's expectation, smaller game development studios find that they have to adapt to keep up with the changing times. Niche markets are areas in which smaller game development studios can find their ground and development successful products.
In this session, game developers talk about their experiences, their technology decisions, implementation considerations, constraints, and a short post-mortem on their decisions.
Open source Console Development. Hello world and beyond
Speaker: Felix Bohmann
Track: Technical
Programming games for the PC is one thing. Consoles are a different story. Imposing limits on memory usage, graphics pipelines and almost all other areas of game development as well. While doing licensed development for any of the consoles requires big budgets, concepts and generally a strong industry background, the open source community has created very useable toolchains and SDKs allowing individuals to step into the world of MIPS processors, vector units, video output formats and DMA streams. Although this might sounds scary at the beginning, it is a great way to gather knowledge needed to successfully develop games on limited platforms. This presentation will show what's available and give a quick glimpse on how to use it.
Lipsync and Facial Animation Systems: Choosing what works for you
Speaker: Alexander Calero
Track: Technical
Lipsync and facial animation is an area in game development that has a lot of room for improvement. There are a variety of ways for generating lipsync and facial animation. There are manual, automated and hybrid systems. This session will discuss the features of each different system type as well as their strengths and weaknesses in the field of game development.
This session will give participants the knowledge to more easily choose the right system for their projects.
The Insider Information on Working with Publishers
Speaker: Kristine CoCo
Track: Business
This lecture will cover what Midway expects from the vendors it works with. The speaker will share details about Midway’s internal processes for vetting & communicating with vendors, and important skills that vendors need to have to do business with Midway.
This session will provide the audience with insider’s information on what this large publisher expects from its art and technical vendors.
The Myths (and Truths) of Java Games Programming
Speaker: Andrew Davison
Track: Technical
This session examines the commonly-expressed criticisms of Java as a games programming language: that's it's too slow, too high-level, prone to memory problems, too hard to install, not available on games consoles, not used in 'real' games, and not even considered a gaming platform by Sun Microsystems. All of these views are incorrect, aside from the console issue.
Team Building: How to build a team for a next or current generation project
Speaker: Tim Donley
Track: Production
This session talks about hiring the best and keeping them. Learn how to train and motivate your team, give them efficient on the job training to bring out the best in your people and improve communication among team members. This is designed to show you it's not about high salaries but about creating the right environment to attract, train and keep the highest performers. Learn techniques to bring the brightest to you. There will be a question and answer session afterwards
Playcentric Game Design: Becoming an Advocate for the Player
Speaker: Tracy Fullerton
Putting player feedback at the center of your design process is a difficult process, but one that can save production dollars and make sure your game is a more successful product. By adapting techniques from usability testing, focus testing and industrial design, designers can integrate useful player feedback into their design process early on, allowing them to take greater design risks and create more innovative player experiences.
Preproduction on Spider-Man 2 and beyond: the dangers of preproduction
Speaker: Jamie Fristrom
Track: Production
The Spider-Man team carried out an extensive pre-production phase for the sequel to their hit game Spider-Man where they prototyped radical new game mechanics and technology; Spider-Man 2 was a great success, a new hit in 2004 with new gameplay mechanics that earned rave reviews. Lately, preproduction has become all the rage--there were at least five talks on preproduction at the last GDC, for example--and many studios are investing heavily in preproduction and prototyping phases, but they're not all seeing the same sorts of success that the Spider-Man team did. Preproduction, it turns out, is not a silver bullet - there are many ways in which it can go horribly wrong, and we'll go into some of those ways here.
An Attempt at Test-Driven J2ME Development
Speaker: Paul Gadi
Track: Technical
Inspired by Noel Llopis’ and Sean Houghton’s talk on test-driven development, we have decided to adopt a test-first development approach for one of our j2me projects. The talk will discuss the success or failure of this experiment on adopting a new programming methodology.
There will be an overview and introduction to Test-Driven Development (TDD), including some history and how it is done. Then, a discussion about our previous programming methodology using Rapid Application Development (RAD), followed by our experiences in adopting TDD, its pros and cons, and the changes in practices/culture needed. This is essentially a postmortem of our experience with TDD.
Cross platform development: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Speaker: Abdool Gafoor
Track: Technical
One of the main challenges of doing games nowadays is catering for multiple platforms. While it may take some time and effort to get it right from the beginning, the results can certainly be rewarding further down the development stages. In this discourse, the speaker talks about the techniques involved in setting up a cross platform framework from a coding point of view. He also gives some pointers in making a cross platform build framework.
Game Financing Evolved: Malaysian Case Study
Speaker: Jaffri Ibrahim
Track: Business
The standard funding model for game developers has been the royalty advance model. At the core of this funding model there are two entities, a publisher and developer, who enter into a royalty agreement in which the games development is funded by advances on future royalties. Those advances are typically paid upon completion of certain milestones. With cost of game development on the rise, developers and also publishers are looking to other forms of financing. This talk gives an alternate view on game development financing whereby providing money only may not be enough.
Survival course for SEA Indie Studios
Speaker: Siddarth Jain
Track: Business
Growth and survival strategies for SME and Indie project teams in the Games industry that typically have a hard time establishing, scaling and maintaining operations in the region.
Tips for Independent developers that want to work as freelancers and outsourcers on projects.
The Real "Imaginary" World of Interactive Storytelling
Speaker: Sarah Fay Krom
Track: Game Design
As we explore the potentials of interactive storytelling, from interactive fiction to virtual reality, are we expanding our imaginations enough to truly conceive the inconceivable? This presentation poses questions and possibilities about the unexplored territory beyond game, film, literature and theater.
Dynamic Character Design and Development
Speaker: Chris Legaspi
Track: Art
Compelling characters are one of the key elements that breathe life into any story. An effective character design must be compelling, drive the story and be functional. The designer must consider all these elements while retaining a clarity that can easily communicate to other artists, writers, directors and the audience.
This talk will focus on:
- How to create an effective, story-driven Character Design that is also unique and functional.
- The importance of fundamental art skills and using them in the design process.
- The design process and how to quickly conjure ideas and record unique designs.
Shader-driven Graphics Engine Architecture
Speaker: Altair Martinez
Track: Technical
This paper presents the inner workings and performance results of the Pixelstream Graphics Engine prototype. A short discussion on the theory behind some implemented effects are also presented. This is followed by a summary of results from various tests conducted on the engine including the performance impact of increasing scene complexity and increasing number of passes to accommodate the combination of certain shaders. Assumptions, performance considerations, and future plans for the project are also noted.
Virtual Actors - The Next Frontier
Speaker: Alexander Nareyek
Track: Technical
Non-player characters in computer games should ideally be much more than the simple reactive punch balls as in most games of today. They should act in a goal-driven way that makes sense to the user, display convincing emotions and personality, fill a specific character role and actively drive the happenings ahead. This talk provides an introduction on related techniques and what you can expect from research in the future.
Negotiating and Managing a Publishing Deal
Speaker: Chris Natsuume
Track: Business
This is not another “how to get a publisher interested in your game” talk – instead, I will discuss:
- What you should look out for when making your contract
- Tips for getting better, cleaner contracts.
- The basics of "friction free business development"
- The process of maintaining and improving publishing relationships with publishers from the developer side
- Preventing common developer problems in working with publishers.
The goal of the talk is to make Southeast Asian developers savvier about what they should or should not expect in making deals, and help SEA developers present a more professionally informed business face to the world.
Games Programming. Starting Out and Standing Out
Speaker: Ng Kian Bee
Track: Technical
Games programming is more than just knowing C++ and graphics function calls. It requires all rounded knowledge and yet in-depth understanding of issues at hand. It asks for problem solving skills and yet demands creativity in finding solutions. To be a successful games developer, it is easier thought than done. This presentation will hopefully give a fundamental view at how one can start out as games programmer and the skills and knowledge required to stay in the game.
More than Outsourcing: Making SE Asia the center of Design, Development, and Knowledge
Speaker: Trey Ratcliff
Track: Business
The talk discusses why we decided to make SE Asia a knowledge center for a global games business. We feel that knowledge capital is not necessarily only the domain and expertise of the West, and that an entire product cycle, from design to development to operations, can be conducted entirely within SE Asia. Challenges still await, such as the sociological and design differences between the East and West, consumer habits, cross-territorial marketing, and how everything can come together in a globally-minded studio.
Enduser Content - The Rising Entry Barrier
Speaker: J.E. Sawyer
Track: Game Design
In the mid-90s, Quake and Half-Life helped usher in a Golden Era of mods. Each year, more games and engines arrive on the scene with tools to assist in the creation of enduser content. Though many developers cultivate the development of enduser content with free tools and tutorials, the rising complexity of game engines and assets often raises the entry barrier. This talk will discuss the successes and failures of recent titles and how developers can deal with the problems of increasingly complex engine features and asset creation pipelines.
Building a development team
Speaker: Bullitt Sesariza
Track: Production
How to mold raw talent that has no gaming industry experience into game industry-capable workers. Training, mentoring, and candidate profiling (testing, selecting people with demonstrated abilities, but not experience).
This talk is based on experience as a game development business pioneer in the region: how to build a team and dealing with team retention.
Indonesian Video Game industry and Market
Speaker: Marlina Sugama
Track: Business
As the last country to join the game developer industry in south east Asia region, Indonesia has been uncovered to have many potentials. First, Indonesia's un-noticed growing online game and mobile market showed more than 100% growth from 2002 to 2006. Second, the country's industry has begun to produce many independent game developer studios, which will be presented in a short animation video.
Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands – Cross Cultural Challenges in an Asian Development Environment
Speaker: Raymond Wong
Track: Production
This sessions explores the process and challenges of knowledge creation in an East v.s. West environment,cross-cultural barriers to effective communication,productivity in the development context, and how cross-cultural uniqueness influences an infant industry.
Turn Based Strategy Games – Obsolete or being different
Speaker: Stephen Yong
Track: Game Design
At this time and age, turn based is almost extinct with most game developers choosing the path of real-time games such as RTS (real-time strategy) and RPG for their game. Some game developers are even combining RTS with RPG elements having seen some that contains hero or generals that have earn experience and can level up.
This topic gives an alternate path that game developers can opt to choose rather than the standard RTS and RPG path and how to design a Massive Online Game on turn based while having the same user interaction as real-time games.