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Forth IGDA Ukraine Meeting Report.
1 April 2006
Forth meeting of IGDA Ukraine was conducted on April 1-st, April Fools Day in USA and Europe, and the Day of Humor in here – in Ukraine.
It was planned that community will be gathered for two educational meetings.
With 15-mins delay for the organizational moments, we started with the welcome words of Yuri Likhota, the President of Ukrainian Game Developer Association and inspirer of IGDA Chapter Ukraine. He informed the audience on the plans, ideas and (yes, it is) the difficulties of forming the strong gamedev community organization in Ukraine.
Then we listened to our first speaker, historian and writer Boris Yulin. Boris worked as a historical consultant to such games as Blitzkrieg, and he told the audience about the importance of in game realism in the war and history-based games. He described several cases in which the in game realism was achieved by raising the detalization and historical correspondence of war units, weapons and also the locations. Also the presenter discussed with the audience several funny cases in which it is clear that the imaginary locations and units must differ a lot from the locations and units that are to be used in war or history-based games.
After a short coffee-break, the audience welcomed Igor Karev, director and leader of Ukrainian oldest and most productive company called Action Forms. Igor’s topic was the postmortem of the game called Vivisector.
After a short summary of company’s history, he shared his valuable experience on what went wrong and what was right with the game. Among what-was-wrong items he stressed attention on the balance between business and creative points of the process of game development. Igor defined Idea, Planning&Preproduction and Management as the three keystones of a successful project and reminded that the technology of game dev is moving forward extremely fast, so now we cannot afford ourselves to spend up to four years for a project; now we have from 12 months to 2 years for a project to be completed and successfully published. Also he talked about the team management problems, that appeared to be and the way those could be solved. Among what-was-right things were a) the idea that joined creative team and let to the finished project and b) positive feedback from people that showed the developer’s team that their idea was comprehended and accepted in the way they planned it.
Then Igor kindly agreed to answer different questions from audience and shared his experience on publisher relations, gave a few tips on the preproduction, marketing and design documents preparation.
The meeting itself ended up with another coffee-break and informal communication.
What went right with the meeting:
The meeting newsletter was extremely funny and professionally prepared.
We managed to found a place that fit the budget and was convenient.
Our speakers were experienced and interesting people.
We have the desire to continue!
What went not that right:
The newsletter was sent a bit late – we might need to send it a bit earlier to gather more people.
The cups for coffee-break were from thin plastic and hot water damaged them, though the guys thought that was a 1-st April Joke
We might need a volunteer person to watch the time – the Time Keeper
And uh – the camera! Next time we’ll heed to have a few.
Special thanks to meeting organizers and volunteers:
Svetlana Kravets – Rostok Games
Yuri Likhnota – Crazy House & IGDA Ukraine
Evgeniy Babich – Persha Studia & IGDA Ukraine
Nadia Matukhno – Intel Ukraine & IGDA Ukraine
Max Dembick – Crytek & IGDA Ukraine
Our guest speakers:
Boris Yulin – game development consultant on history
Igor Karev – director of Action Forms
Our sponsor: Crazy House
Our information sponsors: My Computer - Publishing House
Navigator Igrovogo Mira – Game Dev Magazine
And all the guys that managed to come and learn new information.
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