The first day was rather interesting as it was a day full of mixed feelings about what would be presented in the Conference. So my first task was to collect my Conference ID from the onsite registration kiosk and there was a small queue at the collection center.
Once I collected the ID I was given a nice Cloth bag (as shown in the picture above) which included a limited edition conference T Shirt, a guidebook featuring the agenda, sponsors, speakers and a briefing about the topic they are intending to speak.
Once the registration process was done I went straight to the conference which was held in two different floors, the conference was divided into several tracks namely Business & Marketing, Design, Production, Programming, Independent games summit, Smartphone & Tablet Games, Round Table, Tutorial and Sponsored Tracks. The sessions on Independent Games Summit, Tutorials and Sponsored tracks were held on the first day.
All these tracks had sessions that were overlapping with each other, so it was very tough to select the most appropriate session as there were several interesting sessions that were held simultaneously.
After giving a careful thought I decided to go for a full day tutorial on 'Level Design Fundamentals and Techniques', I decided to attend this session so that I could learn about level designing in games which is very important when progressing to a new level, in addition to that I wanted to get level design insights from the professionals in the field. This was indeed a fruitful session, it was from this session I learnt that every gaming company should have a level designer if there are serious about their game (As it is a known profession within the gaming industry).
They spoke further about the following topics
- The Role played by a Level Designer
- Layout (Using the layout of the game to teach the game)
- Layering
- Visualizing (Rule of thirds - An important concept in photography and Gaming)
- Modes of creating a layout (Paper Planning, Graybox Blackout and Kit Roughing)
- Environmental Storytelling.
This session explained several more insights on Level Designing and went on till the evening but I decided to leave early so that I can attend other sessions in the conference.
It was while going through the agenda that I came across a sponsored session arranged by Adobe titled 'Equipping a perfect game design team- Visual Design tactics with Adobe's technology edge'. I thought I should attend this session since I was keen to know how Adobe would cut its teeth into the gaming market.
When I just started my career as a game developer around a year back I was happy to see the Adobe Gaming SDK (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/games/gaming.html) that consisted of several tools and frameworks for gaming that is supported by Adobe, so I thought that it would be interesting to know more about their involvement in gaming. However there was an issue in attending this session.
This session was delivered in Chinese, and in order to get it translated live I had to get a translating device from the conference by keeping my Passport as a security, that lead me to problem number two. I hadn't brought my passport to the conference.
Fortunately one of the organizers of the event was very kind enough to convince with the organizers of the session to keep my bag (I brought a hand luggage that consisted of some of my belongings) instead of my passport as a security, and I was finally able to get the device below.
Many technologies and tools consisted in the Adobe Gaming SDK were discussed in this session, In the Picture below the speaker was discussing about Dragon Bones - A 2D skeletal animation library for Flash, but what inspired me in this session was something else; It was Adobe Scout (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/scout/articles/adobe-scout-getting-started.html).
Adobe Scout is a profiling tool that could be used to analyse the behavior of the Flash content. Initially I was thrilled to see Adobe extending its arm towards gaming and to know that it has further extended itself for developing Program Analysing (i.e: profiling) tools I was thrilled, even though Adobe Scout was designed for Flash based Game Development which would probably benefit only 2D Games, developers now have a tool to analyse their games prior to its release. This proved the extent to which a technology company can expand itself and one day I hope that in Sri Lanka we could learn a lot by looking at these developments.
Finally after the end of this session, I went back to the hotel calling it a day and with the intension of learning a lot more the next day.
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