Game Developers Conference China - Day 2

The second day was equally interesting,  I was familiar about the conference with my experience from the first day and since I knew the proceedings before hand (Thankful to the organizers of the conference who had deployed a Mobile app on the conference that was very handy) things went on smoothly.

The first session I attended was titled 'Building tools for empowering creativity and improving efficiency'.

This session was focused on the development of tools that could be used when designing and developing games, so the discussion was based on the usage of these tools by taking real world examples into consideration. In addition to that several libraries and tools were discussed, PHPExcel, YAML and Particle Editors were among them. This session was held under the Smartphone and Tablet summit.

 

It is important to note here that to create a game a developer needs the aid of so many tools, a Game Engine will be able to provide most of these tools, but sometimes the relevant tool may not be available in the engine, even though it may be available the tool in the engine may not be as effective as the custom built tools. This session presented some guidelines to consider when developing such tools which are as follows

1. Build something generic, as you may never know what your next project is going to be.

2. Have a plan on how you will be working with the tool in future

3. Version Control your tools (TotalSVN is a free tool that could be used)

4. Never connect your tool to another tool or software, even though we may like to connect our tools on top of another tool.

5. Have a good document about your tool so that people could read and use them (This is what so many projects lack)

6. Keep the project smaller

7. Have a few programmers that will ensure less confusion in the initial development.

In addition to that the speaker mentioned that as the tool becomes popular people could demand more features, so he suggested to make the code clearer. 

Prior to ending the session there was a suggestion to watch a TED Talk that was delivered by a Game Developer named Jane McGonial (Author of the book 'Reality Broken'), though this TED Talk had very little to do with the content that was spoken (except about World of WarCraft Wiki which highlighted the importance of documentation) this is an interesting Talk that could be viewed below.

 

The next session was titled 'Road not taken: Lessons learned transitioning from Mobile to Console' this too was held under the Smartphone and Tablet Summit.

As the title suggests this session was focused towards the migration of Mobile games to the Console market, so in this session the focus was on the migration to a new market, so according to the speaker  thriving markets have the following features

1. Weak Competition

2. High Platform Support

3. Large Audience

In addition to this he mentioned the following during his session
 

1.Gaming Consoles fall under the category of consumable media as they only care about selling the game, so have a good sales pitch and an effective marketing strategy (create an excitement about the game - Community marketing is a good option)

2. Consoles are closed platforms, i.e. Platform controls Distribution

3. Though advertising a console game through the press could be effective, it takes a long time to get attention and such advertising methods should be done intensively.

4. Mailing lists and Cross Promotions may not work for console games since console games are closed platform.
5.Rush to meet the deadlines and the time line of work should be done simultaneously in order to keep in line with the deadlines.
6.Iterative development methodologies may not work for Console game development so make big development releases.
7. Console gaming market is very expensive and conservative, so the publishers may not want to spend money on a game that is very new as they fear it may not be liked by the players
8. Finally, Game Developers are not people who just make one game
9. You can find gaming articles in the following site: http://www.lostgarden.com/.
 

The next session I attended was titled 'Business model for web games'

 I was not much thrilled by this session as I felt that the speaker was focusing his attention on the Chinese Game Market (which was understandable as the session was delivered in Chinese), yet I was able to gain the following facts from that session.

1. The Business model is a system and it will be useless if people dislike it.

2. Web games take a lot of testing time

3. Quality of the Game itself depends on the payment model.

4 Web games need to generate more traffic to generate more money.

5. Business models should be built on Innovation

6. The web game has to be unique to generate more money

7. Adding unique features could make the game more popular e.g. Making the player to ride a dragon the way he rides a Ferrari.

8. Having a good structure is very important.

9. When the difficulty of the game increases the player becomes anxious.

10.Match the difficulty and the boredom of the game.

11. Increase the levels of payment with the progression of the levels

12. Last but not least, consider the income of people when developing a business model.

 

The next session I attended was titled 'Engine Development of Moonlight Blade', I thought of attending this session as I wanted to learn about technologies that are used in Game Engines, Once again this session was in Chinese but the speaker was very informative as he spoke about several technological and design aspects that were used in 'Moonlight Blade' which included Mapping, Instancing, Material Shading, Rendering and Lighting.
He further stated that Moonlight Blade is MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) Game Engine, so this may not be the best choice if you are building small scale games. In addition to that their official website is in Chinese (again I feel that this Engine is catering to the Chinese developers), however if you are able to manage simplified Chinese this is the official site http://wuxia.qq.com/

In my previous post I mentioned about the issue of having overlapping sessions, due to that I decided to attend two parallel sessions alternatively, this however had the disadvantage of missing and the advantage of gaining some information from both sessions. One Session was  titled 'Powerful and Effective Animation for 2D and 3D Games' while the other was titled 'Data Oriented Programming Paradigm for Optimal Performance'

Courtesy: GDC China

This Session was presented by an Animator Working in Skull girls, she mentioned several animations that were used in Skull girls games .

She suggested that Gameplay is the most important thing, so that animators should corporate with the designers to know how the animations should be done.
Another important thing that she suggested was to make the animations strong and even the idle should be considered as an animation.
She discussed a lot of animation techniques that were demonstrated using sprite animations, which were quite interesting an could be used especially when developing 2D Games.

Courtesy: GDC China

The other session was related to Game Programming, an area which I am highly interested in learning, this session was more like a research and had a lot of technical and academic literature in its delivery. The Speaker highlighted the fact the data is going to be the bottleneck in the future and though the compiler has the facility to optimize the code execution, it cannot optimize the data layout.

The Last session I participated for the day was titled 'Prototyping for Innovation: How to Prototype Effectively', I would rate this as the best session I participated on that day. The first thing that she mentioned was that the Commercial Game Development is much different from Student Development Project. She mentioned that the Common Process was to: Have an Idea -> Make a Game -> Iterate on Mechanics -> Launch. She added that this may be good for student projects.

She mentioned about an interesting Method known as the Cerny Method which had two methods, which are Preproduction and Production. She suggested that Agile and Scrum are good development methods to implement the Cerny Method. In addition to that she suggested us to look at other games and do prior art research when developing a game.

Finally she ended up suggesting an effective method that we should follow when developing games. This was the first time I came across a Stage called Alpha Stage, that is comes prior to the beta stage of a product.

1. Assess the Assets and Constraints
2. Evaluate the Market Place
3. Look at the calendar of events
4. What are the biggest Unknowns
5. Vertical Slice - Refining the major features of a game
6. Alpha 1 - Game Should Work from start to end
7. Alpha 2 - Mixing Music, Visual Effects and other features
8. Beta - Only used to fix bugs
9. Re evaluate the schedule regularly
10. Maintain a stable build

With the end of that session, I called it a day and went back to the hotel with lot of knowledge on the Game Development Arena.