Kalender

Thank you everyone for a good first session and your patience through my monologue. Here's the presented material. If there's anything you need to know more of, contact me or Chris Peters – or of course we'll meet in class!

Among the many things I presented to you, was the template for the Game Design Document (GDD). Rememember that it's a template, it's something you adapt to your particular project and process. I will get a LaTex-version soon and put that up as well.

For the diary (1-2 pages max, lots of references and examples)

• What type of player are you?
• Describe a really good game experience. What was good? (the game, the situation, the platform, etc etc etc)
• Describe a really bad game experience. Why didn’t it work?

And, BTW, here's the link to the co-organised PhD course DD3336: Interactive Entertainment Technologies.

We have a guest lecturer, Björn Johannesen (Seatribe). Among other things, he's responsible for Salem (http://www.salemthegame.com/) och Haven & Hearth (http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/).

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Here's todays presentation and here's the info on Bitsquid. Particularly important (I guess) are the groups. Make sure you contact everyone in your group so you can get a head start. On Tuesday you'll get a chance to present some of your ideas for projects to Rikard Blomberg and get a little bit of feedback. So in preparation for that we ask you to:

For Tuesday, Nov 12

• In your assigned groups, start to discuss and develop three general game ideas.

• Reflect on (a) gameplay aspects and (b) technology requirements of each.

For the diary

• Play any of Seatribe’s two games:

Salem http://www.salemthegame.com/

or

Haven & Hearth http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/.

• Describe and present it. Analyse it. What is it? What type of game? Mechanics? Game play? Tech? Players? Business case? Competitors? You pick.

Here's Rikard's presentation.

And here's the preparatory info on next weeks games session.

For the diary:

Rikard (among other things) presented a few pointers what he thinks are good approaches to game development. What do you think is a good software development model for games? Why? What do other professionals think and what's their motivation for their choices?

GL Niklas Frykholm, Bitsquid

Here are Niklas' slides.

For the diary:

Consider the data-driven approach to game engine architecture and performance considerations in relation to both game engine development and selection.

Here's Chris's presentation.

For the diary:

Investigate one or more of the real-time game technology areas outlined in the presentation (Lighting and materials, Procedural synthesis, Game AI and behaviour, Game interfaces) and consider how advances in each area may support or create new gameplay opportunities in future games. 

It may help to think about historical breakthroughs in classic games, for example, the graphics environment of Doom, galaxy generation in Elite, ghost AI in Pacman, the handheld controller in Tennis for Two, and so on.

Here's the current status of games and groups responible for them.

Preparations:

• Sign up for a game, not more than 3 per game
• Prepare an oral presentation in the group, max 3 slides + video (8 mins, questions during hands-on)
• Prepare the hands-on (save games, profiles etc)

If you don’t have access to the game on the designated platform, check with us and we’ll sort it out!

For the oral presentation:

•   Be efficient and focus on the specificities: what’s typical and what’s unique?
•   Give relevant historic mile stones
•   Name drop titles, people and studios, etc.
•   Commercial success (if available)
•   Use video material: trailers, walkthroughs, matches, own game play etc etc

The presentations:

Send in the pdf (with links to the videos) to me and I'll put them her for future reference.

For the diary:

• The script for the presentation is today’s diary entry, i.e. all in the same group will have the same or very similar entries

Here's Alessandro's presentation.

For the diary:

On numerous occasions lately we've heard about pros and cons towards building your own engine or use an existing. We'd like you to put together these and discuss them - and it's not enough to say: "It depends on the game!". Of course that is true, but there are other considerations, e.g. time, team size, competence within the team etc etc.

Here's Joacim's presentation.

For the diary:

• Examine ways in which game physics techniques have led to interesting forms of gameplay in a game of your choice (for example, ragdoll physics in Trespasser, momentum redirection in Portal). Describe the implications of greater environment manipulation capabilities on game design efforts, especially in relation to unintended situations or consequences that may arise at runtime e.g. a player becoming trapped or the AI behaving strangely due to routes being blocked with objects, destructible environments, and so on.

Today we have a rather informal status update of your projects. What are you working on? What have you done? What's left to do? We'll have at least 9 projects presented so keep it rather short, no more than 10 mins/group (incl discussion).

Here's Per's presentation.

For the diary:

• How can the game developer interact with the audience?
• Why does not in-game ads work?

Here's Jörgen's presentation (in Swedish).

For the diary:

• Present up to three (3) game-related business models and highlight the pros and cons with each. Remember to exemplify and reference!

Here's today's presentation with instructions for the final presentation next week.

For the diary:

Tommy emphasized that, particularly for mobile games, you have 30 seconds to make the player interested. If not, they'll quit and play something else. Choose a few examples on how game developers have tried to do this. Discuss other possible ways to address the issue.

You made a fantastic show! I'm so impressed with the quality of the material you presented and how far you'd come with demos/vertical slices. Very, very good!

For the diary:

• The final presentation (all in the same group hand in the same)
• The aggregated data you collected during the demo session and initial analysis

For next Friday, Dec 20 (but you're allowed to deliver earlier if you want to):

• The complete diary
• The complete GDD
• A demo/vertical slice (or similar) that can be run in the studio