 | A Strategic Approach to Game Design
Grand Ballroom C
During production, most development studios shift from thinking strategically about their project to a day to day tactical approach of "get that next thing done" game development.
A Strategic Approach to Game Design talks about how to maintain your game's strategic vision throughout the development process, from goals at inception, prioritizing critical game features to when and how to engage PR and Marketing.
Presented by video game industry veteran and EEDAR president Geoffrey Zatkin, this talk incorporates a wide variety of hard data, thoughts on best practice and few juicy anecdotes.
Target audience: Game designers, game leads, game producers, anyone wanting to one day be a game lead or game producer.
Wednesday, 4:45pm - 5:45pm Geoffrey Zatkin [President and COO, EEDAR] |
 | Are They Dead Yet? An "Orcs Must Die!" Post-Mortem
Grand Ballroom B
We gave a too-small team 12 months, a bunch of tech from an abandoned game, and freedom to come up with a cool idea. What happened next? They charged in and made "Orcs Must Die!", a 3rd person action/defense game that mashes up some of the best aspects of classic 3rd Person Action games, Tower Defense, and dungeon defense games. We think the resulting game was fun and cool, but the process wasn't easy and we made heaps of great and, uh, not-so-great decisions along the way.
Join us as we discuss making our first digital-distribution-only title and what we learned from the experience. In a world gone crazy for social games, mobile games, and $50+ million dollar blockbuster sequels, find out why we opted for a different road and learn from us why we think OMD! was a good choice.
Thursday, 11:30am - 12:30pm Harter Ryan [COO, Robot Entertainment], Chris Rippy [Producer, Robot Entertainment], Ian Fischer [Design Director, Robot Entertainment], Dave Kubalak [Art Director, Robot Entertainment], Justin Korthoff [Community Manager, Robot Entertainment] |
 | Art Discipline Leads Roundtable
Willow
The Art Leads position, regardless of sub-discipline, is fraught with peril. This moderated roundtable is aimed at providing a forum to discuss these issues and how we go about handling them. Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:30pm Topics will include: - How to manage and mitigate dramatic project changes, both in and out of your area. - Dealing with communication issues with other disciplines in the game development process. - Managing deadlines and schedules for required asset work. - The intended audience for this session are art directors and art leads of all sub disciplines. |
| Artist Portfolio Review
Douglas
Artist's _love_ criticism. Right? This session will be a speed format portfolio review. Reviewees will bring their portfolio in an easily presentable format (full review within 3 minutes) and meet with one or more of our panel of industry professional reviewers. In their time they will both present their work and receive pointed feedback on what is good and needs improvement.Wednesday, 3:30pm - 5:15pm Following the review session each reviewer will pick a few pieces of work (with artist approval, of course) they liked and give pointed feedback to the reviewee as to what caught their eye about it. Dan Paladin [Behemoth Games], Thomas Holt [FlashFlood Games], Corey Dangel [Detonator Games], Mike Krahulik [Penny Arcade] |
| Chaos in the Kitchen
Grand Ballroom A
Lessons from working in restaurants that inadvertently made me a better producer; ability to adapt and iterate quickly, talking to various types and temperament of customers, working with the 'cooks in the kitchen', late nights, crunch time, preparedness and camaraderie.
Thursday, 11:30am - 12:00pm Bryan Mashinter [Producer/PM, Backflip Studios] |
| Concepts Place in the Ever Shifting Industry
Willow
Concept artists have been an integral part of the game creation process since the 8 bit era. Some aspects of the craft have remained the same since that day but others require concept artists to adapt as the industry shifts. This panel will discuss: Thursday, 4:00pm - 5:00pm Concept art has shifted to be almost entirely digital at this point, how important are skills in traditional mediums? How do you work with the art director to establish a consistent aesthetic for the world? How do you manage conflicting feedback from the execusphere? How do you prefer to build ecologies and character? Preproduction and production have very different needs from concept, how do you manage this and the transition between them? How important is achieving consistency in art style for a concept team? Is consistency in quality more important?
Shane White [Owner / Concept Hired Gun, Studio White], Brian Snoddy [Concept Hired Gun, Independent], Chris Madden [Concept Artist, Airtight Games], Sergey Naygel [Concept Artist, Airtight Games] |
| Design Doc Do's and Don'ts
Grand Ballroom C
You've made the best game ever. Congratulations! Problem is, you're not a psychic. We'd all love it if the fully-formed visions inside our heads could spring instantaneously into the minds of other people, but we know it doesn't work that way. Instead, we rely on design documents to convey that vision to the people who matter: publishers, programmers, artists, executives, and everyone else. But designing a game is very different from talking about it, and involves a very different set of skills. In this session, we'll build these skills by reviewing successful - and unsuccessful - design documents from games you may have heard of, and working through what made them tick.Thursday, 2:45pm - 3:45pm Brought to you by the GDG. Nik Davidson [CEO, Critical Hit Consulting], James Ernest [President, Cheapass Games], Paul Sottosanti [Systems Designer, Maxis] |
| Designing for Sustained Engagement: Case Studies in Player Needs
Grand Ballroom C
This session will present a validated model and specific strategies for designing mechanics, content, and features that are optimally designed to maximize the lifetime value and enthusiasm of players by sustaining their interest and engagement with your game. The key to this model is understanding basic motivational needs - specifically needs for competence/mastery, autonomy, and relatedness - that we are all deeply motivated to satisfy on an intrinsic level. The fundamental nature of these needs means that games can either (1) facilitate their satisfaction through design and reward structures that are optimized for intrinsic motivation or (2) thwart their satisfaction through structures that data show will undermine intrinsic needs (and push players away). During this session, we will review the principles of intrinsic needs and then move into a more interactive discussion with the audience around what "supports vs. thwarts" these basic needs - looking at traditional reward structures and mechanics alongside actual data on how these aspects of game design impact players' basic need satisfaction and sustained engagement. The audience will take away an understanding of both the general principles critical to sustained engagement, as well as (i) ways to think about their application to the day-to-day work of game design and (ii) how to vet design choices through player testing.Wednesday, 2:15pm - 3:15pm Brought to you by the GDG. Scott Rigby [President, Immersyve] |
 | Designing to a Story, Part 1: Opening Talk
Willow
Cheapass Games designer James Ernest begins the afternoon workshop with a talk on designing to a story. He'll discuss how mechanics and metaphor interact, and how strategy and luck are not opposites. The audience will then break into smaller groups for the afternoon workshops, where panelists will be given a difficult design challenge that the audience members must solve, working as a team. The groups will then reconvene in the closing session, where each breakout team will have five minutes to present their solutions, and James and the other panelists will evaluate and judge them. It's like Designer Idol, except not lame.
Wednesday, 1:00pm - 2:00pm Brought to you by the GDG. James Ernest [President, Cheapass Games] |
| Designing to a Story, Part 2: Workshops
Douglas
This is a followup to James Ernest's opening talk on Designing to a Story. Audience members will separate into breakout sessions, where they will be presented with a thorny game design challenge which they must solve as a group. Each team will be led by a "shepherd," whose job it is to help the group come to the most creative conclusions possible. The goal is to prepare a five-minute presentation to be given at the Designing to a Story: Closing Presentations panel directly afterward.
Wednesday, 2:15pm - 3:15pm Brought to you by the GDG. James Ernest [President, Cheapass Games], Mike Selinker [President, Lone Shark Games], Richard Garfield [Game Designer, Three Donkeys], Paul Peterson [Senior Designer, GameHouse], Joshua Howard [Senior Director, Design Media] |
| Designing to a Story, Part 3: Closing Presentations
Willow
After the Designing to a Story workshops, participants come back together for the presentations. The panelists evaluate the presentations, and James Ernest gives some conclusions on what we all have learned.Wednesday, 3:30pm - 4:30pm Brought to you by the GDG. James Ernest [President, Cheapass Games], Mike Selinker [President, Lone Shark Games], Richard Garfield [Game Designer, Three Donkeys], Paul Peterson [Senior Designer, GameHouse], Joshua Howard [Senior Director, Design Media] |
| Developmental Theory: The Hard Work Between Design and Publication
Willow
You've designed a game. You like how it plays, and your friends tell you that you have a hit on your hands. This is the perfect time to rest on your laurels, right? Well, if you're here, you know that's not true. Our panelists take you through the steps of development, testing, and rules writing. Collectible game developer Paul Peterson will tell you about balancing and then unbalancing a collectible game. Lone Shark Games creative director, Teeuwynn Woodruff, will give you tips on play-testing and blind testing. Board game designer Mike Selinker will describe the rules you should know about writing rules. This wide-ranging session is a preview of the Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, from Open Design Gaming.
Thursday, 11:30am - 12:30pm Mike Selinker [President, Lone Shark Games], Teeuwynn Woodruff [Creative Director, Lone Shark Games], Paul Peterson [Senior Designer, GameHouse] |
| Dragons, Lost Cows, and Shiny Beads: How to Build a Collectible Game
Willow
Ever gone broke while playing a "free" online game? Wonder how your room got covered in Magic cards after you went to the store to buy "Just one more pack"? Come find out the design secrets behind what drives these gaming phenomenons. In this presentation, Gary Games CEO Justin Gary, the Lead designer of the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, and Redakai takes you inside the mechanics that drive you from initial trial to complete addict. Whether you are interested in making trading card games, digital object downloadable games, and "freemium" games, these principles will apply to you. Topics to be covered include collection drivers and customization, aspirational ladder designs, and variable reward ratios. Don't worry, the first one is free!
Wednesday, 4:45pm - 5:30pm Justin Gary [CEO, Gary Games] |
 | Dungeon Defenders: Breaking the Cross-Platform Barrier
Grand Ballroom B
Trendy Entertainment's Dungeon Defenders is an Unreal powered indie title built to achieve AAA success by going totally cross-platform. To achieve this, Trendy used off-the-shelf online game development services in completely new ways, enabling matchmaking, save games, and more across Android, iOS, PC and PS3 - uniting fans however they chose to play. The results? A game created on a modest budget by a small dev team that has racked up hundreds of thousands of downloads.
In this session, Trendy Entertainment personnel will share key learnings from their experiences, discussing technical approaches to building out forward-thinking features while also exploring the business rational for making games - especially on emerging mobile platforms like iOS and Android - cross-platform.
Wednesday, 1:00pm - 2:00pm Jeremy Stieglitz [Lead Programmer, Trendy Entertainment], Philip Asher [Marketing , Trendy Entertainment], Sean Flinn [Sr. Product Manager, GameSpy Technology] |
| Fast Gets Faster: Speeding Up Game Development Iterations
Grand Ballroom B
Few can deny the primacy of the iteration in game development. Even in social and mobile game development where the teams are smaller and the dev cycles are shorter, there's always a deadline looming and a palpable pressure to release. But what are the some of the best techniques being used to go from idea to design to prototype to play-test faster than before? What tool chains and work-flows make a significant difference in development speed? What are the trade-offs in using them? In this session, active developers and team leaders talk about their work-flows, tools, and techniques for speeding up the core game development loop.
Thursday, 4:00pm - 5:00pm Gabe Brown [Engineering Manager, Playdom], Damon Danieli [CTO, Z2Live], Grant Goodale [CEO, Massively Fun], Keith Fuller [Project management and game production specialist, Fuller Game Production], Patrick Meehan [CTO, Zipline Games] |
| From the Cubicle to the Basement: Corporate Devs Go Indie
Grand Ballroom A
A frank and open discussion with a panel of game developers have left successful careers in the traditional studio model to go out on their own as indies. The road to independence is a rocky one and the panel will share their experiences, good and bad, while giving advice to other developers contemplating the leap.
Thursday, 4:00pm - 5:00pm Jamie Cheng [CEO, Klei Entertainment], Rick Davidson [CEO, Inspirado Games], Brian Provinciano [President, VBlank Entertainment], Jake Birkett [Owner, Grey Alien Games], Shane Neville [Director, Ninja Robot Dinosaur Entertainment], Morgan Jaffit [Director, Defiant Development] |
| Fun Amplification
Grand Ballroom C
In this rapidly evolving world of new genres for mobile, social, and motion controls, the ability to quickly prototype fun original ideas is often the difference between creating a new smash IP or being stuck doing contract work. Learn what to prototype, where to focus first, what questions to ask and when to stop. Find out how to identify and amplify the delightful moments in your game in a cost effective manner. Spry Fox game designer and writer of Lostgarden.com, Daniel Cook shares practical tools and techniques that helped him increase his prototyping success rate by 400%.
Thursday, 11:30am - 12:30pm Daniel Cook [Chief Creative Officer, Spry Fox] |
| Game Design Workshop
Douglas
Design a game in collaboration with your peers - all attendees are grouped into small teams and work from the same prompt. Each team is responsible for generating a game vision document (a one-pager) that accomplishes the design prompt along with satisfying additional "business" constraints specific to their group. At the end of the session, each team will present it's game design vision to the entire audience for ~5 minutes each with a brief Q&A period from the audience for each team.
Thursday, 10:15am - 1:15pm Dylan Mayo, Dave Guskin [Digital Game Designer, Wizards of the Coast] |
| Getting Audio In and Mixed: How to Get the Time You Need
Willow
Audio is the bastard son of game development. It's the last in a long line of disciplines that always slip their schedules. This is a round table discussion on how to get more time and proper consideration. And if that fails, things you can still do to get a good product out the door. Producers, this is for you too! This panel will help you with your audio scheduling.
Thursday, 5:15pm - 6:15pm Tom Smurdon [Audio Director, Airtight Games], Chase Combs [Sound Designer - Turn 10, Microsoft / Contractor], Mike Caviezel [Audio Production Director at Microsoft Games Studios, Microsoft], Jay Weinland [Audio Lead, Bungie], Drew Cady [Sound Designer, ArenaNet] |
| Grand Theft Automation: How One Programmer Developed Retro City Rampage
Grand Ballroom A
This talk covers the key techniques which enabled a lone programmer to build the multi-platform, multi-award winning open-world game, Retro City Rampage. The panel will cover: use of automated debugging, building more efficient tools, implementing simple features which save weeks of work later and leveraging existing functionality for multiple features.Thursday, 10:15am - 11:15am While developing Retro City Rampage, Brian handled all of the business, marketing, design and most of the art along side the programming and tool development. It was a lot to juggle, making the process of automation critical. Attendees are given an overview of the techniques used to build a large game more efficiently. They will get a peek under the hood and techniques they need to apply these practices to their own games. Brian Provinciano [CEO, Programmer, Designer, erm ...indie, Vblank Entertainment Inc.] |
| Keys Everywhere! Animating For 5TH Cell's Fast Iterative Design Process
Grand Ballroom A
At 5TH Cell, part of our success with innovative titles relies on the ability to iterate gameplay and design very quickly. This talk will discuss how the animation team on Hybrid, 5TH Cell's upcoming XBLA title, is able to keep up with a fast iteration process while maintaining a consistently high quality bar via the marriage of old school animation techniques and a modern twist on the Source engine's animation system.
Thursday, 2:45pm - 3:45pm Tim Borrelli [Lead Animator, 5th Cell Media] |
| Leisurely Game Design. Fast Development. Profit!
Grand Ballroom B
Trying to cram 10,000 sprites into a shooter? Do you blink at the word, 'const'? After a year of engine building, are you still making the same game? Technology isn't the game. Tech is for making games efficiently. Get it's magic boots off your back and on your feet! Thursday, 2:45pm - 3:45pm Learn how one veteran (C++ coder on Mac, PC, consoles) went indie using Python to ship two commercial quality games (three by PAX Dev) that sell. Rapidly prototype your ideas, and in some cases build finished products across PC, Mac, and Linux. Amazingly flexible, and all components: language, libraries, app creation are Open Source, free for commercial use. Making games is hard enough. Don't increase your work load unnecessarily. Keith Nemitz [Ordinauteur, Mousechief Co.] |
| Lua Lab Level 1 - Integrating Lua into C++ Game Engines
Grand Ballroom B
Lua is a scripting language that has wide use in the games industry. It's popular because of it's flexibility at pulling together engine components to really make it into a game. As a programmer who is looking for ways to empower designers, Lua is a great way to give them power and flexibility to craft behaviors, scenarios or UI, and give you the ability to quickly build tools and game systems to meet their needs.
Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:30pm The goal is to explain the fundamentals of using Lua as an embedded language, show examples of how it is used in professional games, and discuss in detail: - initializing Lua, syntax, executing code, executing script files, and binding C functions and objects so they are accessible to Lua code - game object systems - strategies for debugging and performance
Tom O'Connor [Programmer, EveryWare] |
| Make AAAA Games Without Aggravating Your Devs
Grand Ballroom A
AAAA games are titles like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed -- multi-studio projects that require so many resources that their development is best measured in studio-months instead of man-months. As with most other sectors of the industry, creating games like this has typically been done at the expense of a lot of overtime and a lot of burned out developers. This session has two main goals: provide a number of suggestions for making AAAA games more efficiently (that's on me), and prompt discussion of solutions to common problems in this area of development (requires audience participation). I will personally guarantee* the physical safety of any studio leaders willing to attend.
*This is not a guarantee.
Wednesday, 2:15pm - 3:15pm Keith Fuller [Production Consultant, Fuller Game Production], Ed Byrne [Creative Director, Imba Entertainment], Dennis Crow [Producer, Blizzard Entertainment], Jaime Griesemer [Sucker Punch], Marc Scattergood [Senior Project Manager, PopCap] |
| Mechanics / Dynamics / Aesthetics Workshop
Douglas
This intensive 3-hour design exercise will explore the day-to-day craft of game design through hands-on activity, group discussion, analysis and critique. Attendees will immerse themselves the iterative process of refining a game design, and discover design concepts that will help them think more clearly about their designs and make better games. The workshop presents a formal approach to game design, in which games viewed as systems and analyzed in terms of their Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics.
Before we can even begin to design a game, we need to understand our aesthetic goals. In other words, we need to enumerate all the kinds of "fun" that we hope the game will provide its users. We can formalize our understanding of our game's aesthetic goals by formulating an aesthetic model for each goal - a formal description of the goal that identifies its criteria for success and possible modes of failure. The workshop will present a handful of aesthetic models as examples, and also encourage attendees to formulate their own. During the design exercise, attendees will use aesthetic models as a yardstick to measure their progress throughout the design process.
Working in small groups, attendees will be given a specific game to play and analyze. After deconstructing the play aesthetics of the game, participants will be then be tasked with modifying the game design to meet a new aesthetic objective. These exercises will challenge attendees to analyze and identify the design principles at work in the game, and to think flexibly and creatively while working within design constraints. The exercise will serve as a starting point for discussing how the iterative design applies to games in digital and non-digital media.
Game designers and programmers will leave this workshop with new abstract tools for analyzing and improving their own game designs, a deeper understanding of iterative design, and other lessons that emerge from the small group discussions with their peers.
Thursday, 1:30pm - 4:30pm Marc LeBlanc [CTO and Senior Designer, Electrified Games] |
| Not Waving but Drowning: Networked Multiplayer Indie Game Architecture
Grand Ballroom A
Wouldn't it be cool, if, like, I made a competitive multiplayer game, and did a public beta, and people could play it over the internet, and chat with each other, and there'd be a lobby server, and some kind of secure single-sign-on account system, and a way to accept money for it, and a way to record playthroughs for tuning and spectation, and ranked ladder play, and mentoring, and it auto-updated, and automatically uploaded crash dumps when something went wrong, and there was a private beta forum and bug tracking system, and it was load-tested, and scalable in the cloud in case it got popular...and I did this all by myself? No, it would not be cool. Well, okay, it might be cool, but it also might be a totally stupid way to make an indie game, and it would certainly be a crap-ton of work. By the time this talk rolls around at PAX Dev, the SpyParty Early-Access Beta will either be humming along as planned, or I'll be dead. Come and see which it is for yourself. Note: this is not a talk for somebody who is idly musing about making their first indie game a networked multiplayer one, because the lecture for those people is the following: "Don't." This is a lecture for experienced developers seriously considering throwing their lives away to make their indie game work over the internet with a somewhat modern set of features and reasonable level of polish and scalability.
Wednesday, 4:45pm - 5:45pm |
| Player and Designer Expectations - a LIVE Friends on Play Discussion
Grand Ballroom C
What do players expect when approaching games? Shall we uphold or shatter these expectations? The social games market exposes new challenges - what expectations will we instill in this sea of new players, and how do our ethics play into it? How do our own expectations impact our work? The six designers of the Friends on Play podcast (FriendsOnPlay.com) explore the mind of the player and derive takeaways from examining traditional, social, and tabletop games and other media.
Thursday, 5:15pm - 6:15pm Aaron Vanderbeek [Senior Game Designer, PopCap Games SF], Andrew Federspiel [Designer, PopCap Games], Ben Miller [Lead Designer, WemoMedia & Contractor, Insomniac Games], Chris Bell [Designer, thatgamecompany], Francisco Souki [Designer, Schell Games], Michael Lewis [Producer, Stupid Fun Club] |
| Practical Systems Design in the Context of Darkspore
Grand Ballroom C
Darkspore: 25 unique heroes with four variants each. 120 different hero abilities. 97 unique enemy types. Dozens of stats and hundreds of randomized item affixes. One designer, Paul Sottosanti, responsible for all of the systems and content.
In this talk Paul will dive deeply into the world of systems design through the lens of a collection-based action RPG. He'll focus on the fully randomized loot system and the spectrum between gameplay and creativity that arose from using the Spore editor. The myriad of problems from eschewing traditional character leveling, some expected, many unexpected, will also be examined in detail.
Though many of the mistakes, solutions, and conclusions will be specific to Darkspore, the lessons will be applicable to anyone looking to increase their knowledge and understanding of systems design.
Thursday, 10:15am - 11:15am Paul Sottosanti [Systems Designer, Maxis] |
| PuzzleCraft: How to Design Every Puzzle Type Ever
Grand Ballroom C
Regardless of their format, every game seems to need puzzles, but not everyone knows how to make them. Lone Shark Games president Mike Selinker, whose puzzles appear in Games magazine, Wired, The New York Times, and ARGs and events everywhere, gives a presentation on puzzle design and implementation in electronic and tabletop games. Mike discusses the placement and purpose of puzzles, the effects they have on players' psyche, and the process of creating elegant and creative challenges. Attendees will gain access to Mike's series of PuzzleCraft articles explaining how to make nearly every kind of puzzle.
Thursday, 4:00pm - 5:00pm Mike Selinker [President, Lone Shark Games] |
| Rebuilding Ships At Sea: Lessons PopCap Learned From Operating Social Games
Grand Ballroom B
The creators of Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz discuss what they've learned from a couple years of maintaining and improving games while millions of people are already aboard... now with painful nautical metaphors! When do our strategists think "a rising tide lifts all boats"? What kind of pipeline ensures customers "know the ropes" for new features? Why re-factor code before your developers "splice the main brace"? Okay... that one's a stretch. It's not easy keeping social games afloat, but it was William Shedd who said, "A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for."
Wednesday, 2:15pm - 3:15pm Avery Alix [Product Manager, PopCap Games], Ross Baker [Software Developer, PopCap Games], Jake Herman [Software Test Lead, PopCap Games], Scott Willoughby [Customer Engagement Manager, PopCap Games], Mystery Guest [Special Mystery Guest, PopCap Games] |
| State of the Craft: Art in Games
Willow
This discussion covers where we feel the discipline is right now, what our shared challenges are and what we can do collectively to overcome them. Thursday, 10:15am - 11:15am Topics will include: - What are the biggest challenges facing game artists today? - How can we best handle escalating consumer expectation for quality and experience when budgets and schedules don't scale commensurately. - Are we painting (digitally) ourselves into the proverbial corner? How can we avoid doing so? - Where do we feel we need to push the medium next? - What are the emerging technologies and approaches that will allow us to get there?
Thomas Holt [Art Director, FlashFlood Games], Steve Theodore [Technical Director, Undead Labs], Harry Teasley [Art Director, Turbine Games], Daniel Dociu [Art Director, ArenaNet] |
| The 2D Revival
Grand Ballroom A
Casual, social and mobile gaming is dominated by 2D games these days. That can be attributed to hardware base partially, but many feel that 2D is simply more approachable for many customers as well. This panel will discuss what the focus on 2D market means for artists looking to transition into it and how it is affecting and will affect the industry moving forward. Topics include:
- Why 2D/2.5D is dominating the mobile and casual markets.
- What does that shift mean for 3D artists getting involved?
- How does this affect pipelines and production?
Wednesday, 1:00pm - 2:00pm Lane Daughtry [Owner, TinkerHouse Games], Alan Diekfuss [Owner, Diode Studios], Brian Thompson [Art Director, Big Fish Games], Wayne Laybourn [Owner, Electrolabs Games], Monte Michaelis [Senior Artist, Popcap Games] |
| The Art of Story
Willow
As the importance of storytelling in games continues to rise, artists must do their part in furthering and reinforcing that narrative. This role constantly presents new and interesting challenges and opportunities as the medium progresses. Topics will include:Wednesday, 2:15pm - 3:15pm - Storytelling techniques used in games today and how they affect our approach to art. - How to create a living world with depth and fiction. - Creation and support of back-stories in Characters and Environments. - Supporting a narrative while remaining flexible to design and scalable for scope.
Theron Benson [Senior Animator, Independent], John Gonzalez [Lead Writer, Warner Bros], Lee Wilson [Cinematics Lead, Bungie], Thomas Smurdon [Audio Lead, Airtight Games], Rocky Newton [Cimematics Lead, Warner Bros] |
| The Four Types Of... (aka A Unified Theory of Human Gaming)
Grand Ballroom A
The past few years have seen the emergence of several strong, well-researched analyses of player motivation, game design rules, and player emotion that have striking similarities to each other: namely, that they are based on four categories, and align remarkably well with existing historical philosophies.Wednesday, 3:30pm - 4:30pm I propose that we are on to something here. Perhaps, a unified theory of human gaming. But rather than write a book, I figured we should crowdsource the problem, and where better to do it than PAX Dev. We will start with a quick examination of the existing play theories that use four categories: - The 4 Emotions of Play (Nicole Lazzaro) - The Bartle Test - The eight kinds of fun (Marc Leblanc) - Shooter psychology study (Ubisoft internal) - The Meyers-Briggs personality test
We'll examine the overlap between these systems, looking for a 'meta' structure that encompasses as many of them as possible. If the right people show up to the talk, maybe we'll even succeed! Come to the talk, take in the data, analyze it live, ask challenging questions, and join the search to understand the human structures underneath our art. Jason Vandenberghe [Creative Director, Ubisoft] |
| The Modern RPG: What Mainstream RPGs Can Learn from Indie, and Vice Versa
Grand Ballroom A
The massive growth in indie roleplaying games comes at a time when the powerhouses of game design are reaching out for new fanbases and new ideas. In the creation of RPGs, we're witnessing a meeting of the worlds, where players of D&D and Pathfinder enjoy games like Fiasco and Action Castle. Surely the two styles can learn from each other. So we've put together a convention-ending roundtable of luminaries from both sides of that dynamic divide. Kobold Quarterly kobold-in-chief Wolfgang Baur moderates an epic panel that includes Vincent Baker, author of Dogs in the Vineyard; John Harper, designer of AGON and Lady Blackbird; Sage LaTorra, author of Dungeon Worlds; Mike Mearls, creator of Iron Heroes and lead developer of 4th edition D&D; Erik Mona, publisher of Pathfinder; Elizabeth Shoemaker Sampat, designer of Blowback; Jonathan Tweet, designer of 3rd Edition D&D and Everway; and Jonathan Walton, publisher of Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying. Now that's a way to end a convention.
Thursday, 5:15pm - 6:15pm |
| The PAX 11-13 Workshop
Grand Ballroom C
Each year the PAX 10 Indie Game Showcase exhibits the best games from a pool of hundreds of submitted independent titles. Paring those games to just ten is a daunting task, and more often than not there are games that JUST missed the cut. In this session, our panel of design experts run through the top 3 games NOT selected (with the developer's permission, of course) to see what they could have done to improve their chances.
Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:30pm Frank Savage [Chief Technical Officer, Jumala], Allen Murray [Sr. Producer, Popcap], Joshua Howard [Group Program Manager/Executive Producer, Microsoft] |
| The Pigs Are Not Happy: Bringing Angry Birds to the Web
Grand Ballroom B
The birds were restless, so we brought them to the web browser! Angry Birds is a phenomenon, and what looks like a simple game is actually a finely tuned game mechanic and technical challenge. Not only did the web port need to retain all the subtle design refinements of the hit game, but it needed to handle multiple browsers with multiple rendering technologies on multiple operating systems. Join the engineers who built Angry Birds to the web and learn how they were able to bring this popular game to your browser. This panel and technical discussion will focus on the specific engineering challenges unique to launching real games on the web: optimizing physics performance for modern JavaScript engines, handling both HTML5 Canvas and WebGL, asset loading, and tools and libraries like PlayN and GWT.
Wednesday, 4:45pm - 5:45pm Seth Ladd [Developer Advocate, Google], Julien Fourgeaud [Engineer, Rovio], Philip Rogers [Software Engineer, Google], Ilkka Halila [Engineer, Rovio], Fred Sauer [Developer Advocate, Google], Ray Cromwell [Engineer, Google] |
| The Price Tag
Grand Ballroom A
Games stand to be the defining medium of the 21st century. Whether it is art, craft, science, business or mysticism, we have a lot to learn and discover. There are choices to be made, and we have arguably not always chosen well in the past.
Join Daniel James to explore an irreverent landscape of questions and observations around the choices we make as developers, and those that may be made for us when games meet the audience and business meets the market.
It's not about the price tag! Is it?
Wednesday, 11:00am - 12:00pm Daniel James [CEO, Three Rings] |
| The World's Largest ARG
Grand Ballroom A
In December 2010, Valve brought 9 indie studios together to participate in what became the largest ARG ever created for the launch of Portal 2. Their goal was to do what had never been done to this scale before - community involvement in the launch time of a AAA title, in-game interactive puzzles, and a story that spanned 14 games, facebook, blogs, twitter, and the real world. In this lecture, Michael Austin, lead designer of Defense Grid and CTO of Hidden Path, will cover what happened from an insiders view - how it was planned, how it all came together, and what the challenges were along the way. In addition, he'll go over the metrics used to track the ARG and the surprising results of what brought the community together far better than anyone expected.
Thursday, 1:30pm - 2:30pm Michael Austin [CTO, Hidden Path Entertainment] |
| Tools for Scaling Out Instead of Scaling Up
Grand Ballroom B
The popularity of scale out architectures has led to the development of a new generation of tools for building distributed systems. Distributed agreement protocols, databases, filesystems, and map-reduce frameworks provide the scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly available building blocks necessary to develop scalable applications and services. In this session Ariel Weisberg, Software Engineer @ VoltDB will provide an overview of the new tools on the block by describing the problem each tools solves and how they solve it. We will be discussing Hadoop, ZooKeeper, Dynamo (Riak, Voltdemort, and Cassandra), MongoDB, and VoltDB.
Thursday, 10:15am - 11:15am Ariel Weisberg [Software Engineer, VoltDB], Joseph Echeverria [Solutions Architect, Cloudera] |
| WebGL as a High Performance, Web-Based Game Dev Platform
Grand Ballroom B
WebGL brings hardware accelerated graphics to the browser, finally unshackling game development on the web. Drawing speed once reserved for native code is now achievable in the no-install, instant-start world of the web page through an API based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and standard GLSL. This session will explore the transition to creating 3D graphics in a browser, the tools available to adapt existing workflows, and the techniques needed to render games in real time while staying true to the web's character. Particular attention will be paid to the mechanics of quickly loading and caching data for display, the execution characteristics of modern Javascript engines, the GPU process models found in browsers today, and the rendering methods that best harness the strengths of this environment.
Thursday, 5:15pm - 6:15pm Brendan Kenny [Chrome Developer Advocate, Google, Inc] |
| What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
Grand Ballroom B
An unconference style tribute to Ulrich Drepper's paper of the same name (http://goo.gl/EoiZE). Come find out what a cache line is and why you should care. Go under the hood of CC-NUMA architectures and find out what it takes to provide cache coherency in the face of a variety synchronization primitives and memory models. Learn about the Java memory model and the upcoming C++0x memory model. Discuss the various tradeoffs between single-thread performance and multi-thread scalability associated with CC-NUMA architectures.
Wednesday, 3:30pm - 4:30pm Ariel Weisberg [Software Engineer, VoltDB Inc.], Frank Savage [CTO, Jumala], Elan Ruskin [Developer, Valve] |
| Why Everyone Else Loves the Games You Hate
Willow
Monopoly, Risk, Killer Bunnies - there's a long list of games that we game designers teach ourselves to hate. They violate some core principles of game design we hold dear: they never end, they reward the leaders, they come down to a coin flip. But Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield has another take on these games, one that suggests that their designers might have been doing something right all along. Come hear Richard tell you why you should play these games and many, many others if you want to be a successful game designer.
Thursday, 2:45pm - 3:45pm Richard Garfield [Game Designer, Three Donkeys] |
| Why Roger Ebert Was Right
Grand Ballroom C
We like to believe that games are a storytelling medium. We're wrong. No matter how much back-patting we do, as game designers we have almost entirely failed to integrate games with stories. We've grown up getting high on our own supply, so immersed in the failed storytelling conventions of earlier games that we can't see just how far down the wrong rabbit hole we've gone. It's time to blow it all up and start over -- and in this lecture we'll pack the dynamite.
Wednesday, 3:30pm - 4:30pm Kevin Maginn [Lead Designer and Producer, Flying Lab Software] |
