GDC 2010
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The Digital Continuum: Catching that All Points Bulletin fever
I knew it would happen. GDC 2010 came and went, leaving behind a brand new trial of All Points Bulletin information that's making me want to play it more than ever before. I've written about the game a few times before, each instance knowing a little bit more about the title. This year's GDC brought us hands-on reports, interviews, the news of a North American beta and even a nine minute video presentation via shakeycam. Now my knowledge feels mostly complete and aside from actually playing the game I've got a pretty good idea of why it's potentially going to be something no videogame fan -- let alone MMO fan -- will want to miss. So, let me share a few of them with you.
GDC10: Our chat with Echo Bazaar's Alexis Kennedy
We caught up with Echo Bazaars's Alexis Kennedy to ask him about the wildly successful Facebook style game. It's hard to describe, easy to pick up and addictive to play. Picture an underground city populated by murderers, spies and all types of shady characters, add in a unique story and Twitter functionality and you wind up with this little gem. "It's more of a single player experience than I'd like." said Alexis, who is the Chief Narrative Officer for the game. "We are always looking at ways to make it more social, we want to give more direct ways to interact with other people. I want to get as much variety in there as possible. But it's finding the right balance of making somebody's experience unique to them without going crazy trying to cater at every possible stage." But how to combat a player feeling as though his or her experience is devalued by seeing the same thing come up in their friend's streams? "The way to deal with that, really, is just to write more content."
GDC 2010: Interview with Faraway's Steph Thirion
Steph Thirion is a game designer who's been releasing some of the most inventive games I've seen on the iPhone. He started out with Eliss a little while back, and he recently announced Faraway, which I got to play at GDC. The night after I played the game (it was at a party called Gamma IV), I sat down with him to chat about developing for the iPhone, why Eliss wasn't bigger, and his biggest inspiration for the more casual gameplay of Faraway. Read on for the full interview.
Hands-on: Parrot AR.Drone
We've never written about the Parrot AR.Drone on our humble news site because we've yet to see its applications in the gaming space. Don't get us wrong -- it's as inherently awesome as you'd expect a hovering, camera-equipped drone (that's controlled by your iPhone!) to be. However, "random things that are awesome" doesn't really align with our editorial purview. At GDC, Parrot went to great lengths to show off the gaming applications of the Drone. A representative presented two tech demos to us, both of which use the device's front-mounted camera to recognize "tags" in the environment, creating augmented reality overlays which allow the user to virtually interact with an object. In layman's terms: It recognizes predetermined patterns, and turns them into virtual targets, at which you can then shoot virtual bullets and missiles. %Gallery-88139%
GDC: 'Designing Shadow Complex' (or: zig when they zag)
While Metroid director Yoshio Sakamoto may not have played Shadow Complex, the XBLA darling's creators definitely played Metroid. During a panel titled "Designing Shadow Complex," Chair Entertainment Creative Director Donald Mustard encouraged the audience of prospective downloadable game makers to embrace genre limitations. "So, genre is one of your limitations because you aren't just competing against other games that are released in the downloadable space," Mustard said, pacing across the stage. "You really are competing against Gears of War, Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2. That is the real competition and you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from those kinds of games. And that is an awesome opportunity." For Mustard, that meant moving "orthogonally" from what the "big $60 retail games" are doing. Mustard said, "For us, what that ultimately meant is target an old and abandoned genre. Which to us was kind of this Metroidvania side scroller adventure genre that had been abandoned. No one was making games in this genre. And we said, 'What if we took that genre and fused that with some of the modern sensibilities that had come out; some of the modern ideas of AI and physics and graphics? That would be a really cool combination.'
Developer Tom Soderlund explains the frights of Ghostwire
Bumps in the night. Unexplained sounds. A chill up your spine. Extreme terror. These things aren't associated with the Nintendo DSi, unless you unexpectedly leave yours behind in a taxi. But A Different Game CEO Tom Soderlund wants to bring all of that augmented paranormal activity to your DSi with Ghostwire and turn you into a ghostbuster (minus the proton packs). Now you're armed with a stylus and the power of Nintendo. Originally conceived four years ago for Symbian-powered smartphones, the idea is to turn your handheld into a tool for communicating with the paranormal world. The built-in camera, sound meters, light meters are all a part of the experience, providing a combination of real-world and computer-generated data. Soderlund's team built an adventure game around it -- you talk to ghosts, find out what's troubling them, and either capture them or attempt to ease their pain.
Ghostwire might haunt iPhone, Android
Ghostwire lead developer Tom Soderlund told us at GDC that his upcoming DSi-exclusive Nintendo DS game might be coming to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. The DSi version, published by Majesco, is set to come out near Halloween this year, and it's possible that other flavors might join it at that time. "With the DSi we have location to some extent using the wifi chip, because we can kind of recognize when the user is in a new location, or where they are somewhere they've been before." Soderlund said, "But, we're thinking of taking to the iPhone or the Android which have more emphasis on location-based gameplay.We hope Elvis' grave is first on the list.
GDC: The music and sound of Flower
On the last day of GDC, a little room in the back of the North Hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center was packed. Most of the audio design and sound creation panels in that part of the building weren't very well attended for most of the week. But on Saturday morning, it was standing room only for the panel hosted by a surprised Vincent Diamante and Steve Johnson, the respective composer and sound designer on thatgamecompany's downloadable gem, Flower. They started off by explaining a little bit about how thatgamecompany developed the game: It all started from the narrative, as co-founder Jenova Chen wanted to try and create a rise and fall story with no actual protagonist to speak of. Then, they loaded up the game itself, and played through most of the levels, talking about their designs as commentary over the gameplay itself.
Interview: EyePet's Nicolas Doucet discusses Move integration
We were starting to worry that SCEA had forgotten about EyePet when its planned holiday 2009 release came and went. Sony's Eye-enabled virtual pet simulator made a surprising reemergence recently, now featuring PlayStation Move support. We chatted with EyePet producer Nicolas Doucet about implementing Sony's motion controller into the game, and what that means for gamers, new and old. By removing the Magic Card, and replacing it with motion controls, isn't this new version of EyePet, essentially, a brand new game? Especially for North America and Japan, as well. It's going to be the first release, so yeah it's a brand new game. We've really made a lot of effort to make sure that whatever we converted from the Magic Card for the Move wasn't just a port. We deconstructed and reconstructed things to really make it feel like a Move-dedicated game. Obviously, to begin with it wasn't. We put a lot of effort into that. We've extended the development by another nine months to really give something special to players. Will it be a PlayStation Move launch title? Yes it will be, this Fall. %Gallery-88229%
OnLive features 'cloud' session saves, disables graphics settings
In a demo of its upcoming streaming service, OnLive president and CEO Steve Perlman confirmed something long suspected -- players will not be able to adjust graphics settings. "We don't want somebody going and changing the settings to something different for what the game is optimized for," he told Joystiq in an interview during the 2010 Game Developers Conference. "We'll go and scale or adjust or do whatever changes we need to make in order to make it work." Perlman also demoed an OnLive "cloud gaming" feature which will allow players to "suspend" action at any time and retrieve the session later through any OnLive source (PC, Mac or on TV). "This is also good if something happens to your connection," Perlman said. "Take as long as you want to resume. So, literally, you can pause a game with OnLive, quit -- suppose you're on your TV -- and then later on in the office a few days later, resume. And it will pick up where it left off." According to Perlman, OnLive's lowest-end server resource offers twice the GPU performance of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The service also has the ability to "virtualize" servers, allowing multiple players per server or creating dedicated servers for players for high-end games. "We can also go and, in principle, tie together multiple servers so you can get something like an SLI type of experience," Perlman concluded. OnLive will launch this summer with various pricing and service models, which Perlman says may change as "statistics of usage" data is examined and the company learns what levels "peak loads" reach.
Microsoft's Game Room for Xbox 'rewinds' the hits in our hands-on demo
Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the "make a virtual representation of a gaming space" idea might seem ripped straight from Sony's Home, there aren't really any actual similarities -- outside of the fact they're both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom "level" of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We're sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it's a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there's a "rewind" function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It's perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.
Nexon MMOs not coming to Mac or consoles any time soon
There's been quite a bit of talk coming out of Nexon from the time of the GDC -- revealing two games, more news on the venerable MapleStory, and even a developer initiative announced shortly before the conference. But if you were waiting for the other shoe to drop, there is one after a fashion, because the company still has no plans to develop anything for the Mac or for consoles. Both Vindictus and Dragon Nest are apparently popular choices for players to request on consoles, but according to Nexon America vice president Min Kim, neither one is planned for development for the console platform. Kim went on to explain that his company's base of operations in Korea meant that Mac support was a distant afterthought at best -- the market for non-PC games in Korea is minimal. Of course, in both cases he said that the support is something they would like to expand to eventually, but for now there's just not enough reason to expand. Which is sad news if you're one of the many users who prefer a fruit-based computer, especially with more and more games expanding to be playable on any platform. [Thanks Tracey!]
Hands-on: Star Wars: The Old Republic's Trooper class
Click to Jabba-size LucasArts and BioWare have thus far released information for their upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic, at a painfully slow pace -- the same goes for the hands-on opportunities they've offered us over the past year. When we finished our demo of the game at GDC, we were still left with a number of the same questions we had when we checked out the game back in December: Will there be space combat? What community features will be available? Can we build our own sentient, wise-cracking droids which secretly possess hearts of gold (and tin)? Alas, these questions remain unanswered. However, our GDC demo did clarify one hang-up we've been concerned about since the game was announced: Why would anyone play as a non-Force user? The answer is now clear. It's because the Galactic Republic's Trooper class is awesome. %Gallery-88220%
GDC10: Dragon Nest hands-on
Ever since the Diablo franchise hit it big with gamers across the world, competing companies have attempted to replicate Blizzard's addictive click-and-loot gameplay with varying degrees of success. There's just something satisfying on a primal level when you wipe out entire armies of monsters with a mere 2,142 mouse clicks. Mega-MMO publisher Nexon (Mabinogi, Dungeon Fighter Online) is bringing over another contender in Dragon Nest, a fast and furious dungeon crawler (minus the Vin Diesel, unfortunately). At GDC 2010, we were fortunate enough to nab a hands-on with Dragon Nest, a title could almost be considered a sibling of Nexon's Vindictus. Both games are action-oriented, twitch-based and include cutting through swaths of enemies for the glory of your inventory. However, while Vindictus is serious in tone and looks, Dragon Nest goes for a "cuter" feel. In markets where Dragon Nest and Vindictus exist simultaneously, such as Korea, each can co-exist peacefully while not undercutting one another. Of course, Dragon Nest is more than a cute face and a mouse waiting to be worn out -- hit the jump after the gallery to chew through this colorful game with us. %Gallery-118909%
GDC: Harmonix on the ups and downs of creating the Rock Band Network
Eleven days ago, Harmonix delivered on a concept many of us had fantasized about since the very first time we ever played Rock Band: It democratized the track-making process. For the first time in the franchise's history, any schmo off the street with a bit of MIDI engineering experience and a song in their heart could put that song on the Rock Band Store for the world to see (and hopefully purchase). At GDC, Harmonix senior sound designer Caleb Epps and Rock Band Network producer Matthew Nordhouse sat down to speak about the challenges that came with opening up the game to user-generated content, and how its dedicated community has organically evolved the song-sharing process.
GDC10: Hands-on with TERA Online
New MMOs are becoming a dime a dozen. We here at Massively are constantly flooded with press releases claiming that Company A's new game is not only an MMO, but it's the best darn MMO you've ever seen. Despite this, we try to hold back the cynicism and keep a sharp eye open for the true diamonds in the rough. At GDC 2010, we saw what could be considered at least an emerald in the rough. TERA had a huge presence at the conference, with fliers everywhere you looked and an impressive demo booth with four playable stations. Since Seraphina and I both spent some quality time with the game, including a developer demo, we decided to pool our thoughts for one big article on what we saw. Follow along for our impressions of TERA.
Interview: ModNation Racers' Dan Sochan
ModNation Racers has come a long way since the release of its public beta last year. Since then, Sony San Diego Studios and United Front Games have expanded the franchise quite a bit, adding a number of new creation tools, four-player split-screen support and even a PSP counterpart. We chatted with ModNation Racers producer Dan Sochan about what's new, and what we can expect from the future, including support for the PlayStation Move motion controller. Joystiq: What's new about the code we're seeing today at GDC? Dan Sochan, producer, ModNation Racers: There's the four-player split-screen, two-player online split-screen, and we've also announced and have been showing off more of the single player career. We kept the story of the single player career mode quite light. At its core, it's still a racing game, so we didn't want to complicate it with you saving the world. The story is you're this young racer who goes into this league, the ModNation Racing Championship, and you're basically going from a nobody to take on the ultimate champion. Through the way you have also have a bit of an influence. It has some elements of Pleasantville, where everyone tends to be a little bit more drab with the colors they choose for their characters and karts, and you influence them by being very creative. So all of a sudden everyone wants to have bright, vibrant colors and doing very elaborate decorating of themselves and their karts, and it's narrated through two characters: Biff and Gary, who offer comic relief through the game. How does progression work in the single player campaign? Do you unlock creation tools in that mode, akin to LittleBigPlanet? Yes, definitely there will be a certain number of unlockables you'll get through the career, but we tried not to make it exclusively through the career. We didn't want to pigeonhole people and force them to play that way. So you'll also get more unlocks by publishing, sharing, downloading, voting, basically being a participant in the community, which is kind of cool.%Gallery-64898%
APB impressions from Joystiq at GDC
Our friends over at Massively's sister site Joystiq have weighed in with their impressions of Realtime Worlds' forthcoming All Points Bulletin MMORPG, recently demoed at last week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. The article drops a few interesting nuggets, including the fact that APB will not feature hand-to-hand combat on release day, as well as observations on the vehicle customization tools, enforcer versus criminal PvP, mission types, and other items shown at GDC by studio founder (and Grand Theft Auto creator) David Jones. "I have to admit that the concept of a "GTA MMO" was never one that seemed like it would "work." After seeing APB in action, though, with its multitude of customization options and spectacular shootouts, my feeling has definitely changed. It really could work," Joystiq concludes.
Gaijin bringing iPhone's Lilt Line to WiiWare
Lilt Line, winner of a 2010 IGF Mobile award for Audio Achievement is a simple iPhone game, in which you tilt the phone to guide a line through winding tunnels, and tap the screen in response to on-screen cues, all in time to dubstep music by 16bit. Essentially, it's Irritating Stick without the irritation! Developer Different Cloth revealed in a tweet that Wii owners will get to experience Lilt Line as well, thanks to Bit.Trip creator Gaijin Games. All we know from the (necessarily brief) announcement is that Gaijin is bringing the game to the Wii. We can assume, both from the nature of the game and the fact that we don't think the three-person Gaijin Games team is going to start publishing packaged games, that it's WiiWare. We've asked Gaijin for more information. In the meantime, check out the iPhone version after the break.
AMD lays out Open Stereo 3D Initiative at GDC
NVIDIA has certainly been more active in 3D than ATI/AMD has as of late, but it looks like the situation may be starting to change, as AMD has taken advantage of the just concluded GDC to lay out its new Open Stereo 3D Initiative. While the company isn't yet drumming up too much fanfare about it (or even issuing a press release), it does seem to have gotten things started on an ambitious note, with the initiative promising to provide consumers with "more choice, more innovation, and lower cost." In the nearer term, that will apparently translate to products like 3D-enabled ATI Eyefinity technology, 120Hz displays, stereo 3D notebooks, and various bundled solutions and shutter glasses. Of course, any actual product announcements are still a little ways off, but it looks like AMD does already have quite a few partners lined up.
