Programming My Life

Here is a sneak peak at half of the lesson we are designing to teach the phases of the moon.  I am currently extending the game to include rise/set/transit times.

Phases of the Moon

The game was designed with Unity3d.  At first, I had trouble with the webplayer again because I had forgotten about a previous problem I had with my host and unity files.  Luckily, I was able to read my old blog post to remedy it quickly.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on the game.

I was lucky enough to be sent to GDC this year.  While the trip (travel and registration) is quite expensive, there is a reason this is the Game Developer’s Conference.  Just about everyone from the game industry is here: producers, designers, artists, programmers, media etc. from the biggest companies down to Indies whose names you may or may not have heard.  And there is something to be learned from just about everyone.

Having all of these developers together makes networking easier than at any other event.  This ca n lead you to find a new team member (temporary or permanent), discussions about how to solve problems in development, or even long term friendship.  I’m not lucky enough to be in a city with any significant game development meetups, so being able to meet so many great developers at GDC was fantastic.

I started out the week in the Level Design Tutorial.  While most of the talks didn’t apply directly to what I’m working on, I feel as though I got a good deal out of some of the lessons, specifically, how to think about level layout.  Despite focusing on shooters, many of the concepts apply to any game in which you need to concentrate your player’s focus, specifically if they are controlling an avatar in a 3D world.

On the second day of the conference, I attended the Unity track, which was like a mini Unite conference.  Despite being all about the engine I use, there were a lot of topics covered that weren’t important for my current project (mobile, art, etc.), but the presentations were mostly well done.  It would be nearly impossible for a set of talks this broad to be perfect for everyone.

Wednesday, the conference really began with the Keynote from Satoru Iwata and Reggie Fils-Aime.  After thinking that the conference was hectic through the first two days, I realized just how much crazier it gets for the full conference with sessions scheduled all day and enough on the expo floor to keep anyone busy for the remainder of the conference.  From the huge Unity booth, to playing unavailable handhelds like Xperia Play and the 3DS, to the new UDK reveal, the Expo floor was incredible.  I haven’t been to any of the other game industry shows, but I imagine the show floors are quite a bit more hectic. The GDC Expo floor was certainly busy, but save for a few big demos (3DS), everything was accessible even during the busier times of day.  Although I wouldn’t want to miss the sessions, there is easily enough to do on just the Expo floor to keep an attendee busy for all three days.

Before the conference, I spent probably too much time trying to determine which talks to go to at what times.  I realize now that isn’t too important considering the all access pass grants access to the GDC Vault where you can catch any talks that you miss.  That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy a great number of the talks, but I am glad I spent a bit of extra time on the Expo floor and I can catch the talks now.  Some notes on my favorites:

The Post Mortems were great, though I didn’t learn a lot other than making games early on was a completely different process.  Back then after deciding the genre, constraints really defined your game.  Now, the bigger constraints are budget or deadline, not graphics or performance (this is becoming more and more true even on handhelds).  For Marble Madness, Mark Cerny spoke about how the arcade board he was given really determined how he created his sprites for the art.  For Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert spoke about how despite having too many characters and only one tester without any sort of test plan, the game has relatively few dead ends. For the Pac Man talk, Toru Iwatani spoke about how the simple, easy to grasp mechanics made for a great game and how he had to fight with his boss to get 4 different colored ghosts. I highly encourage anyone interested in game development to check them out at the GDC Vault.

The Indie failure talk was incredibly interesting.  5 drastically different lessons from how to grow an Indie studio to design mistakes by small teams applicable to nearly any project.  Most of the lessons came down to two important instructions:  figure out what is fun about the game you want to make, and iterate on that.

Two of the most entertaining talks I attended were Jeremy Bernstein’s Minimizing Exposition and Dustin Browder’s Starcraft 2 as an e-sport.  Jeremy is a freelance writer that explained how to cut, control, and hide exposition to make the game’s story more interesting to the player with examples from his experience on Dead Space 2.  Browder is a lead designer on Starcraft 2 who described the painful choices they made that affected nearly every facet of Starcraft 2 in order for it to be played as an e-sport.

The final day of the event includes talks about breaking into the industry to compliment the student passes which are only good for that day.  I attended the last two and most of the information was of the form: know what you want to do and do more of it so you have something to show when you apply for jobs.

With all of that activity during the day, it is important to note that some of the most important business at GDC gets done over lunch, dinner, and at the parties thrown by nearly every major company in attendance.  It was a struggle to get up for the keynote on Wednesday, but going to the parties at GDC is a must for networking.  It’s pretty incredible to see entire bars full of people with a passion for this industry and being able to talk to nearly anyone in the building about gaming and development.

After all of the activity at the conference, I was exhausted.  But I’m already looking forward to next year and trying to get even more out of the conference.

In the Spring of this year, I was using Torque Game Builder for my game development.  I began to realize that the documentation and community weren’t as helpful as they could be and began looking for alternatives.  After some consideration, I settled on Unity3d because it seemed to have an active community and solid documentation.  After attending the company’s annual conference I can say it seems as though the community is only getting bigger and more involved and the platform is only going to improve.

Unite 2010 took place in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  The following are some notes about the conference.

Venue and Logistics

The conference was held at the Marche Bonsecours, which was a great location.  The only problems with it (and the logistics of the conference) were with seating, both at lunch and during some of the advanced sessions.  In both instances, I found myself at least once sitting on the floor.   Hopefully, this was a result of the 2010 conference being more than twice the size of the 2009 version and will be fixed for next year wherever the conference is held.

Both breakfast and lunch were provided at the venue during the conference which made networking a bit easier.  Without the option to stick around the venue for meals, it is easy to end up with a small group to eat with and not meet as many people during breaks.  I met several people as a result of hanging around the Marche Bonsecours at lunch and breakfast.  In addition to these times, there was a short break between the afternoon sessions.  Before arriving, I thought these might be boring as I would be sitting around waiting for the next talk to start (checking Twitter or doing something else just as productive…).  However, I found that these times offered me a chance to relax, prepare for the next talk, and discuss either the previous or upcoming talk with fellow developers.

Sessions and Hands-on

I won’t talk about the individual sessions (they should be available at Unity3d.com soon), but overall, the talks were quite informative and at an appropriate level for me.  Some of the more experienced developers at the conference indicated they would have liked more depth in the advanced talks, but for me, the advanced talks gave me some ideas about how to tackle current problems and shed some light on topics I hadn’t considered before the conference.

One of the other main attractions of the Unite conference is the hands on time attendees are able to get with the creators and developers of the Unity software.  For me, this alone was worth the registration cost of the conference.  What made this truly worthwhile was the enthusiasm the developers had while helping me.  Despite my inexperience (I’ve only been working with Unity for about 6 months, 3 of those part time), I never felt like a question was too simple or easy to solve for those helping out.  When we ran out of time fixing a particular problem on day one, the developers made sure to book me some additional time on the second day to finish finding a solution.

Unity in the future

In addition to the growth of the Unite conference year over year, the attitudes of the Unity employees I met and heard speak at the conference gives me confidence that Unity will continue to improve rapidly.  It was evident through several of the sessions that despite the recent improvements to the engine, those at Unity realize that there are a great number of additional features and fixes that can make Unity even better.  Critically, the company seems to be taking input from the community of users seriously in considering which of these should be tackled first.

After this experience, I’m already looking forward to Unite 2011.