Kalender

Thanks everyone for today. I'm extremely excited about the upcoming period. I'm certain you'll do great things!

Here are today's slides.  

We'll primarily use this place to store the slides and post the assignments etc. Tomorrow (Wednesday) I'll post the groups and also the game suggestions you had for the game session.

For the diary:

1. Introduction

• What do you hope to get out of the course?

• Do you see yourself working with games in the future?

– If yes, doing what and in which context?

– If no, what will you use the experience of the course for?

– GL: Daniel Nyberg on examples of games technologies

– L: GDD and business case development

– Group work (if time)

And here are the proposed games for the games session. We'll need to decide which ones we focus on etc soon.

And here's one of the more exhaustive templates for a GDD by the consultant Marc Baldwin. As with every template, it needs to be adapted to the project at hand. Take away all the headers that aren't relevant to your specific project – but remember to consider them carefully before removing them!

This event we devote to getting the projects off the ground. We use the first 45 mins for you to finalize your presentations and the second hour to short presentations (4 mins/project) of your project ideas and a quick discussion (3 mins/project). Follow the spirit of this template, i.e you can change the layout etc, but attempt to answer the categories for each slide!

Please use Google docs (or similar) or upload to the podium computer in VIC to avoid unnecessary switching time.

---Update---

I was really impressed by your presentations! You had really made an effort to make make them both understandable and exciting. Very professional! I'm looking forward to see how they progress. There are plenty of darlings that need to be assassinated...

This time, the focus (for most) was on the concept/the idea. Make sure you integrate work on the other points as well (target group, business case, technology). You'll have to work on it in parallel to assist i making the most relevant design choices - and getting the motivations and arguments for them.

Well done!

Here's today's presentation given by Chris Peters and here's the paper he referenced.

We have a visit by games guru Tommy Palm. He has a very long and successful track record in mobile games development, most recently as part of the King.com success story.

Here's today's presentation with the instructions for Friday's games session.

Today we listen to talks about games, discuss games, and play games. For 6 hours. Everyday should be like this really...

All in all we'll have 15 games. We do them in three segments (8-10, 10-12, 12-14). In the first hour in each segment we hear presentations of the games, IPs, studios, designers etc. Instructions can be found here. The second hour we get to play them. After that we start over for the next segment.

Here are the games, the segments and who are responsible for each of them. Remember to be precise and pedagogical in your presentations and to prepare the hands-on well.

You're responsible for the hands-on session where we get to try the games. If you need to install beforehand, contact us in the studio to sort that out. In some cases it's perhaps easier to bring your own laptop. Thursday afternoon (the 20th) is for example a good time to drop by for installations and testing.

There are a few of you that haven't signed up for a game yet. Look at the list where there are openings, contact me and the others in the group.

Finally, remember to bring food and drinks! It'll be a long day and we need to keep the energy levels up!

Björn is a game developer with a very long experience. He'll talk about indie development, community management - and very many other things.

If you want to check out some of his earlier work (but still active), look at Seatribe.

John Fuller from Avalanche studios will present and talk about his long experience in game technologies, particularly physics, middle ware, animations.

We want to hear where you are and what focus you've reached. Prepare a presentation of max 10 mins + discussion.

We want you to:

• Give a clear understanding of what your game concept is.

• Use visuals, concept art, hands-on, animations, interaction principles, early demos, etc --> game play and mechanics.

• Remember the four dimensions - concept, tech, target group, business case - and include how you address them.

• Also, tell a little how you distribute the work load between you.

Today the trade organisation Dataspelsbranschen will visit us. Among other things, Anton will talk about their work with diversity.

We're now closing in on finalizing the course. It's been an exciting round, in many respects!

The presentation

Below is the order for the presentations. You've been very well prepared for the previous sessions and I assume the same thing now. We'll devote 15 mins for each project's verbal presentation. Make sure you present all aspects this time (business case, target platform, target group + convincing concept description). If there's time for questions, we'll of course do that, otherwise you can refer to the playtime session. Be convincing and "sell" us your ideas. Focus on the strongest aspects and be prepared for tough and challenging questions. Make us excited about your idea!

Playtime, in this contexts, mean that we'll get an opportunity to try your demos/vertical slices and ask more in-depth questions. Make sure that everything works and that you've got enough hardware to facilitate as many different play testers as possible, that still get a representative experience.

9.15      Re:Peter

9.30     Shopping Wars

9.45      Playtime

10.00   Pinball Battle

10.15   Polarity Bear

10.30   gRabbit

10.45   Playtime

11.00   Reach the Sky

11.15   Rockstar Simulator

11.30   Playtime

11.45   Wrap-up

Deliverables

The deadline for the report and the diary is on Dec 17. Send it to thure@kth.se. I would also like all projects to produce a lightweight website presenting the project in a comprehensive yet "selling" manner. Hopefully this website could also serve as portfolio material for you. Send the url together with the rest of the material.