AGC: Out on the show floor

Elizabeth Harper is covering the MMO-heavy Austin Game Conference for Joystiq and our WoW-obsessed friends at WoW Insider.

Though Thursday was the second day of the conference, it was the first day for the show floor to be open. As many game developers are here recruiting for jobs (including Bioware, Blizzard, LucasArts, and Perpetual -- among others!), rather than selling a product, there's no ground-breaking new game announcements. But there's a lot of interesting things happening out there, and to see what I came across during my adventures on the convention floor, read on!

The few games being shown off here tend to be of the more casual variety, and focus heavily on free-to-play online games.

• Virtual pet game/social networking site GoPets talking about their recently released an API that allows developers to integrate their own minigames into the GoPets world. (The reason to do so, of course, is money -- players can pay to play your game with real-money purchased game currency.)

• Comedy Central -- not a name you would usually associate with games, is it? -- has a large presence on the floor. They're showing off minigames from their website that are based on their different shows -- these are simple, intuitive, quick to play games that are fun and funny.

• Microsoft has a large presence here as well, and are displaying offerings from Microsoft Casual Games, with demonstrations showing soduku and other puzzle games.

• GaiaX showed off three different free-to-play online games with colorful, anime-inspired graphics.

• K2 Network is a bit of an exception, as they're demoing several traditional format games -- MMOs Knight Online and MU Online, as well as War Rock, a first person shooter currently in open beta. However, K2 games are all free to play. Of course, you can pay them for the pleasure of playing if you really want to - and gain additional abilities if you do.

With the amount of money World of Warcraft is bringing in, there are plenty of hopefuls wanting to mimic its success. And so of course we find many vendors offering to make game development as quick and painless as possible.

• Vivox is showing off their voice communication software -- you'll find it in EVE Online, Second Life, and Icarus Studios MMO to-be Fallen Earth. The difference between this and the ubiquitous TeamSpeak or Ventrillo is that it's integrated with the game itself - no more alt-tabbing.
  

• Offering to provide full QA services were Enzyme and iBeta.

• Full scale animation services were offered by The Animation Farm, while graphics software solutions were touted by Adobe, Autodesk, and Softimage.
  

• IBM and OGSi offered server solutions and game hosting for the up-and-coming MMO developer
  

• There are even some companies here showing off complete MMO development suites, that offer everything you need to create an MMO -- except the MMO. (Just insert concept art!) Thee ones on display at the AGC include BigWorld, HeroEngine, and Multiverse. The differences? BigWorld has an integrated voice communication package (from Vivox, mentioned above), HeroEngine is currently being used by Bioware (not bad press!), and Multiverse is a free system (it's a profit-sharing agreement -- you can provide your created game for free if you wish at no charge, but if you start collecting subscription fees of any sort, Multiverse gets a portion).

While there's certainly a focus on software products, hardware isn't completely left out of the loop.

• Immersion was displaying its new force feedback technology -- which had a much more subtle feel than older force feedback systems, and synced up nicely with on-screen action.

• The remainder of the hardware selection on the show floor was a bit sparse, but featured booths from Dell and Intel.