Independent Game Conference East (IGC East) Wrap-up

This was the first year the Independent Game Conference East has been held, and I think it was a great start. My hopes for IGC East were to do some good networking and see a few interesting sessions, and I feel I got even more than I bargained for. I’d like to recap a few personal notes on the experience and then share some notes and highlights from a few especially outstanding sessions.

Getting lost in Boston

I had the honor of being Scott Macmillan’s (Macguffin Games) ride to Northeastern University both days. This was an interesting experience for me not only because Scott is, well, and interesting guy, but also because I have very little driving experience in Boston. I expected it to be quite a learning experience, and it certainly was.

We got lost several times (we even asked a man for directions, at one point) but always quickly corrected ourselves and made our way to our destination eventually. Unfortunately, some last minute coding along with difficulty finding the parking garage (we drove right past it, geniuses we are) meant we missed the opening keynote by Vladimir Starzhevsky (Creat Studios), which I heard was pretty good.

In the end, I’m glad to have some more Boston driving experience under my belt (I even learned where the super-secret detour entrance to The Pike is!) and ultimately Scott was happy to have the extra computer which necessitated the use of my car to get to the event. In fact, we enjoyed the experience so much that we opted to drive there again the next day. (Nothing like an adventure!)

Demo Night, networking, tapas

One of the big highlights of IGCEast was Thursday’s Demo Night. Demo Night was a great community event. Besides the joy of getting to see so many interesting games shown off, it was nice to be able to show my support for my Boston indie friends and meet some interesting people who had come by to network and learn.

After Demo Night finally ended (for real) at 7:30, we headed over to The Savant Project tapas bar, where Mike Cavaretta of the New England Gamers SIG was hosting a nice, casual get-together. I really enjoyed the food there, and the atmosphere made for some good, casual hanging out. You can find some pictures from that event on the NE Games SIG blog here.

Sessions of note

The rest of what I have to recap from IGC East is session-specific. I will point out in particular the last session highlighted here, which was Dallas Snell’s keynote from Friday morning. Snell’s talk really inspired me and amped up the flames in the fire that’s been burning for me lately to make a true social game.

Standard disclaimer applies: these are simply my notes from the sessions, and any errors are mine and mine alone.

Rapid and iterative prototyping

Eitan Glinert and Ethan Fenn from Fire Hose Games talked about “Rapid and Iterative Prototyping”. Some pearls of wisdom they shared:

• make friends, and then ask them for help and advice
• deadlines are critical
• take advice with a grain of salt
• test all the time (they tested with “outsiders” once a week, every week)
• (as a result of testing) identify and remove bad ideas
• “do it now, get it right later”
• don’t argue about design ideas: implement, then test
• have playable builds all the time
• don’t pay testers: messy business liability and food can actually work better

Eitan also recommended that you start your prototyping by working full-time, because you can get so much more done that way. That said, he admitted at the end that these days the company is making ends meet by doing contract work, so clearly there’s a careful balancing act there.

Game design panel

This was a powerhouse panel made up of five highly experienced (some even legendary) game designers. The panel was made up of:

• Steve Meretzky (Playdom)
• Linda Currie (Creat)
• Chris Foster (Harmonix)
• Christopher Zirpoli (Auto Assault)
• Cardell Kerr (Turbine)

The discussion was broken down into ten “Really Important Topics” (RITs), so I’ll break my notes down by topic as well.

1.) Project Goals/Vision

• Meretzky: “one person should be the “keeper” of the vision
• Foster: “Harmonix has “The One Question” (ex: “Is it an authentic band experience?” for Rock Band) that helps them make design decisions
• Kerr: “Your vision is the razor with which you focus your game”

2.) Balance

• Meretzky:
  • playtest with many different types of players
  • balance frequency of rewards
  • know when to balance
  • Sometimes players ask for a game to be easier, but then find it’s too easy
• Zirpoli: Perception is everything – the game must feel balanced to players
• Kerr: if you don’t understand the game’s balance to begin with, you won’t be able to understand how players are breaking it after launch

3.) Interfacing

• Zirpoli: know your platform: “How do people play games on this platform?”
• Meretzky: putting even one click between the main UI and an action provides a barrier to users; try to make every interesting action one click (or one immediate action).

4.) Collaboration

• Foster: “you won the design process, but you don’t own the design”
• every voice on your team represents part of the game’s audience
• the designer must act as a sort of arbiter [my paraphrasing]
• Foster: unravel arguments to integrate the essence/hidden wisdom within every idea

5.) Meaningful Choices vs. Joy of Discovery

It was hard to take notes on this as it was a frantic, unstructured conversation, but the essences is this: it’s important to explore for your game the right balance between making it clear how your games works and allowing players to experience the joy of discovery through discovering as they go.

6.) Communication (and follow-through)

It’s way, way better to communicate 105% of the information than 95%. If you only give 95% of the information, people will stop trusting you and communication will break down.

7.) Constraints

Constraints help focus a game’s vision. Sometimes a game’s best and most unique elements are born from constraints. “don’t be afraid to follow your situation to its logical conclusion” and think creatively about how you can embrace your constraints.

8.) Don’t overdesign

Foster: No one reads design docs.

(I interpreted this part as: remember to keep the design simple and the product of the team’s communication and exploration – do not write the “Design Bible” for your game and expect everyone to live and die by it.

9.) Iteration! (You Will Guess Wrong)

Zirpoli: As game designers, we don’t build with stone, we build with clay

“Great tools enable iteration”

Foster: Iteration is about learning what you don’t know [love that one!]

10.) Research & QA

This conversation largely retreaded what was discussed in the “Don’t overdesign” part, and Damien Shubert’s GDC talk about building better design docs was highly recommended.

Foster: Remember to keep design an “active conversation”

Nothing casual about social games

This was Dallas Snell’s keynote from Friday morning. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for those who couldn’t attend it, it was the kind of presentation that loses a lot if you can’t be there to experience it as it was delivered. However, I will summarize his key points that he came to at the end.

Essentially, the point of his talk is that human beings are wired such that our social connections are primary to our well-being and sense of wellness; thus, we should be making games that help people develop social connections.

He referenced a scientist’s great work (I really need to look this up some time -- I believe it was the same work that inspired Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Blink”) about how people, when interacting, have what are called “bids”. Bids are mostly-subconscious attempts to connect with someone else. Often they’re as innocuous as some small bit of body language that must be reciprocated by the other person in order to strengthen the relationship.

Snell proposed that the popularity of Facebook and Twitter may be largely due to the fact that they facilitate bids between people. So, he suggests, we should make games that also facilitate bids. And he also recommends that we tap into player’s social graph, as it’s a powerful part of our lives. This is exactly the way I’ve been thinking about how to make a meaningful social game, so it was really great to hear.

Conclusion

IGC East was a really great experience. The best talks were edifying and inspiring, the networking was solid, and the sense of community was palpable. This event helped show that there really is a substantial Boston game development community. Between the Boston Post Mortem, GameLoop, and now IGC East, it’s clear that Boston is really maturing as a development scene, and it’s awesome to be a part of it.

BarCamp Boston 4 Wrap-up

BarCamp Boston 4 was the first BarCamp I’ve attended, and it certainly did not disappoint! I’d heard great things about it, and last year’s BarCamp-inspired Boston GameLoop set my expectations even higher.

What was great was that there were people with so many different technical and personal interests there. We had lots of people with computer science backgrounds (duh), but also many with electrical engineering backgrounds, as well as backgrounds in business and design. It made for a great environment where you never knew quite what you’d get, but there was always an interesting voice to hear from.

The informal nature of sessions is great, and all the good session leaders knew this: they always encouraged us to chime in and start the “real” conversation going throughout the room.

Session highlights

Here are some notes from a couple of the many stand-out sessions I attended.

Co-working

The co-working session was run by the two main guys who run Betahouse, a co-working facility in Central Square. They intended for the session to be a group discussion, but not surprisingly we all seemed to be most interested to hear about what co-working is like, how they maintain a good culture, and what lessons they learned.

Interestingly, several attendees were planning to start or were about to start up co-working facilities of their own, so it sounds like the co-working community is growing quickly (but hopefully not too quickly!) these days. I enjoyed the talk, and I think it gave everyone a lot of interest in co-working and confidence in its future in Boston.

Rails tools

 

 

I haven’t had the chance to check most of these out yet, but here were a few tools that people mentioned several times and/or raved about at the session:

• RubyMine (allegedly buggy in its pre-release state, but it’s now in 1.0, and it seems pretty neat to me, from my short use of it)
• rakeweb (testing via “faking web requests”)
• httparty (easy http, esp. good for consuming REST)
• auth_logic (auth)
• clearance (auth)
• ar_mailer (oldie but goodie?)

Here are some hosts that were recommended:

• heroku
• linode
• slicehost
• I’m still pretty happy with Dreamhost, especially since they now support Passenger

Stata Center

I think the Stata Center was a great venue for the event, and I’ll be happy to do it there again next year, if the organizers are for it. Its quirky is a great match for the BarCamp atmosphere.

Conclusion

BarCamp Boston 4 ruled: can’t wait for BCB5! Also, you can read what people tweeted about the event here.

 

 

[Photo credits: Steve Pomeroy and faz the persian, respectively. Post inspired by Matt Wiseley’s great Edit Your Web blog]

AngelXNA spreads her wings!

Jeff Ward and I are proud to announce today that we’re officially presenting AngelXNA 1.0 to the world.

AngelXNA is a game prototyping engine built upon Microsoft’s XNA framework. It offers all the power of XNA, plus several key features including:

• In-game interactive Console (ala Quake/Half-Life)
• Super-simple Logging (to system, Console, and/or files)
• Basic Actor framework
•   Layers
•   Texturing with transparency
•   Data-driven Actor generation (Actor templates + “level” files)
•   Interval-based transitions, such as color, size, rotation, and positio
•   "Animations" (texture swapping at defined intervals)
• Messaging system (global switchboard)
• Config file processing
• Event-driven input from a mouse, keyboard, or Xbox 360 controller
•   Binding inputs from a config file

What’s a prototyping engine?

The idea behind AngelXNA is to provide a game prototyping framework that will help amateur and professional game developers alike with prototyping game ideas. With AngelXNA, we’ve tried to take away a lot of the boring, unnecessary work that goes into making any game, even a small one meant merely as a proof-of-concept or prototype to explore a single or small set of game ideas.

Ready to get started?

For you brave hackers, here’s the 1.0 tag for the project. You can grab the project using Mercurial or just grab a zip/gz/bz2 file from the “get source” dropdown in the menu.

The documentation is hosted on the project’s wiki.

Version 1.0 is, of course, meant for true early-adopter types. We’ve written up high-level documentation that is commensurate with that of the original Angel engine itself.

For version 1.1, we plan (so far) to have pathfinding working (possibly in addition to some other simple AI routines), but more importantly, we’re hoping to get feedback from our early adopter users on how to improve the documentation of AngelXNA and of course the engine itself.

Have fun and please let us know what you think.

This weekend: BarCamp Boston 4!

I’m really looking forward to attending BarCamp Boston this weekend. This will be my first BarCamp, but I’ve heard great things about it.

Last year’s BarCamp inspired Darius and Scott to run the very first Boston GameLoop un-conference, which really rocked. I still think about the topics discussed there and the ideas we shared about multiplayer game design, what true “viral” marketing is and isn’t, and more.

A few of my ex-coworkers and some people I’ve met during some great interviews recently will be there as well, so the crowd is already showing signs of excellence. BarCamp seems like the kind of experience that’s almost completely defined by who you interact with, so I think I’m justifiably optimistic.

I love the casual format of the BarCamp concept, it seems to practically guarantee that people will be talking about the topics that get them fired up. I’m sure there will be lots of great idea sharing and that the experience will be very inspiring.

Rockstar web-games integration with GTA: Chinatown Wars

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how games can integrate with the web and provide players with a natural connection between the main game experience and the meta-game, where progress tracking, further exploration, and competition with other players can often become enriched in significant ways. So when I noticed that Rockstar now lets owners of it’s recently-released GTA: Chinatown Wars track their rampages on their Rockstar Games Social Club website, I tried the new feature out right way.

 

I love the idea, and the implementation is very well-done. It has me going back to Chinatown every few days to do a few more rampages, which are one of the most fun parts of the game for me. It seemed to me that originally, the game intentionally forced you to hunt for the rampages or assumed you’d enjoy stumbling upon them randomly. But this new feature shows you pretty much exactly where each rampage is and, also significantly, shows you how well you’ve done on each one.

It also has me reflecting on how well they integrated the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection support into the game. Basically, once you’ve initialized the connection between your Nintendo Wi-Fi DS account and Rockstar’s Social Club site, you just click on your computer from any safe house (which is where you go to save your game, manage your drugs, etc.) in the game and press the sync button.

It feels very natural, and in my opinion it strikes an almost perfect balance between immersion and natural meta-gaming. The laptop makes a lot of sense in Chinatown’s world, and the idea that it would track your crazy antics in the game seems very consistent with Chinatown’s old-GTA feel of zaniness and embraces the fact that it’s a game. The laptop connection asks for no more suspension of disbelief than anything else in the game, and provides a natural bridge to the meta-game.

Punishment, confidence, and improvisational play (reflecting on Clint Hocking’s GDC ‘09 talk)

One of the very best talk of GDC ‘09 was Clint Hocking’s talk on improvisational play. That article does a good job of summarizing his talk. The element that I want to talk about is the part about giving players the confidence to embrace improvisational play, as opposed to simply seeking the fastest or most direct route to mastery.

Interestingly, in a prior GDC ‘09 talk at Indie Games Summit, Jason Roher suggested that single-player games (that is, single-player games with no AI-controlled simulated second player) are an evolutionary dead end because the player will always seek the “steepest descent” towards the strategy that maximizes mastery over the game. Really took these comments to heart, but I think that Clint’s concept of improvisational play may well be the answer to Roher’s concern.

Surely, Roher is right that there is a optimizing, dominating mindset that us “veteran” gamers (to use Nintendo’s recent choice of terminology) have grown accustomed to and will often default to. I think that expectation that is reinforced not only by male culture in general, but also by the way in which most games punish us harshly for failure. While we as designers expect players to fail as part of the learning process, we tend to offer harsh consequences to that failure: Start over. Try again. You fail.

We punish players by making them replay parts they don’t necessarily wish to replay. Making players replay a level made a lot of sense back in the days of Pac-Man and Galaga: it encouraged the kind of one-more-quarter repetition that lead both to more revenue for the arcades but also a high-score-driven culture of mastery. But so often what we end up doing is boring a player by forcing her to play parts of the game that are no longer challenging to her before letting her test and hone her skills on the part that is a challenge.

We punish them by mocking or insulting them. I don’t think I need to say much more about this: designers do this either simply because it matches their mindset when playing games or because they see it as a great way to give your game an edgy, competitive feel. However, I believe that at best it reduces your motivational techniques to “tough love” and at worse it reflects a puerile male-oriented attitude that dominance and humiliation are the best way to encourage a player to strive for more mastery and to risk fewer mistakes.

We also punish players for failing by making the next part of the game less fun or more tedious. This is actually a very tricky problem to get around in a game. An easy example of this is Bioshock’s Vita-chambers. The Vita-chambers are a phone booth-sized device that resuscitate the player when he dies. Many (veteran) players disliked these chambers because they violated their expectation that total mastery (no mistakes) is the only correct solution to a challenge. But some players disliked them for a significantly different reason: they offer an easy but boring solution to any problem: just keep running at your enemies, using your weakest (or most plentiful in ammunition) weapon regardless of how many times it gets you killed. It’s boring, but it’s effective. The terrible thing about it is that it has the opposite effect (on some players) to the one that Hocking praises it for: it discourages them from exploring creative solutions.

Now, I believe that for most players, the Vita-chambers have a positive impact on players, giving them a sense of confidence that the game will not punish them too harshly for trying new strategies to begin with. But the danger lies in the fact that you’re betting that the player will interpret their respawned state as an invitation to make more risks, rather than an invitation to “quit screwing around” and use a simpler, more obviously dominant route to success (such as I described above).

John Carmack talked about walking this line in a great article he recently posted where he reconsiders a few elements of Wolfenstein 3D’s design during the process of porting the game to the iPhone.

There was some debate about the right way to handle death:  respawn with the level as is (good in that you can keep making progress if you just get one more shot off each time, bad in that weapon pickups are no longer available), respawn just as you entered the level (good -- keep your machinegun / chaingun, bad -- you might have 1 health), or, what I chose, restart the map with basic stats just as if you had started the map from the menu.

Carmack’s choice was to simply assure players that even if they die, they will still be perfectly able to beat the level, but only on his terms (as he is the one deciding what “basic stats” to restart you with).

This is clearly a very hard problem to solve, but I believe it lies at the heart of the challenge of giving players the confidence to encourage them to take more risks and be more expressive of their selves with the way in which they explore your game space. Without dealing with this issue, players may always adopt a purely competitive, antagonistic attitude towards the challenges they encounter in the game. If that’s the case, then their game experiences will always skew towards being limited to a mindset of mastery as opposed to improvisation.

I think the good news here is that we need only encourage players to take on this mindset to begin with; the fun of exploring the game’s possibility space will then take over. In other words, once we can help players put aside prejudices and expectations from 20+ years (or is that 4,000+ years?) of mastery-oriented game design, they will naturally embrace what mechanisms we offer to ease the unnecessary pain of failure and use them as an excuse to be more bold, more creative, and, ultimately, have more fun with our games.

Quick Highlights from GDC 2009

GDC 2009 was awesome. It was an amazing week. For this post, I’ll stick to a quick recap of a few highlights, and I might even get a little sentimental towards the end. GDC, after all, is both a stimulating intellectual and unique emotional experience for many people, myself included.

First, there was the Indie Games Summit, which was awesome. In fact, I’d say that for the first time in my three years of GDC, the summits were even better than the main conference this year.

I attended mostly the IGS, hopping over to Worlds in Motion summit just once, for a great talk about Tiny Adventures, Wizards of the Coast’s Facebook D&D game. IGS was just packed full of useful, candid, fact-filled presentations from Stardock, Hothead Games, thatgamecompany, 2Dboy, and more. (links are to coverage of their talks, if you’d like to read more)

It’s really great to see indie starting to cultivate this really open community and helping each other out more and more. As Ron Carmel (2Dboy) said: “we’re your friends, not your competition!”

As Rasmus Boserup said in his GDC recap, a huge part of what makes GDC great is in the people you meet. But I’d also say that I enjoy seeing how others meet up. It’s great to see such sharp and active minds coming together to share knowledge and support each other as we explore and advance our beloved medium.

A few more highlights: I really enjoyed discussing Scott Macmillan’s game design with Scott and Corvus Elrod, and a Thursday night dinner that Corvus arranged (in addition to the one Darius posted about here) stands out as a highlight as well, even compared to the usually-supreme speaker party that follow it.

This year, I apparently even helped someone realize their own (great) role within the games industry. I made an off-hand remark (to him) about a friend of mine being a (social) “hub” in the games industry, something that I figured was obvious to everyone. Perhaps it was obvious to everyone but him up to that point, because he later told me he’d never quite realized that he’d actually become that much of a social connector.

He also told me that he realized it was always a goal of his to awesome people meet each other, and so he was happy to have become accomplished at that. This reminded me of one of Darius’ networking tips about being useful to other people first, and it really touched me.

It helped me realize just how much being a great “connector” is also a long-term goal of mine, and a skill I think I improved at this year’s GDC. Looking back, some of my best memories of this past GDC were of introducing people to each other and seeing the beginning of what will hopefully be a great friendship come from it. That’s the gift that Darius and Susan Gold gave me when they first helped me make it to GDC two years ago, and it’s a gift I love to pass on.

I’ll post more about the talks themselves next, but I wanted to be sure to start with a sentimental reflection on GDC ‘09. Thanks go to Scott’s wonderful reflection on the “post GDC buzz” on his company blog for that inspiration!