Monthly Archives: March 2009

Videogame AI, Videogame Conferences, Videogame History

GDC2009 – Friday – My Student Mixer, AI SIG roundtable, Game Preservation and a Cold

Friday – the final day of GDC. In the morning passing over a Larrabee session I visited the career area briefly – loud, busy, and I just noted who was there more then anything.

Later in the morning was the AI SIG Roundtable. There was really not much a chance of discussion on the problems with going forwards with the AI Standards the SIG seems to be built around. I hope that the issues are resolved and information provided or worked on that AiGameDev or the AI Guild themselves wouldn’t do – such as academic relations, looking at listing tons of papers, and so forth. I’m going to keep an eye on it and lurk but I’ve got too many commitments elsewhere to help directly.

I had my own session – the student mixer – just before lunch. I took a few notes – but mainly it was discussing some of the cool things the students present were able to do, how they felt about their course and work (which they are all usually fine with – no doubt the people who come to GDC are that dedicated 🙂 ) and about the IGDA efforts I did a little questioning about if they thought more communication, student groups or possibly in the future a student event would be a good idea – on all counts yes, and I hope to get this going by myself if no one else will help 🙂 – one of the things people dislike is the students have to be integrated into the normal chapter meetings, online resources and groups – segregating it helps immensely, since it would allow people interested in the area to help, but the rest to work on their own things.

During the mixer I finally got to meet Julia Brasil – who is finishing her design/art course soon, and I meant to meet last year. In fact I managed to miss Corvus Elrod who I saw once but had to rush off somewhere else. In any case, we went to the Preservation SIG meeting, then roundtable – lots of notes I have to write up, and a general feeling of some progress, with a lot more to do in the future came out from some of the stories people brought up. In related news to this seeing Devin Monnens article in the print IGDA Journal was awesome.

In the evening there was the AI Dinner, where I got to discuss all sorts of things. Some nice discussion on things with a few fellows from Google, including possibly getting the search term “A*” or “A* search” specially listed as an exception – since it currently just lists all the terms starting with A 🙂 – also discussed some bits and pieces of AI, design of an MMO, and the IGDA a little.

Lastly, throughout the day I got a worse and worse cold. Urg, the final few days of my trip will be pretty basic – I’m writing this on Sunday and, well, I’m not out riding a bike as I had hoped – at least this didn’t hit me early on in the week. *sniff sniff* *achoo*

IGDA, Videogame AI, Videogame Conferences, Videogame Press

GDC2009 – Thursday – Meet the Press, QoL and a AI Roundtable

A lot of various things done on Thursday – this year I was looking to see what the IGDA was doing in more depth, especially on the QoL side. Jason Della Rocca is leaving, so they explained in the AGM that there is a process underway to get a new executive director. There was also news on the Leadership event issue – no apology from the person directly involved but at least an apology from the board chair herself at the lax actions of the response and not having any coherent voice, although I think more needs to be done (as did several question askers). The board voting (it being a rather closed process), the board being silent (they’re getting a blog, so a good first step) and other items were also brought up (website revamps, money issues, chapter restructuring). My notes will be up next week.

I also went to the QoL committee roundtable – a lot of issues were raised as being problems to tackle and there is a reasonable action plan underway – as well as changing it to a Special Interest Group so more people can get involved. I’ll report more on this as I get involved.

The morning had the second AI Roundtable – less people (it clashed with another AI session!), but very informative on some subjects. I’ll get notes up next week 🙂

Finally, an area that I keep an eye on is game press – so going to Meet The Game Press panel was interesting. There was some good information on how to promote games – such as how to contact the press – and some of the problems they have too. They didn’t go much into why there wasn’t much journalism done, but it was at least very informative on how the 3 different sites run.

The evening had me visit the speakers party, which was fun (although I missed Simon Carless who I intended to chat to, who was always busy speaking with someone 🙂 ), although I felt a little out of place just doing the lowest of the low student mixer (which I think is important, but I doubt everyone would, hehe 🙂 ).

IGDA, Videogame Conferences, Videogames, Xbox 360 Videogames

GDC2009 – Wednesday – Anti-Censorship and more

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IGDA Luncheon

On Wednesday I intentionally missed the Nintendo keynote, which from checking the news didn’t announce anything interesting. I went to 4 sessions in the day – only 4! It’s utterly bizarre…

In any case, the first one was the Anti-censorship Committee Roundtable, which looked to do a few interesting things this year – a cheat sheet for the ESRB, information for debunking myths and regional grassroots campaigners or people who rally against laws. Some interesting people there I met who do European items too, which wasn’t covered much in the roundtable itself.

The next session on adding LIFE to Saints Row 2 was a big lesson in not giving designers too many things to do. 15,000 or something nodes on the map – slowly added over development, constantly erroring, and whenever art got updated the nodes sometimes were then in terrain. It however did add a good amount of artificial life – another big thing was that the basic things, not the special fire breathing mimes but just the smokers or groups of talkers were the best additions to the world since they are so common.

Lunch was the IGDA VIP Luncheon – it was nice to see some great praise for Jason although there was, sadly (and I should have seen if something was going to be done) no presentation of anything to him, even just a card or something else. A missed opportunity.

After lunch was the censorship roundup – an interesting look at the state of American censorship. Some stuff on countries I’ve not had a chance to check up on either. After this was the first AI roundtable – a great look at a whole range of areas, from multi-core processing to behavioural design to the way to implement things.

We checked out the Expo briefly before the awards, where a lot of the IGF games sadly were turned off (obviously all at some pre-awards thing, annoyingly I guess!). The IGF awards gave me a few titles to check out, the main awards were pretty standard – not much, I think, that really pushed games this year as much as some of the previous years, but at least Tim Schafer was fun 🙂

I actually wrote this writeup of the day there too, I perhaps half wished I had something better to do I guess! Notes for this day will appear when all the others go up too.

Videogame AI, Videogame Conferences, Videogames

GDC 2009 – Monday and Tuesday AI Summit

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The GDC AI summit was pretty good. A wide range of topics covered – although as someone noted almost all of it for bipedal creatures, usually humans specifically – so it didn’t have as much on strategic AI or for other areas like space/flying – things with 3 dimensional movement.

A good highlight was a great demo by Damian Isla that showed an AI searching for a player, getting confused when the AI didn’t see the player where it last thought it was, then exploring further afield as necessary. The small amount of behaviour gave some pretty nice stuff – a problem being that showing that behaviour to the player is very difficult, and the technical aspects of dividing up spaces to search can get pretty complex. The use of emotions like that though is immensely fun.

I must admit I am more into the behavioural and design side of AI then the technical implementations – I have my notes up from the days, but the notes for the technical sessions might not be as good. These will be up shortly – they’ll take a little time to edit, and I’ll add them here and make a post (this weekend perhaps) when I’ve sorted them.

As for slides – the locations of them will vary. GDC is locking down their public access to slides, and the AI Guild is going to be member access only to “people who have shipped one game” and are an AI programmer. Therefore I’ll probably have a look around for some slides I want to re-read from the author’s own sites.

Videogame History, Videogames

Byte Back 2009

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The memories!

On the 8th and 9th of March I attended Byte Back, a small retro game convention hosted near Stoke-on-Trent, UK. I should really have taken more notes from the event, but honestly it was just a good time for me to get out and actually play some of the videogame history I keep writing about.

It was great to meet some other great people involved in videogame preservation or history – some I still need to contact (I’ll do so after GDC 🙂 ). I had a long chat with Andy Spencer of the Retro Computer Museum – he’s looking for a place to actually display the material he’s collecting, and is looking into making the organisation (which is very new) much more official. Some great systems he had on display, and he’s been getting a lot of good volunteer help and donations.

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The pinball machine was popular

I caught up with Steve Webley, who’s really looking to work in the area of videogame history a lot more. Should be good seeing what he comes up with even if he is super busy doing tons of other cool things! 🙂

Dave Moore from Stairway to Hell was also a great insight into the UK game history scene, especially emulation. I’ll be in contact with him more I hope, certainly since I intend to research the webpages dedicated to systems and gather the webpages own histories. I also chatted very briefly with Weekend Gamer’s Sir Clive, who I should have done a more in depth chat with to see where they’re taking their series (which I brought both DVD’s of – should be a good watch!).

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The second room

There were some good people (who only briefly chatted with) from the Retro Gamer forums, where I need to join up really. So many forums to join up to!

I didn’t do much journalism as such – I hope to get some of the footage recorded by some people onto the Internet Archive if possible, a service sadly not many people know about. I should have done some more prepared interviews, but without a real aim – since I haven’t got down even what information I want to write about the museums and archives, not even getting onto collectors, enthusiasts and private groups! I need to get more involved – or at least do some coverage of – the UK videogame history area.

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A working copy of the Doomsday project! wow!

However, I do have some highlights from the event. At the charity auction (in fact all the money was going to charity, awesome!), I managed to bid for the books The Ultimate History of Videogames, by Steven L. Kent, and Game On From Pong to Oblivion The 50 Greatest Video Games Of All Time, by Simon Byron, Ste Curran, David McCarthy. The former is meant to be a great read – the latter very much a more popular look at good videogames, but I think should be a fun read in any case despite what the One Life Left guys say themselves about it on their show 🙂

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Ocean Reunited

The Ocean Reunion was a little strange – various reminiscent, rants and good stories from the old company. There’s a video of the event on youtube, which is worth a watch (I wish it was on the archive though 🙂 ).

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Jon Hare

I missed Jon Hare, which would have been good to see, but did manage to get involved in the first round of the fighting tournament – I fought a girl from the Retro Gamer forums, and while I managed to win at Soul Calibur, I did really poorly at Street Fighter and finally lost playing the decided in King of Fighters, which I had honestly barely played (although it was pretty close considering). The winner was pretty damn good, I just got roped into it as literally the last contestant, so there we go, my adventures as a pro gamer cut short 😉

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Tony Temple, Jon Stoodley and Paul Drury

Lastly, Paul Drury’s Q&A with Jon Stoodley and Tony Temple was amazing – it explained the phenomenon of high scores, the techniques and games they played (Pacman and Missile Command respectively), the other high scoring players, and some amazing and funny anecdotes (especially relating to Tony Temples strange “opponent” Roy Shildt). This is another area which isn’t really being preserved apart from those dedicated organisations who record the scores, and the odd news or magazine article (sometimes written by the people themselves!). There are the odd few documentary though too – King of Kong (which I still need to watch) and some others I have forgotten about, doh. I’ll put this onto my growing “to investigate” list 🙂

All in all a good weekend, I’ll definitely come to the next one. I’ve also brought a ticket to the Retro Computer Museum open event on May 31st, should be good!

Gallery of pictures, can anyone name every system and game (if they are visible, I need to get a better camera):

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PC Videogames, Recently I've Been Playing, Videogames

This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness

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This week I have been mostly playing…

I have been playing other things since my previous “This week”. A lot of things in fact, all full of numbers – Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Civilization 4, Dawn of War 2, and other sequels like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2, Empire: Total War and Max Payne 2…but enough of all those. I’ve got various posts in the works for most of them. 🙂

I’d like to otherwise briefly look at two indie games I’ve played the past week – Depths of Peril and Mount&Blade – both demos at the moment, my time before GDC is so limited I’d not have time for the full games yet! Continue reading This Week I’ve Mostly Playing…Indie Demo Goodness →

General, Personal

New Business Cards

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So I’ve been using, wrongly, cards for the last half a year which stated I was still a student, oops! I am doing this kind of last minute – I was recommended Moo.com – so I thought why not. I can think of some interesting card backs to use right? 🙂

I decided on the front, the easy part, I’d do the two logos on the right – my own very simple AA one, and the IGDA Game Preservation SIG logo. This coupled with my contact information (ie; this website). Here is the front in all it’s glory:

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As for the backs, that was the harder decision. There are a few things I decided to do:

  • Raid my photos for some interesting videogame (especially game preservation) related ones
  • Check what pictures I have downloaded that inspired me to save them in the first place – there were more then I thought (but 50 is a rather large number)
  • Add some other random ones in the mix (not specifically videogame related pictures or photos in the first place)

I added a simple text caption of my thoughts onto the pictures – I did try and do the full 50, but I forgot a few important things (which I didn’t want to go back and fix):

  • Cropping will occur – make sure there is whitespace around the edge of the image (which I just couldn’t be bothered to redo for many images – some were much too long or simply not big enough to work) or make sure you are using a large picture
  • Fitting text into some pictures is not possible, aesthetically – and some I did use eventually fails at this a bit
  • Having a second chance to look at what you are going to put on cards you’ll give to people is important 🙂 There are some I cut from this

A mix of these reasons made me cut it down to around 37 designs, mainly the cropping and size issues (it was late when I eventually finished, ouch what an evening). I did end up with a few more unreadable ones (or perhaps just cleverly hidden 😉 ). They’re all in this gallery, including the lot I didn’t use:

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And the final result (Moo do sure like to make it all pretty):

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I think next time I get some printed (I got 200 from Moo) I will see what people think of these. Since I am no artist, and not a very good photographer (I need to get a better camera for starters that can deal with low light and taking pictures of screens), I did source most of them from the web in one form or another. Too cliché? too derivative? too copyright infringing? too self-indulgent? not witty enough? Who knows what people will think, to be honest! At least they’re much more exciting then my last batch which was entirely black. Next time I might also have some more interesting game development screenshots to use. 🙂

Also one last final point:

  • Business card printing prints much, much much darker then what you see on any screen.

Luckily only one of mine was really affected, but it does show using just black or white text helps 🙂