“Vertical slice” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the land of game development. The idea is to create an incredibly polished 5-minute-or-so demo meant to represent a morsel of a larger experience, and after playtesting Tales from the Minus Lab for nearly a year, I’ve come to the conclusion that this really doesn’t work at all for games with a heavy focus on exploration.
19
Apr
Slices of Exploratory Games
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Speaker: Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and former CEO of MySpace
Time: Wednesday, April 25 , 6-8pm
Location: USC School of Cinematic Arts, The Albert and Dana Broccoli Theater: Room SCA 112 [ PLEASE NOTE NEW LOCATION]
Digital entrepreneur Chris DeWolfe is best known as co-founder and former CEO of MySpace from 2003 to 2009, the social network that redefined the concept of socializing around shared interests. Under DeWolfe’s leadership, MySpace grew exponentially. At launch in 2003, MySpace attracted an average of 300,000 new members daily, and when he left the company in 2009, it had more than 125 million monthly active users globally.
DeWolfe continues his entrepreneurial mission at SGN. As CEO, DeWolfe led the acquisitions and rollup of MindJolt, SGN and HallPass Media, creating a leading independent multiplatform game developer and publisher. Responsible for more than 12 top 10 titles on the iTunes Store and three number one titles on the Amazon Appstore, SGN has 35 million monthly active users, 45 million mobile downloads and more than 80 million installs on Facebook.
DeWolfe has been featured on the cover of Fortune magazine twice, was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world (2007), and chosen by Barbara Walters as one of her 10 most fascinating people (2007). DeWolfe has a B.A. degree in Finance from the University of Washington and an MBA from the University of Southern California and was honored by the latter as Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year (2006). DeWolfe served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; he lives in Los Angeles.
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18
Apr
In Praise of Abstraction
In Praise of Abstraction
One of the most inspiring talks I attended at GDC was “In Praise of Abstraction: Art History for Game Devs”, given by Jon Sharp of the Georgia Institute of Technology. As he began his talk he emphasized that he wasn’t just going to give an art history talk, but rather talk about the art of abstraction as a tool for game designers to use. He further explained that his belief that abstraction is a good tool for game designers because many games these days have a problem with literalization; what I understood to be a negative focus on recreating or representing actions and events in the real world too literally through player interaction. To elucidate this idea he posted up slides of the runner game, QWOP.
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The author may not be dead, but s/he’s down to 4 hit points and has no
lives left!
lives left!
Text written by William Huber
The topic of the next game salon is “authorship” (or auteurism in games)
When game consoles and arcade games started to hit mass culture in the early 1970s, there was little talk of them as “authored,” and in most cases there wasn’t really a distinction between platform and content: the Magnavox Odyssey (despite its swappable cards) was its games, Pong was both the game and the hardware it ran on. When the Atari VCS and other game platforms from the “second-generation” were released in the late 1970s, however, they afforded a distinction between platform and content that made it much easier to think of digital games as designed and authored by a specialist. Games could be designed, packaged and sold as works in their own right, distinct from the platforms on which they ran.
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Last week, I attended the Red Bull Game & Demo Lounge Auditions event for TEDxUSC. I had very few expectations going into this event, other than that it was a qualifier for presenting our games at TEDx and an industry pitch in its own right.
At the event, we had the chance to demo Minus Lab for the guests, some of whom were from Red Bull, some from USC and some from the game industry. The audience got to fill out comment cards, ranking us on Innovation, User Experience, Artistic merit and Technology. We have yet to receive these comment cards back, but I think this was a very useful part of the evening. It will be interesting to see what the first impression of our game is for folks who haven’t seen it before. We only had 4 minutes to present the entirety of the concept (which very much allowed for only “it’s in one room!” “you shrink and grow!”), and I’m curious to see whether we presented enough of the gameplay for the audience to understand what Minus Lab is as a full game. I think the comment cards will help us decide what to focus on in future demos; if the cards are largely confused or ask questions about what the game actually is, then we’ll know that we need to adjust and focus more on describing play during the game.
I was also happy to see that I remembered and was familiar with all of the games (save for one) that pitched at the presentation. All of the games that presented were memorable in some regard, and it was interesting to hear the responses to them.
Overall, it’s still slightly unclear what the TEDx Game Lounge experience entails, but this event at least offered us the chance to try out our presentation and get feedback for it and for our game.
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16
Apr
Disney Inspire Days Trip
Attending Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Inspire Days was a much needed flood of inspiration for me. Not only did it rejuvenate my excitement for developing my thesis, but it also reignited my passion for the industry.
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13
Apr
TypeFighter Review
TypeFighter created by Kevin Lee and Kyle Fujita is a “classic beat-em-ups” game like the Street Fighter and Tekken franchises, but with a clever approach regarding game mechanics. Conventional fighting or brawler games typically require a player to press a sequence of directional and button based input commands in order to complete combo moves and special attacks. Similarly, TypeFighter requires a player to press a sequence of buttons in a timely fashion to either complete a combo attack or defend against it.
However, TypeFigher differs from its early predecessors due to the game mechanic of typing a specific word rather than pressing a sequence of buttons having no meaning except for their input value. The game uses fighting game conventions related to eye and hand coordination to improve typing skills while immersing the player in the reflex driven fast-paced excitement inherent in iconic brawler games like Street Fighter II.
TypeFighter excels at immersing players into the “over-the-top entertainment and insanity of a brawler game” without reminding players they are actually playing a game to improve their typing skill set.
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A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to get a chance to go to Disney Inspire Day with Sarah. I’m not the biggest fan of Disney, I’ll start off by saying that, but to get a look behind the scenes of a giant animation studio was nonetheless an amazing experience.
Unfortunately most of what we were shown is covered by an NDA so the best bits I’m not allowed to talk about, but I think I can mention Wreck-It Ralph, the newest Disney feature animation that will be released this coming November. We were given the usual concept art showings and the spiel about how yes, this is their most innovative movie yet. For those of you not up to date with your Disney news (like me) it’s an CG animated film that takes place in video game worlds. The main character is a video game villain and (so says wikipedia) the movie will feature cameo appears by licensed video characters such as a ghost from Pac-Man.
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(photo from joystiq)
Speaker: Christina Norman, Riot Games
Time: Wednesday, April 11 , 6-8pm
Location: USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC), Room 122
Christina Norman is a Lead Designer at Riot Games currently working on League of Legends. She previously worked at BioWare on Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3 in both Lead Programmer and Lead Designer roles. Christina was instrumental in creating Mass Effect’s cinematic conversation system, and building the real time shooter gameplay of Mass Effect 2 & 3, as well as Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer.
In her talk, Christina will discuss the evolution of design in Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3. Specific design choices, and the thought process behind them, will be discussed in detail
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