March 2014, Games Developers Conference, San Francisco, CA – GDC has evolved from a niche developers conference to being a central point of commonality for the transmedia content marketplace. This center of commonality now brings together technologists, creatives, artists, business people and “closet geeks and techies” into one show for a chance to meet and…
March 2014 – The international presence at GDC is getting larger and more prominent each year. There were ten national pavilions this year (in alphabetical order) : Belgian Trade Commission, Chile (ProChile), Canada (Nova Scotia Pavilion), German Pavilion, Korean Games Association, Nordic Pavilion, Peru (PromPeru), Poland (Polska Gaming), Scottish Development International and the UK Trade…
March 2014, Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—In one session, the focus was on unique characteristics of a game, “High School Story”, a dating sim where you create a dream high school, choose your click (nerd, jock, etc.), throw parties, go on dates, and dress up in costumes. Some characteristics include: > 1000 unique quests, and…
March 2014, Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—The gaming industry is going through changes and is seeing more pressure to measure and show results. Some of the issues are cost of loyal users, competition and limited markets, too many games being the same, and targeting isn’t accurate enough. As a result, it is important to optimize…
March 2013 – At GDC 2013 in San Francisco, we visited with Three Ring Studios, which has been producing games for Sega since 2001. In 2003, they launched their premier game Puzzle Pirates. This game is an MMO RPG that is playable on PC/Mac and Linux systems. The game has recently been ported to iOS…
March 27, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—We talked with IncrediBuild about their acceleration platform for software developers. They have the technology to improve Make and Build cycles through sharing of CPU cycles in game development and other vertical markets. By using the Net and parallelism, they emulate a high performance compute network. Most of…
March 27, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—Joost van Dreunen from SuperData Research talked about how new devices will change games. Developers who take advantage of the new platforms can take advantage of alternative business models to increase revenues and make more money. The trends in these devices are changing distribution and publication. In the…
March 26, 2013, Game Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—Four educators offered their thoughts on teaching game development. Clara Fernandez-Vara from MIT, Michael Mateas from UC Santa Cruz, Ian Schreiber, an independent developer, and Jose Zagal from DePaul offered their opinions on the state and nature of game education. Zagal started out decrying the practice of using…
Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—This conference had many technical sessions presenting at the Dev Days. The usual suspects included Intel with their perceptual computing and UltraBook groups, Google, Facebook, Unity Technologies, Imagination Technologies, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon Web Services, Xsens, ARM, Sony Entertainment, Autodesk, AMD, Nvidia, and Adobe. In these sessions, the sponsors talked about the…
March 27, 2013, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco—We talked ARM about breaking out technology for gamers. The growing move to mobile platforms means that more of their underlying IP is being used for the casual, and mobile games. Native gaming on the GPU enables high resolution and activity games on mobile. The potential for large…