Game Focus Germany 2008
I’m writing this blog post from my hotel room in Hannover, Germany! I’ll be attending and speaking at Game Focus Germany, a cool intimate conference in Hannover held on January 24th and 25th.
I’m particularly interested in attending Greg Kostikyan’s keynote on Thursday, “The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again.” Looking at the huge internal development machines of the top publishers I can’t help but think we’re about to go through a rather painful reorganization of the whole industry. But, through that we should see some great new companies, new games, and new directions.
I’m also looking forward to the party on Thursday night hosted by Black Lion Studios. I’m sure there will be vast quantities of beer there, and I can only hope any pictures of me will stay off the internet.
At 11am on Friday, I’ll be lecturing on the 3rd person camera technology I wrote for Thief: Deadly Shadows during my stay at Ion Storm. It is a little outside my usual management and production topics, but I always like getting back to my programming roots.
The presentation has almost two dozen movies of bad camera movement, tolerable camera movement, and great camera movement (if I do say so myself). Each section shows what happens to a camera if you don’t handle a particular case of third person camera movement, such as linear movement, fast rotations, and negotiating geometry.
I’m also interested in meeting some independent German developers during my stay. My relationship with the Lyon, France based Arkane Studios is extremely rewarding in both directions, and I’d consider myself very lucky to find a German studio to work with in a similar vein.
Beyond that, I’m already enjoying my stay in Germany – it is a beautiful country and I apologize to every native German speaker what I’m doing to your language!
January 24th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
The first day of the conference was pretty good – I went to the English sessions which were plentiful. I saw the keynote from Greg Kostikyan about the new rise of prominence of independent game developers working in the downloadable PC and console space - not a bad way to start the show. The best talk today was a tie between two speakers.
The first was given by Jonathan Blow – a very design centric person who sees games as pure works of art, to be worked on until the artist is damn well ready (if ever) to let it go. I recall disagreeing strongly with some of what he said at first, but then coming to an understanding – not every game has to be played – some games are only for the designer. Well – in my mind they don’t really contribute to the human situation, but perhaps if the game designer is sufficiently annoying to hang around with, at least he isn’t bothering the rest of us while he chases his white whale!
The second was given by Stephane Bura, a Belgian game designer who works at 10Tcale. His talk defied description, actually – and was extremely familiar to any Dave Gorman Googlewack fan. He had over 219 slides in 30 minutes. I thought my presentations were stuffed with slides until I saw his. He romped through the modern ideas of game design and how they related to almost everything – including architecture and even the study of genetics. He attempted to classify game design components as they relate to an evoked emotion, such as fear, hope, etc. I don’t know how useful his classifications were but they were thought provoking.
If you ever see Jonathan or Stephene on the GDC schedule, drop everything and go see them lecture - they are worth it.
January 28th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Will you be posting your presentation online after the conference? I would love to see the videos you mentioned. And Jonathan Blow was supposed to come to Warren Spector’s “Inside the Designer’s Studio” thing but that apparently has been put on hiatus.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:09 am
My slides are posted - just go to the “Presentations” link at the top of the page, and look down about half way. It is a big presentation, though!
January 29th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
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