Game Network Newsletter - November 2010
November 16, 2010 (Back to archive)
In This Issue
- Game Developers Conference 2011 - GDC Director, Meggan Scavio, discusses GDC's 25th Edition
- GDC China 2010 - Trinigy GM Felix Roeken discusses Vision Game Engine success in Asia
- GDC Vault - Zynga's Chief Game Designer talks about designing innovative gameplay
Meggan Scavio, director of the Game Developers Conference, talks about the upcoming 25th Edition, the very first GDC, and the secret to having your talk accepted at the show |
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 Meggan Scavio |
Q: Meggan, this is a very special year for the Game Developers Conference – it's the 25th edition, correct?
Meggan Scavio: It is! It started in 1988...and there were two that year. The first was in the living room of Chris Crawford, GDC's founder. Because this is a very special year for us, I want to honor Chris. So I think we're going to put him on a panel with others who have been in the industry for 25 years and have been making games for that long. We're still working on those names. But did you know that there are only three people who have been to every single GDC and have been active developers all that time? They are Chris; Gordon Walton, who is VP at BioWare Austin; and Tim Brengle, who is now an adjunct instructor at DeVry University and who has run GDC's conference associate program for as long as I can remember.
We've actually hired a documentarian this year to put together our yearbook...and we've put out a call for anecdotes and pictures and stories and memories from anyone who has come to GDC over the years.
Q: What continues to make GDC such an important event for developers?
Scavio: Someone once called GDC a family reunion...and to me it's always been that, especially back in the San Jose days when we were a lot smaller. That's when you could walk down the hall and see everyone you knew. It's a little tougher now because there are so many more people...but it is that one time of the year when, as a developer, you leave the confines of your office and you join like-minded people to share information and ideas and talk about what you're doing. We say that GDC is where you learn, network, and become inspired.
Q: What special things can attendees expect when they come to the show this February?
Scavio: This will be the year when much of the focus will be on Smartphones...and so we've consolidated our iPhone Summit and Mobile Summit into a Smartphone Summit. At the same time, we're rebranding our Serious Games Summit and dividing it into two days–the first will be about serious games in the health field; the second is all about "gamification," a trendy word that means using gameplay mechanics for non-game consumer technology applications.
Q: What were some of the biggest announcements at GDC over the past 25 years?
Scavio: Well, Bill Gates announced the Xbox at GDC in 2000 and Will Wright announced his game "Spore" at GDC 2005. Because GDC is for developers, our show is where the cutting-edge game technologies are unveiled. What you see at GDC is what the public is going to see in 3-5 years at E3. E3 is now; GDC is what's going to happen.
Q: For companies looking to speak at GDC, what's the secret to getting your talk accepted?
Scavio: GDC is all about integrity. We have a very strict advisory board which, when it is reviewing talks, if it senses any sort of a sales pitch, the talk gets declined. So my suggestion to vendors who want their products mentioned at GDC is to ask their customers to submit a talk that includes the technology and how they use it. It's the user who should be talking about it, not the vendor. That's because we want to hear the bad along with the good; we want to know what problems the user had and how they fixed them. And you're not going to hear that from the vendor. So there has to be takeaway...that's what we look for when we're reviewing talks – takeaway, takeaway, takeaway. Is the attendee going to walk out of that room knowing something they didn't know when they walked in?
Felix Roeken, general manager at Trinigy, discusses building a global business, the success of the Vision Game Engine in Asia, and participating at GDC China |
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 Felix Roeken |
Q: Felix, in September, Trinigy expanded to Asia and announced an office in Seoul, Korea. You've also secured several licensing deals with game companies in Korea, China, and Vietnam. What makes your Vision Game Engine so well-suited for Asian developers?
Felix Roeken: The Vision Engine's flexibility lets developers adapt the tech to their very specific requirements and toolsets. Unlike other monolithic or more complex technologies, Vision can be easily modified, customized, and integrated with complementary internal or third-party technologies. Of course, this is something that developers everywhere love, but it's proven especially successful in Asia.
In a very short period of time, a number of Asian developers have licensed our technology. In fact, more than 20 Asian game titles are currently being developed on Vision Engine 8. Neowiz has already released two action MMOs based on the Vision Engine ("Warlords" and "DiZZel"), and they are working on several more unannounced Vision-based titles. Other Asian licensees include Nanoplay, SmileGate, Aurogon Games, Nsid Global, FPT Online, and several more. One of our customers is working on a hi-profile martial arts MMO based on one of the most popular IPs in Asia, which also happens to be my personal favorite IP of all time.
Q: Trinigy is participating in GDC China in December. What will you be showcasing?
Roeken: In addition to exhibiting and lecturing at GDC China, we'll have a strong booth presence. From a technological point of view, we'll be focusing on the very latest version of Vision Engine 8, which will feature additional improvements specially geared towards our Asian customers.
We're also setting up meetings with numerous Chinese development houses as we have some exciting support news to share with them. And we'll have some big new customer and partner announcements. Unfortunately, I can't share any details now.
Q: 3-D gaming has been a hot topic in the games industry. Do you believe that the hype is warranted?
Roeken: It's an important trend in gaming, for sure, but it's definitely not new. Trinigy actually had an optimized 3-D stereoscopic rendering mode back in 2004. I suppose we were ahead of our time. Back then, the available hardware was not really suited for end-users, and the industry trend more or less went silent.
Now, with the recent new approach led by some of the industry's giants, 3-D gaming has become popular again. From a technological point of view, the Vision Engine is still well-prepared for 3-D-stereoscopic rendering. However, since we focus a lot of attention on customer requests – and there have not been many requests for 3-D rendering yet – we have not placed it very high on our priority list at the moment. But it certainly is a growing trend and we could include it at a moment's notice if those requests increased.
Q: We have seen other game engine companies – like Epic Games – make a play in the mobile space. Is that a market you plan to tackle?
Roeken: Many people don't know this, but Trinigy was one of the very first middleware companies to offer a solution for mobile and casual game developers.
We did this in the form of pricing by introducing an innovative licensing model back in 2004. It's a project-based pricing structure that, unlike Epic's UDK pricing, is flexible and royalty-free. We actually signed our first casual game customer that year. In 2009 – again before Epic – we introduced the Entertainment Stimulus Package (ESP) to support newly founded studios hit by the recession, many of which had begun developing casual and/or mobile games.
On the technological front, we launched WebVision this year to bring all the power of Vision Engine 8 to browsers and the emerging browser-based gaming space. That was just the first salvo. The flexibility of our engine makes it far easier for us to adapt to casual gaming than for some of our competitors to move in the opposite direction.
Brian Reynolds, chief game designer at Zynga, chats about designing innovate gameplay, the value of streaming event content, and 3-D technology in social gaming |
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 Brian Reynolds |
Q: Brian, your keynote address at GDC Online looked at the launch of "FrontierVille" and the process of designing innovative gameplay. For readers who may not have attended, what was the main takeaway?
Brian Reynolds: I talked about the approach we took to pitching "FrontierVille" within Zynga, and then the process we used to design it. We had a fairly conservative pitch ("FarmVille" plus more game) and set out to take the best from "FarmVille" and the best from "Mafia Wars" and put them together on the frontier. Maybe the most interesting part was showing how many of our original pitch slides made it into the game but then noticing that largely those original ideas weren't the things that people now identify as what makes "FrontierVille" a great social game. The real innovations in "FrontierVille" weren't in the pitch; they were things we found along the way, things we found by playing and improving and playing and scrapping. So it was a talk about "here's a good process to design innovative gameplay."
Q: That talk is currently being featured on GDC Vault and is available for free. What is your take on the value of streaming event content to the industry?
Reynolds: I think it's great – and I see colleagues talking about this-or-that-presentation on GDC Vault all the time. It certainly seems to broaden the reach of giving talks at GDC.
Q: Who or what inspired you to be a game designer? And what games – past or present – do you consider excellent from a game-design perspective?
Reynolds: I sold my first game when I was 13 years old–for one hundred dollars [gives Dr. Evil hand gesture]. So I've always been interested in game design and programming.
The first game that made me want to do this for a living was probably "Ultima VI." I remember thinking "Wow, this is a really big and open world" and, at the same time, "Hey, I could totally have written this!" Some of the other games that most appealed to me as both a player and a designer over the years include "Civilization" (amazing open world plus lots of simple mechanics that interact in complex ways), "Starcraft" (great combo of sharp asymmetry and near-perfect game balance), "Half Life 2" (my favorite story ever combined with terrific game detail and balance), "Gears Of War" (the most fun pure shooting experience and such innovative game craft), and "Bioshock" (great passive-listening story-telling technique).
Q: The social game space is becoming increasingly crowded and competitive. How does Zynga plan to keep the attention of players in this rapidly expanding market?
Reynolds: Like any entertainment business, we have to keep delivering new content. By way of analogy, even the best hit TV shows only run for so many seasons. So you've got to keep making more pilots to find the new hits. Multi-platform content is definitely part of our strategy (we've recently released "FarmVille" for iPad, for example). The best multi-platform strategy for us is one that increases the number of their real friends that a player can play with.
Q: What's your take on 3-D social games? What are some of the ways you would use that technology to engage players?
Reynolds: I think it's still a bit early for 3D in the social space. Navigating in 3D makes for difficult UI decisions that are hard to teach to the mass market, and the quality of the pure graphics isn't high enough yet for the mass market to get attracted to the potential immersiveness of it. So I don't see it happening yet.
Q: Lastly, hey, what's up next for Brian Reynolds? Care to share?
Reynolds: Right now I'm largely focused on "FrontierVille." Our success with the title means I need to help the team feed the continuing hunger for more frontier content and features. Eventually I'm sure I'll want to get going on a new franchise, but right now the frontier seems pretty big and friendly!
For a GDC Vault Demo, click here
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Paul has covered the videogames industry for over 15 years now, currently writes for Gamasutra.com, and was editor-in-chief of UBM's GamePower.com. He can be reached at phyman@gdmag.com.
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