develop-2010
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Develop: How is digital distribution changing the games you play?
Now that services like Xbox Live, PSN, Steam and the iPhone App Store have proven digital distribution as a market force to be reckoned with, it's time to start examining what this change means to publishers and developers. Four game industry veteran got up on stage at the Develop Conference in Brighton this week to do just that. On the one hand, some saw the increasing influence of digital distribution as having a democratizing effect on the market, letting big publishers and small indie developers compete on even footing. BioWare's Greg Zeschuk argued that, these days, a well-known brand isn't enough to sell a low-quality game on its own. "EA hasn't been throwing out half-assed content [on digital platforms]," he said. "You not only have to have the franchise but also the quality."
Develop: How a movie screenwriter helped save Enslaved's story
Gamers sometimes criticize games for playing too much like movies. But as Ninja Theory Designer Tameem Antonaides explained at a Develop Conference session this week, bringing in screenwriting veteran Alex Garland to consult on their upcoming game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West made their game more movie-like is some very beneficial ways. As the writer behind movies like Sunshine and 28 Days Later, Garland had a feel for how to get the most drama out of Enslaved's story scenes, Antonaides said. Garland would write scenes with very simple, reductive dialogue that looked thin on the page, Antonaides said, but gained more "meat" with an actor's performance behind them. Indeed, the short story clips shown at the conference were notable for how much they relied on body language and vocal cues to convey information without words. Antonaides said they ended up cutting the game's cutscenes down from two hours of dialogue to a lean 80 minutes, with less focus on exposition and more on drama. "If you have too much dialogue, it doesn't work," Antonaides said. "Alex changed my view of what writing meant," Antonaides said. "I felt like a schoolboy so many times talking to Alex." %Gallery-97232%
Sony limiting use of 1080p 3D in PS3 games
Sony's official guidelines for 3D gaming on PS3 limit the displayed image to a resolution of 720p, a Sony representative confirmed at the Develop conference this week. Even games that run natively at 1080p resolution, like Super Stardust HD, are downscaled in 3D mode to two 720p images (one for each eye), Sony's Simon Benson explained during a demo of the technology at the conference. While the PS3 is capable of displaying a 1080p 3D image -- indeed, it will support 3D Blu-Ray movies at that resolution later this year -- Benson said upping the resolution comes at the expense of the silky-smooth 60 frames per second available at 720p (Blu-Ray movies run at 24 frames per second). Benson said that a "more cinematic game" might be well-suited for the lower frame rate and higher resolution, but that Sony's current guidelines for 3D games wouldn't allow for such a setting. The effects of this policy are probably unnoticeable to most gamers. Benson said that, in 3D, even trained computer graphics artists could barely tell the difference between the resolutions. Still, for all you pixel counters out there who obsess over "full HD 1080p," here's another bit of technical trivia for you to argue over.
Develop: Molyneux talks Fable 2 problems, Fable 3 fixes
Despite "generally favorable reviews," there were quite a few people out there who had some serious problems with Fable 2. And to hear Lionhead's Peter Molyneux talk at the Develop Conference in Brighton today, he's one of them. Molyneux's hour long on-stage presentation of Fable 3 included a veritable smorgasbord of self-deprecating remarks about the problems in the first two Fable games that would be fixed or mitigated in the threequel. For instance, Molyneux lambasted his studio for throwing way too many unnecessary features into Fable 2, even citing a study showing that most people didn't use more than 60% of the available features. Even when a feature was used, Molyneux said, it was often only used once and didn't factor into the larger game enough. For example, "most people did get married, but it didn't mean anything, it was just an excuse to have sex," he said. At one point Molyneux likened Fable 2 to "designing a car with 300 buttons on dashboard when you only need a steering wheel." %Gallery-95691%
Tim Schafer: Brutal Legend 2 isn't happening
During his recent Develop panel, Tim Schafer -- creator of Brütal Legend and head of Double Fine Productions -- revealed that the potential for a sequel to Jack Black's journey through a fantastical world of rockitude is nonexistent. "Apparently when they said it was a done deal, they meant there was no deal, and we're done," he told attendees. Double Fine fans shouldn't mourn the game's loss, however; the studio is currently at work on four new titles, so it's not like Schafer is riding off into the sunset -- unless that's part of one of the four games Double Fine is working on, in which case you heard it here first.
Double Fine's next projects: four 'smaller' games
After releasing only two games over its first ten years of existence, Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions is heading in a slightly different direction and working on four smaller projects, each with a different producer. Speaking at a keynote presentation at the Develop Conference this morning, Schafer didn't reveal many details about the new game projects. He did, however, mention who was heading up each one. They are: Lee Petty, art director on Brütal Legend, is leading a game Schafer described as "sort of retro but also really new." Nathan Martz, lead programmer on Brütal Legend, is working on a game that's "quite cutting edge." Brad Muir, who designed a lot of the combat and multiplayer on Brütal Legend, is working on a game that "focuses on gameplay mechanics." Tasha Harris, lead animator on Brütal Legend (and former senior animator at Pixar) is heading up a fourth game. Schafer didn't say what systems or formats the games would target, but did mention that some would be available as downloads while others would be retail products. He off-handedly mentioned that the quick development process meant some of these projects would be coming out this year, but quickly caught himself. "I didn't announce that," he said. "I see you writing that down. ... That was not a ship date." Schafer said the transition to multiple smaller projects happened in the wake of the unexpected cancellation of a planned Brütal Legend sequel. "Apparently when they said it was a done deal, they meant there was no deal, and we're done," he said.
Develop: Is PlayStation Home the next great game development platform?
These days, every developer and their brother seems to be making a beeline for hot new gaming platforms like Facebook and the iPhone, visions of Farmville- and Doodle-Jump-style riches dancing in their heads. But nDreams CEO Patrick O'Luanaigh says all these gold rushers might be ignoring a more welcoming and neglected platform for their gaming projects: PlayStation Home.
Rare discusses new challenges of Kinect development
Twenty-five years ago, Rare founders Chris and Tim Stamper had to reverse engineer a Japanese Famicom development kit in order to make the early NES game Slalom. Today, at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Rare Talent Director Nick Burton outlined some of the very different challenges the company has run into in the developing of Kinect Sports for Microsoft. "Kinect was a no-brainer as far as we were concerned," Burton said. "Just the opportunities it brought ... because it removes one layer between you and the computer." Burton said that Rare has always been interested in technology and game design that "is trying to remove that barrier to entry, trying to get that fun experience the entire family could have, but also getting the fidelity gamers could love." The problem with older motion control solutions Rare has worked with -- like accelerometers and even the Power Glove -- was that the fidelity wasn't there, Burton said. Rare tried to fix this for years by augmenting the original Xbox Live Vision Camera with a PlayStation-Move-style light-up handheld wand made out of a supermarket vitamin tin (pictured above). The first-person spell-casting game they made for the wand, Soulcatcher, never got out of the prototype stage, but it did go a long way to "prove you could have that kind of hardcore depth of experience with this kind of control scheme," Burton said. %Gallery-97510%
Lionhead talks about Fable 3 voice stats, emotional storytelling
If you thought the amount and variety of spoken dialogue in Fable 2 was ridiculous, then the voice statistics Lionhead is targeting for Fable 3 will... um... also seem ridiculous to you. Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Lionhead Audio Producer Georg Becker mentioned that the upcoming title would feature about 80 actors speaking over 460,000 recorded words, representing a full 47 hours of speech in the final game. For context, Becker estimated Fable 2 had a mere 50 voice actors speaking a paltry 370,000 words over a laughably short 36 or 37 hours of speech. %Gallery-95691%
Press the Pele button to see Kinect Sports soccer footage
As part of a Develop Conference talk on the lessons learned from developing Kinect Sports, Rare Talent Director Nick Burton showed a short video of the near-final version of Kinect Sports' soccer mini-game. The clip shows how control jumps between different teammates as the player passes the ball, with the Xbox 360 AI controlling player movement automatically (a la Wii Sports tennis). Check it out after the jump.
Can Kinect handle a player lying down? Yes and no
Amidst all the hubbub around the question of whether Kinect can or can't handle a player sitting on a couch, one related question seems to have been lost: Can Kinect handle players lying on the floor? This important issue was finally addressed at a session of the Develop Conference in Brighton today, and the answer is a definitive "kind of." Speaking at the session, Blitz Games CTO Andrew Oliver said his team ran into this very issue when developing their The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout game for Kinect. Many of the exercises on The Biggest Loser TV show, such as push-ups and certain yoga poses, require lying on the ground. Replicating these in the game offered a new challenge for Microsoft's 3D motion sensing hardware, and apparently it's a test the hardware fails. Oliver reported lying on the ground fundamentally breaks the 3D skeleton of your body detected by the Kinect camera and technology. "We had to consider, would this skeletal tracking ever realistically be able to work out that a player is laying on the floor," Oliver said. "We asked – believe me we asked – and we were told it wasn't going to happen."
Schafer: Comedy games need a big hit before publishers will approve
We had always assumed that we don't see more comedy in games because nothing could ever be funnier than the end of Limbo of the Lost. But speaking with Eurogamer before his upcoming Develop Conference keynote, Grim Fandango designer Tim Schafer said the comedy boom will come when publishers start connecting chuckles with dollar signs. "The industry is imitative," he said. "A lot of people are chasing the last thing that was a big hit. What we need is a big hit comedy game. As soon as we have one, everybody will follow, of course." Schafer also has some choice words for Activision's Bobby Kotick, but our therapist says we need to spend more time focusing on positivity.
InstantAction CEO: Game retail 'headed for a disaster'
InstantAction CEO Louis Castle is a big fan of "the kind of big, complicated games that cost a lot of money to make," he says. But he left a job making just those kinds of games at EA's Los Angeles studio in order to focus on finding "a new way to get the money needed to make those games." Without such a solution, Castle says we're "headed for a disaster in the retail space." The core cause of this impending disaster, Castle argued in a keynote presentation at the Develop Conference in Brighton today, is the big-budget, hit-driven focus that has overtaken the industry. This mentality has made it hard to make a game with a budget of less than $20 million and hard to profit on a game that doesn't hit the top 20, Castle said. "Really, we're becoming the worst of what Hollywood did become at one point before the independent film festivals and such," he said.
Unity CEO disses Jobs on gaming
Unity CEO David Helgason gave a talk at the Develop conference, going on this week in Brighton, England, and had some harsh words for Steve Jobs on supporting iPhone gaming. Jobs previously said that using "middleware" like Unity to develop iPhone games "produces sub-standard apps," but Helgason fires back that Jobs "doesn't understand the economics of game development fundamentally." Most developers, Helgason seems to be saying, can't be jack-of-all-trades with their code -- they need libraries like Unity to do some of the lifting, especially on smaller-scale platforms like the App Store. Stuart Dredge at Mobile Entertainment is doing a great job of covering all of the other iPhone gaming news coming out of Develop as well -- he's got talks by the developers of Ngmoco's Godfinger, Rolando's Simon Oliver, and Ideaworks Game Studio, the company that brought World at War: Zombies to the iPhone for Activision (that last talk sounds similar to the one we saw earlier this year at GDC). If there's a theme among everything developers are saying, it's probably that they're finding flexibility a must on the App Store -- while an app may be developed with one feature or pay model in mind, things often have to change quickly during development or even after the app goes live. Lots of interesting things to read in there if you're interested in iPhone game development.
PopCap: Social features coming to 'all existing games'
digg_url = 'http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/13/popcap-social-features-coming-to-all-existing-games/'; PopCap Senior Designer David Bishop said today that the company is "looking to add social features to all our existing games going forward." Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Bishop wouldn't elaborate on what kind of social features we could expect to see or which existing games might get the social treatment first, but he did mention sending cross-platform taunts and challenges in Peggle as a hypothetical example. When questioned, Bishop said we could expect to see these features rolling out in the next six to 12 months.
Joe Danger dev explains why publishers don't get downloadable games
Hello Games' Sean Murray learned a lot when looking for a third-party publisher for his company's recent PSN critical and sales success Joe Danger. But the final takeaway from all those lessons seems to boil down to the same thing: most of the big publishers do not know what they're doing in the downloadable games market. Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton today, Murray presented much of the personal research and anecdotes that convinced him and the three friends that make up his tiny company to self-publish on PSN rather than attach themselves to an established third-party publisher. Chief among those reasons was the fact that digital downloads from big publishers don't tend to sell very well on the download services. Excepting established franchise re-releases like Galaga and Street Fighter 2, which skew the data, Murray's research found that an overwhelming majority (77 percent) of original IP from third-party publishers sold a paltry 25,000 copies or less on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network. These weren't underappreciated critical gems either -- 68 percent of original IP third-party downloadable games earned a 65 percent or lower average on Metacritic, Murray said.
