BerenB

Zeitland workshop: “Transmedial Storytelling”

2011-09-19T06:49:00.001-07:00

Today, on September 19th Zeitland, including me, is holding a workshop at Film Commission Region Stuttgart / MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg with our buddy Martin Nerurkar (Gameforge). Our topic will be “Transmedial Storytelling: Arranging your story in film, print, web and games”. The workshop will start at 18:00, Breitscheidstr. 4, Stuttgart. Registration details are displayed in the announcement below. Hope to see you there!

Link:
http://zeitland.com/?p=713

Cinematic game trailers

2010-12-29T06:26:00.000-08:00

Taking some time off working on the I.P. Bible for Rust Raiders (www.RustRaiders.com), I made a small collection of trailers I love watching. I wouldn't call them the greatest top trailers of all time, hoping there are even better ones ahead, but their craftsmanship and cinematic style is truely inspiring.

Please enjoy!
And if I missed some, feel free to comment and add em.

Deus Ex 3 Human Revolution

LA Noir

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Splinter Cell: Conviction

Gears of War

World of Warcraft and Star Craft
(Not in-game tailers because it's all prerendered, but still cool)

Silent Hill

TOM CLANCY'S GHOST RECON: FUTURE SOLDIER

Crysis 2

Assassin’s Creed II

Bioshock

Halo 3: ODST

Mass Effect 2 Trailers

Grand Theft Auto 4

Metro 2033

Metal Gear Solid 2 - Sons of Liberty

Metal Gear Solid 4 - Guns of the Patriots

Dead Space (takes some reference from the Alien 4 teaser)

God of war 3

Transmedia, an Interview with Inga von Staden

2010-12-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

Inga von Staden, head of the Interactive Studies Degree Program at the Animation Institute/Filmakademie in Germany, and a great mentor to me and other students, has just released a very interesting interview about transmedia.

http://www.nealromanek.com/i-ask-inga-von-staden-what-is-transmedia/

Free stock image resources

2010-11-07T02:44:00.000-08:00

Images, textures and references are a very useful tool for artists. With the web, they're practically everywhere, but sadly not always free to use due to copyright restrictions. Here are some free stock image resources from the web.

Search Engines

Here are some search engines for free stock images:

http://www.everystockphoto.com/
http://search.creativecommons.org/
Google Images (be sure to set the license options correctly under the advanced search)

Image Resources

www.cgtextures.com
Vast image resource for textures. The first place I'm visiting when looking for textures.

Conclusion: Highly recommended.

www.sxc.hu
SXC is a friendly community of photography addicts who generously offer their works to those who need them free of charge. It's one of the biggest free image sites out there with 350,000 photos and counting.

Conclusion: Recommended.

www.flickr.com
The giant. You can use the advance search to search for creative commons license pictures that can be used free of charge and altered.

Conclusion: Recommended.

www.morguefile.com
Hosts tons of free images for inspiration, reference and use in creative work, of course also for commercial use. It also has a bunch of interesting search options, like the color picker. It has a quite powerful search with lots of filter options.

Conclusion: Recommended.

www.stockvault.net
It has a huge amount of photos with some high quality ones as well. All images are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license. There is image tagging, but searching categories might lead to better results. Also there are a lot of ads on the site.

Conclusion: Decent site.

www.freerangestock.com
They strive to provide high quality free stock photography for commercial and non-commercial use. And there are already some very good photos available.

Conclusion: Decent site.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery
Public Domain images from the NASA. If you need space, nebula and planet images you might find it very useful. More "image of the day" links can be found here: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html
They also have a website for more details on their copyright and image usage.

Conclusion: Recommended for space images.

http://www.deviantart.com/?catpath=resources/stockart
The stock image category of deviant art. You can find high quality images here, but be careful about the license restrictions since they might vary from artist to artist.

Conclusion: Recommended, but you have to be careful about the copyright licenses.

www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos
Compared to other sites, there aren't that many photos on it. Still, pixelperfectdigital has a good amount of high quality photos. Sadly it also has irritating advertisement and resource-links to other sites that aren't free, like dreamstime.

Conclusion: Go here if other sites do not have what you seek.

www.openphoto.net
Since the search seems to only take the file name under consideration, you're better off using the browsing function. Which makes finding particular images tedious. Also there are a lot of advertisements on the site. The categories are well-arranged with a fair amount of high quality pictures under a creative commons license.

Conclusion: Not Recommended if you are searching for a particular image, but the image quality and pool is good.

Cross, Trans, Multi, Interactive

2010-10-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Coming back from last week's bookfair 2010 in Frankfurt and having attended the first Stroydrive, a transmedia conference, I am wondering why there are so many problems understanding the differences between transmedia, crossmedia, crossplatform, multimedia and interactive media.
If you're new to the field, it's easy to mix those terms up. And there still are debates going on about which is which, but enough material and common knowledge is already available to make clear cuts.

Here's how I'd define it:

Multimedia
A combination of different content forms in a single product. This could be a multimedia presentation with text, audio and video that runs on your computer.
In a broader scope, the term multimedia can be difficult to define, since even printed content such as a newspaper may be considered multimedia because it contains images and text at the same time.

Interactive Media
The expression already includes its purpose: To be interactive and give users the possibility to choose and interact with the software (user feedback and control). Since the interactivity has to do with media, it could be described as a subform of multimedia, because most of the time the users actions will change the display of different combined media, such as images, text, videos, graphics and audio.
Interactive media is not only limited to the digital world, as adventure books, card- and boardgames can also be considered interactive media.

Crossplatform
Software that runs and inter-operates on multiple computer platforms. For example a 3D game that can be played inside a browser on a Mac, but also on a tablet PC or on a gaming console. In true crossplatform entertainment, different players can interact with each other in the same gaming world, using different platforms at the same time.
In a broader sense virtual machine platforms such as Java are crossplatform as well, because software developed for those machines runs on many operating systems and hardware types.

Crossmedia
Here, content from one media format is ported to additional media formats. This can be done right from the start of a media release or gradually. For example a movie that is accompanied by a game and later a comic book. All media formats reside in the same "story environment" or "intellectual property", meaning they are all based on the same initial idea. Most of the time, crossmedia only copies the content of one media to the next while adjusting it to the new format's specifications. For example a printed comic book that is accompanied by a digital version on a tablet PC and an adventure game, all telling the same story.

Transmedia
Transmedia can be seen as a subform of crossmedia. Here, content is not only copied from one media format to the next, but split among them to generate a holistic experience for the user. Transmedia tries to penetrate a user's lifestyle as fully as possible, using different media to tell interlinked parts of the same story.
Users can enter a transmedia story at various entry points, because they might consume only a fraction of all transmedia products. What is true for good transmedia entertainment is still being defined at the current time. It is often a balance between attracting a user with a single, satisfying media product while quickening his appetite to consume other products as well. To get a holistic experience of the big narrative scheme that spans all transmedia products, a user might want to "collect them all".

360-degree
360 essentially hints at an all around experience. Hence there are many areas that use the expression 360-degree. There is 360-degree feedback in human resources for example, where feedback is provided by many different sources in the team, peers, subordinates, supervisors and stakeholders to name a few. It helps to give a more complete view on a certain employee and not just approach him from a single view.
Then there's of course Xbox 360, an entertainment console by Microsoft. My guess is, it was named Xbox 360 because Xbox 2 sounded old in comparison to the Playstation 3. Plus, Xbox 360 likely also refers to an all around entertainment center, combining different media in just one console. And now there's Kinect that even makes you go hammertime in front of your tv.

In the context of a converging media landscape, 360-degree development means creating immersive media experiences for the user. This is true for 360-degree content as well as a 360-degree marketing approach. It can be classified as a cross or transmedia experience, but other than using a few media formats it strives to create an all around experience on as many of the touch points surrounding the user as possible. It will also likely use interactive formats and user generated content to engage the audience even further. This could be a campaign or product that involves a network of online media, games, radio, print, alternate reality games and real life events.

In the documentary area, like at the BBC, it stands for a certain cost effective production method and value chain. Journalists develop a story (quality core content) that is adapted to different media formats and platforms. For Mark Thomson of BBC switching to a transmedia production is even "a question of survival" in the converging media world (http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thompson_future.shtml).

360-degree deals, often used in the music industry, are deals that will give a company shares from all revenue streams coming from different media.

There are lots of fancy terms popping up in these fields, forgotten, reinvented and new ones - such as product worlds, meta media, integrated communications, branded entertainment, user generated content, social media, community involvement, creative kernels, operative ideas, content onions, rabbit holes...
but this is a different (transmedia) story to be told.

Urban exploration

2010-09-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

Abandoned factory in Lurgan by Stefan Ray

Urban exploration (often shortened as urbex or UE) is the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities. (From Wikipedia)

It's a great source for inspiration, especially when you're working on postapocalyptic or horror scenarios. Here are some photo websites I found. Take a look:

Lipinski.de
Sperrzone.net
Relikte-der-zeit.de
urb-ex.com
Forbidden-places.net
Telefunker.wordpress.com
Friched.net
Urbex.nl
Oboylephoto.com
Dubtown.de
Abandoned-places.com

A crossmedia team outline

2010-09-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm currently trying to get some structure into my crossmedia production thoughts from an entrepreneur's standpoint. No project is alike, especially crossmedia ones, but this is my take on constructing a lead department for a larger project with a scope that covers different media formats and platforms. In an ideal world, here's how I would approach crossmedia team planning right now:

Crossmedia Producer
Responsible for supervising crossmedia productions and delivering the products on time and within budget and quality standards.

Crossmedia Director
Responsible for creating crossmedia concepts that bind users across media formats and platforms and maintaining their essence throughout the production.

Crossmedia Designer
Responsible to give the project a coherent visual appearance across all formats and platforms.

Crossmedia Writer
Responsible for the narrative engineering of the story environment across all media formats.

There are other roles that work across media as well, such as the Audio Director and Technical Director. But mostly they can be constrained to certain media formats, with the crossmedia parts being outlined and enforced by the Crossmedia Director or Producer.

Taking a hierarchy for decision making into consideration, the director or producer is best to be given the team leadership. Their field of work connects with most aspects of production and they ensure the creative vision and production standards are maintained on all levels.
Logically it makes sense to have the producer rank higher than the director, because he has to ensure that the production is on time and within budget and quality. He can't do that without the proper control. This is most often the case in game development. On the contrary, film directors are definitely higher than their producers in Europe, especially in France and Germany.

I'm looking forward to discuss this with my friends, coworkers and peers.

Naming

2010-09-02T03:36:00.001-07:00

A good name can boost the promotion of a product, while a bad one can easily reduce its marketing potential. Creating the right name is much more complicated than merely picking a name.

Here's a small checklist I'm using most of the time when creating names.
There are a lot of much more elaborated articles about naming on the web, but often a few basic rules is all I need for finding a fitting name.

First and foremost find out the essence of what you're about to name. A good idea is to do a short list of adjectives and descriptive words that come to mind.

Naming checklist

Does the name fit the idea behind what is being named?
Does the name also sound fitting?
Is the name short or at least easy to grasp?
Is the name easy to type with a keyboard and write with a pen?
Does it work internationally or at least in the countries of your target audience? (Think ahead, you might not know how far it will reach eventually)
Are the important domain names still available? At least .com
Is the pronunciation clear and avoids potential misunderstandings?
Is the name easy to remember?
Does the name stand out from the competition?
Does a thorough google/trademark check not reveal any similar names or products?

Decision matrix

Once you have assembled a list of names, there might be one that jumps out and is better than the rest. Great!

If not you might want to set up a decision matrix. It's a simple table with the checklist categories (the checklist above) as columns, and your collected names as rows.

Rate each name in each category. A good idea is to use a simple scale, like 1-3, with 1 being bad, 2 mediocre and 3 good. Do your rating randomly, not one name after the other. That way you're as objective as you can be.

Then also rate each checklist category. E.g. Fits meaning 2, Domain available 3, Short 1 ...

In the end, to get a result for each name, all you have to do is multiply each category rating with the rating of the name in that category and add the results up till you have a total score for a name.

E.g. the category "Fits meaning" was rated 2, "Domain available" 3 and "Short" 1.
The name "Angst" was rated "Fits meaning" 3, "Domain available" 1 and "Short" 3. The name has a total score of 6+3+3 = 12.

3D awesome

2010-01-09T05:28:00.000-08:00

Since we're all still entangled in the depths of Pandora, here is some three-dee for your viewing unpleasure.

We all know 3D images = awesome, but most of the time you need super-duper 3D goggels. Not here. You have to stare at pictures cross eyed until the two images melt into one, resulting in a 3D view of the image. It works like a charm if you make a tunnel with your hands towards the image, so each eye only sees one of the images and not the other. :)

Read here and try for yourself: http://www.starosta.com/3dshowcase/ihelp.html

I did a fast 3D version of a speedpainting from last year. The seagull and palm tree should be popping out. It's a good idea to download it and use an image viewer to look at it in fullscreen mode with black around it.

Some artists have already begun doing 3D versions of their images:
http://artbytheo.deviantart.com/
http://omen2501.deviantart.com/art/Stereovison-116303390

Here is a nice article for artists on how to do it:
http://artbytheo.deviantart.com/art/What-if-three-dimensional-62335458

There's an easier and ancient technique where you focus in the distance using a Screenscope Viewer. This will not put that much strain on your eyes. You can read more about Stereoscopy on Wikipedia.

AVATAR

2009-12-18T04:09:00.000-08:00

Between research and concept work I can't stop thinking about Cameron's AVATAR.

The movie isn't an intellectual masterpiece in regards to the story. In fact it's "Dances with Wolves" in a SF setting. However, Avatar is a lot more than "just" a story. It's a narrative of a new and beautiful world, about inner struggle and redemption. And it's an attempt to bring people back into the cinemas with polarized 3D, something not many can experience at home.

Above all Avatar shows that with current and future technology movies are finally able to produce a believable new world and pass the boundaries of comic-style cg characters without getting lost in the uncanny valley.

With so much visual and creative denseness, project time and money at stake, who would blame Cameron to have chosen a story maybe as old as humanity itself to bring it all together?
If Avatar fails, the progress of movies that create whole new universes for a mature audience might get stuck for a decade. I sincerely hope it succeeds... but that's just my 2 cents so to speak :)

I have yet to try the game and see if it is a good adaption of cross media development and adds to the user experience within the Avatar universe.

Watch the Avatar trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u3akG-5BH0

Interactive text-based stories

2009-09-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

First of all this is about text-only stories, pretty much like Gamebooks. I could have just called it "interactive stories", but that would be misleading since visually intense computer games can be considered interactive stories as well. So no high-def at 60 fps. These stories take place in the cinema of your mind.

There are many names that can be connected to interactive text-based stories, like for example Hypertext fiction, Interactive fiction or Text Adventures.
This article looks at the tools in regard to prototyping stories as text-only interactive media. For me written text is the fastest way to draft a story, except maybe telling it to someone directly.

The tools

Twine

Twine is an easy to use desktop utility to create interactive texts developed by Chris Klimas. The software enables you to organize your story graphically in a node based flowchart. It is quick to export and compile your story, have a read, then go back again to editing it.
The final story page is based on a one page javasript wiki engine and looks nice and organized. Since it's a single web page, with basic html scripting knowledge you can change the looks of your story easily.
Twine can also include conditional text, so "if you have a yellow key" will give you the possibility to "open the yellow door", while as you don't have the yellow key you can't open the door.

Here you can read some Twine stories by the author himself: http://gimcrackd.com

There is a google group, but it mainly consists of code and software related issues: Tweecode

The Author, Chris Klimas, made some neat video tutorials to show how twine works. Here's one of them:

Finishing Touches from Chris Klimas on Vimeo.

Twine is an impressive tool and defintely recommended. Even more so for prototyping.

Get twine here: http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

City of If

The City of If is an online community for storygaming. It's more like classic Roleplaying Games, where players and authors experience a story together. Basically it's an online message board with different sub-forums where users write threads for their stories.
I remember City of If from a while back and it's still around. As far as I can tell it's been online since 2002. So there are a lot of stories to read trough, sorted in different categories. And polls are held for "Best Storygame", "Best Supporting Character" and so on.

With an active community the site sure is worth looking at. Still it is not really useful for closed story prototyping, but if you want to share, and see how your story develops with the aid of players interacting with it, this is a great start.

Collaborating online on a story reminds me of my R-Tech System, a creative tool for writing screenplays.

Look at City of If here: http://www.cityofif.com

Quest

Quest is a program for text adventure games. It helps users to create complex text adventures without requiring programming know-how. Quest comes in a restricted free and an unlimited pro version.

Quest seems like a very interesting tool for creating text adventures, but it is also very much optimized to do just that. Hence it's a bit much for doing normal interactive story prototyping, but maybe the complex possibilities are just what you need.

You can get quest here: http://www.axeuk.com/quest/
Here are more screenshots: http://www.axeuk.com/quest/qsshots.htm
A collection of textadventures created with quest: http://www.textadventures.co.uk/

Inform Fiction

Inform is a tool to create interactive fiction. The created source code of Inform reads like native English sentences, making it accessible to non-programmers. What makes Inform stand out is its ability to

Aaron Reed, the creator of Inform, has created an extensive introduction tutorial for Inform:

Inform 7 Introductory Screencast from Aaron Reed on Vimeo.

A cool timelapse video shows the Aaron working:

Interactive Fiction Time Lapse from Aaron Reed on Vimeo.

Inform is a very complex, but easy to learn software package. It can be used for advanced prototyping and story tweaking, since it can track the path a player took.

Inform Website: http://www.inform-fiction.org
Current version http://inform7.com/

Conclusion

There are quite a lot of tools for writing interactive adventures, but if it is about ease of use and quick prototyping that is beyond flowcharts I would recommend Twine. Also the ability to simply share a single html file makes it stand out.
If you want to experience a story in a collaborative effort, something like City of If might be a good start. A while back I wrote the R-Tech System, a creative tool for writing screenplays by using a Roleplaying Game. With some minor modifications R-Tech can be used for interactive stories as well.

Further Resources

Further info and an even more detailed glimpse into the world of interactive text-based stories can be found at the Interactive Fiction Wiki.
There's also a lot of historical information about Interactive Fiction in general on the Inform website.
Someone even made an interactive fiction game about the GDC: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/gdcgame/

HiRISE Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

2009-09-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered how alien terrain might look like? HiRISE posted new images of the red planet. The "Orbiter" has been studying Mars, taking magnificent images of Mars since April 2006.

Images are available in different resolutions and within the public domain: there are no restrictions on their usage by anyone in the public, including news or science organizations. They do ask for a credit line where possible:
Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not in the public domain.

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/nea.php
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/

gamescom 2009 mosaic

2009-08-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a mosaic of the mobile photos I took during gamescom 2009 in Cologne, Germany.

From gamescom 2009 in Cologne, Germany

GDC 2009

2009-08-24T06:24:00.000-07:00

Overall impression

This years European Game Developers Conference, a gathering of developers, sponsors, exhibitors, media and publishers, was held in Cologne, Germany. It directly preceded the first gamecom convention (see my previous post for a rundown).

The main sections were Business, Game Design, Production, Programming and Visual Arts.

I will more or less write about the GDC as a whole rather than listing single Sessions. Overall I was missing more of those useful insider information bits. Most presentations seemed a bit generalistic to me, but there were a few in depth sessions and especially the panels sparked interesting discussions. Sadly there was very little on game art. In my opinion this is a flaw since art is an essential part of a game. Art most likely grips the attention of players before gameplay, story and other features are even considered. To those working in art departments I recommend checking out the fmx and Siggraph instead.

Art and Graphics

Since I'm the art kinda guy I was pretty disappointed at what the GDC had to offer in regard to art direction and art asset production. There was one session on art direction held by Victor Antonov, which I already attended on the fmx earlier this year. I can highly recommend his Creating Visual Identity for Games for anybody interested in creating fitting and unique visual styles for games. Antonov worked on high profile titles such as Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. He does wonderful architectutral and industrial designs, so be sure to search for him on the web. Here are some links to interesting articles about his design philosophy:
http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16475
http://www.catmoo.co.uk/blog/2009/07/25/develop-2009-the-edge-panel-architecture
Concept art: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Viktor_Antonov
Since we're already taking about art direction in games, I can highly recommend researching the art direction of Team Fortress 2:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=104694
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=4338
http://www.primotechnology.com/2008/02/25/gdc-08-the-illustrative-world-of-team-fortress-2/
Video: http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/team-fortress-2_graphical-style

As beautiful as all the art might be, it wouldn't show without a proper engine. One of the keynotes was dedicated to Crytek's new CryEngine 3. Here's an older but still intriguing video about it:

The outsourcing company Streamlike Studios showed some insider information about their art pipelines. So did Bioware Development Director Dorian Kieken on a more general scale with his What Is a Living Plan and How Can We Achieve It? lecture.
It was interesting to see that more and more studios are using a combination of project and asset management tools. Even more so in the art department, because artists tend to neglect planning and using orderly task lists. Hence it's a good idea to keep the whole asset approval and management process quick and easy to use. Kieken recommended Hansoft, an online solution for agile and iterative project management.

Having worked quite a lot with online and offline project and asset management tools myself I'd say as soon as the project starts to get big there's no way around commercial solutions. There might be matching alternatives in the future, but right now especially commercial project management tools are way more streamlined their open source counterparts.
As for simple file collaboration and asset management, there are always free and stable version control systems to be found on the net (e.g. subversion). And an open source wiki is more than enough to manage your game documentation. Some payed solutions like basecamp and unfuddle might be good for general purpose project management, but when it comes to games, it's a lot more complicated and I'd actually recommend using a proprietary software instead, even derivating from an open source solution.
Actually if anyone does have some good free project management tools that can be linked to an asset management environment, please comment and I'll be glad to discuss or post a more detailed article.

Online and Social

A lot of the sessions were about online gaming and especially social gaming with facebook games being the number one topic. It's a very new platform but growing rapidly - no surprise with facebooks 250+ millionen users. I'm actually keen to see facebook's userbase exceed the world's population someday ;)
Basically game concepts for social platforms have to stay low profile with focus on social features rather than game features. To be successful, they must be easy to adapt for new users and supply a rich palette of opportunities to interact with other users. There are some leading examples for more complex social online games that have been successful: FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Quite a lot of smaller games are also successful, a remarkable adaption of the match-3 gameplay mechanism is Bejeweled Blitz.
An interesting fact is that a lot in social gaming can be achieved by experimenting. The risks are low, and once something gets accepted by a large part of the community it's ready to be used as a commercial gold mine. For example selling virtual poker-chips. Once introduced, poker players were willing to spend a lot of money on buying them. There are some games that use ads for money, but most revenue is produced through micro-payment by the users.
To sum it up: Social platforms are the playground to be for young developers. Also it's a good idea to connect browser games to those platforms to broaden their userbase.

Are clouds the future?

With technologies like onlive and Gaikai buying expensive gaming hardware seems to be a thing of the past. All you have to do is get a cheap standard computer and connect to the cloud by a user account. It might still take a while till those cloud and server based services might run smoothly for high end gaming, but the industry seems to be slowly getting there. A drawback in user freedom, and with having subscriptions to games and software users actually don't own their packages anymore. On the positive side everyone will be up to date and there's no more data loss once your console, software-disc or home computer dies.
Now what does that mean for developers and publishers? No one can say for sure yet, but I guess developers will have it easier to get their games out there and publishers can market their gaming products more easily. It seems like a win-win solution with cable companies also gaining, and even the big distributors like Walmart will likely still have enough products to put on their shelves - at least for the time being.

Mature Narrative

We're talking mature games here (for mature minds), not adult entertainment (e.g. boobies). There was one keynote about mature gaming, held by David Cage (CEO & Founder, Quantic Dream) called Writing Interactive Narrative for a Mature Audience. While the keynote was rather polarizing and sensationalistic there was an interesting core statements that are true for the whole game development community. If we want games to be considered art we have to stop making them similar to toys. Now in my opinion games are neither mere toys nor sophisticated works of art per se. They can be a lot, but above all they're games. If something is more like an interactive movie it shouldn't be called a game, but rather interactive entertainment. Still, the lines blur and I don't want to sound hair splitting, so let's stick with the term games for now.
I embrace the idea of introducing mature topics and more elaborate characters and storylines to games, but not at the cost of gameplay. Mass Effect 1, and probably 2 as well, introduced a solid SciFi story combined with good RPG action gameplay. Admittedly they borrowed a lot from Alistair Rainolds Revelation Space setting and the action oriented gameplay wasn't as smooth as a 3rd person shooter, but the overall mixture of story and gameplay elements made Mass Effect an outstanding experience for a lot of mature gamers:

Notable examples are also May Payne and the upcoming Alan Wake, by Remedy Interactive:

And Heavy Rain:

Business and Production

Since games aren't only about fun, business and production talks are essential to the industry. There were quite a lot of interesting presentations and discussion panels about how to pitch to publishers, how to get game ideas realized and what to avoid before and during production. Bostjan Troha the CEO, ZootFly gave an interesting speech about projects cancellation and how to avoid it. Important tools are strong project planning, due-diligences and persistence. These keypoints were reflected by some other speakers such as Hilmar Veigar Pétursson (CEO, CCP) with his Eve Online presentation CCP: Winning the War.

Conclusion

There's a lot more to the GDC than just the panels and presentations. The exhibitors area is also worth checking out. Especially the school booths, because there really weren't any talks about game development education. It's still more or less about doing internships and business contacts if you want to get into the industry. Since the gaming industry is a lot about tangible results rather than sophisticated ideas, streamlined academic courses with a combination of game designers, artists, producers and programmers have a high chance of actually breaking into the industry.
The GDC Europe 2009 was a truly remarkable combination of talent, interesting projects, talks, networking events and exhibitions. For everyone who's remotely interested in interactive entertainment, this was one of the conventions to be in 2009.

gamescom 2009 - a retrospective

2009-08-22T04:33:00.001-07:00

Best gamescom day

Yesterday I came back from the GDC and gamescom in Cologne. Earlier than expected, because the waiting lines on the first public day had globe-spanning proportions. After waiting for hours in front of the Avatar game booth, just to be sent away in the end, I became painfully aware that I'm getting too old. No, not physically. At least not yet.

The problem is that wasting time waiting for hours on end just to get a short glimpse at future releases just doesn't fit my schedule anymore.
Gladly I was fortunate enough to have some time on Wednesday, where the gamescom areal was restricted to business visitors only. If you want to actually play games, better come during this first non-public day of the convention. Now if you like to watch the big gigs, there's plenty during the public opening days.

Business area

It's getting bigger as well. Sadly it looks more or less like an labyrinth of fortified walls these days. I remember when I was at the first gamesconvention in Leipzig. The business area was a lot smaller, but the booths were open and actually presented something. Now it's more or less an area for closed business meetings.

Gamescom impressions

You can't really check out everything. So it's a good idea to focus on a few things and plan ahead. Some friends and I signed in as VIP visitors a day before the presentations of Splashdamage's new first person multiplayer shooter BRINK. Thus a few lucky visitors had CEO and Game Director Paul Wedgwood play though a level of the game and explain the gameplay mechanisms. BRINK looks promising: The background story seems a bit bioshock-ish too me, but there's enough new material to set it apart from other shooters. Especially the art direction looks very nice with a combination of realistic environment and abstraction of body proportions for characters. It reminded me a lot of french comic styles. A big plus is the extensive character cusomization which makes BRINK at times appear more like an role playing game than first person shooter. Here's an interview with some visuals:

Command & Conquer 4 had a big show at the EA areal. Guess what, Kane was there! He's the bald mean guy numbero uno since the original release of C&C in 1995. Here's the C&C 4 trailer from youtube with plenty B-Movie goodness:

In the presentation that followed, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli revealed the Nanosuit 2 from the in-development game CRYSIS 2. See a video here:

More than just a pretty design the nanosuit 2 is said to have won the red dot award -- can anyone confirm that? By the way, remember SKYNET from the Terminator? Well, there's CRYNET now, the fictional developers of the technology inside the CRYSIS game universe. So better brace yourself for some heavy crying in the months to come.

There's a lot more to write about, but most of it has likely been posted on numerous news sites. So let's get straight to the GDC in my next post.

Why blogging?

2009-08-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

I asked someone a while back "Why do you blog?". His answer was quite simple and summarizes the whole topic very well: "Because I got something to write about."

More elaborate answer would probably be "As human beings, we're a community, and as such we strive to connect to others. Eventually this lead to a common knowledge base which is the internet. Sharing our thoughts with others helps us to understand, reflect and progress much faster than keeping information to ourselves." Or at least that's my opinion right now.

So I guess it's a good idea to start blogging - in case there is something to say and there's enough time. Which doesn't happen too often, so don't expect any spamming going on.