Vicarious Visions Comes to Montreal
by Jason Della Rocca (November 2002)
Close to 150 local developers came to listen to lectures from Vicarious Visions. Fighting the snow to come up from New York to visit the Montreal Chapter, Vicarious Visions presented three advanced level lectures. And, despite some technical glitches with the projector (thanks Edward!), everything went over very nicely. Bringing in external talent and focusing on professional level topics is part of the re-emphasized focus of the Montreal chapter to provide real value to the local community.
The three lectures focused on the topics of greatest interest to the chapter (as revealed in our ongoing chapter survey): game design, game postmortems and business issues. First up, we were treated to a postmortem of Jedi Knight II, where the discussion centered around the challenges of porting a PC game to console (eg, memory constraints, controller mapping, player experience, etc). Next, a design deconstruction of Crash Team Racing helped us understand what makes kart racers fun, in general, and Crash Team Racing, in particular. Finally, we were introduced to the broad topic of intellectual property rights and their implication to the game industry (both good and bad). Tobi Saulnier, who gave this IP rights lecture is also heading up the IGDA's IP Rights Committee.
After the lectures, everyone went to the arcade/bar for our usual social portion of the evening.
Until next Month...
Big thanks to our sponsors
November Gathering Pictorial
...here are just a few shots I took during the November gathering of the Montreal Chapter. (all persons are identified from left to right)
Bret and Karthik present the first of three Vicarious Visions mini-lectures.
...Bret's turn to talk.
Vicarious Visions designer, Daniel Tanguay, deconstructs kart racing design
and his fascination with the sub-genre.
Special guests Tobi Saulnier and Karthik Bala from Vicarious Visions pose
with Duncan (Intrinsic Graphics).
..same pic, reversed, with grey-polo'd Jason Della Rocca (IGDA) inserted.
Matrox devrel guys Alexis Mather, Mike Drummelsmith and Shawn Leblanc
hang with Eric Le (Ubi Soft).