Meeting Feedback Required - Please Read!
Hi, for those of you who have attended IGDA meetings lately, what have you thought of them? The recent meetings focused on lectures, did you find these interesting? What else would you like to see at these meetings? Also what do you think of the location? If you don't like it, do you have ideas for other locations? Feedback would be greatly appreciated and help us to improve future meetings! Also it would be helpful if in your responses you mentioned your position in the game community, as in, are just a gamer? are you trying to break into the industry? are you already in the industry? etc. If you are already in the industry it would be helpful to know what project(s) you are working and who you work for. Thanks! Take care.
-calimer
Wow nice reply! Very informative. It's so great to hear stories of local game developers, especially when I thought I was the only one, until I found out about the IGDA. I have looked at some screens of Kyle's Quest, they look pretty cool! They bring me back to the days of Dragon Warrior and the earlier Final Fantasy games, which I absolutely loved.
Looking at those screenshots, was the RPG engine called RPG maker? Some of those characters look familar in the menu and I'm trying to think of where I remember them from. Great work on that, I definitely want to download the demo and give it a whirl.
As far as the meetings, suggestions are always more than welcome. Perhaps we could have something more hands on for your gamer friend in the future, like maybe a demo of a mod or game in development by someone in the local area. I do plan on presenting the mod I work on, the Doom 3 Coop Mod Last Man Standing at one of the meetings and would love to have people playing it there, perhaps he'd be interested in that. Also, maybe sometime we could discuss creating game design documents and even try to come up with some actual game ideas. If you have any ideas as to what you'd like to see at meetings please feel free to share. Take care and thanks for the interesting read!
-calimer
One other question I would like to get information on, is how did you learn about the Albany IGDA chapter? Is it the emails, website, forum or some other source? I need to know what's working and what isn't for getting information out, and what we can improve on. In the future I would like to put together an online survey form to collect peoples ideas and suggestions in a more organized fashion.
In response to Kain's post - Thank you for your feedback! Because the target audience for the IGDA is professional game developers as well as hobbyists and students, the activities and topics in the meetings quite likely will not appeal to gamers who are only interested in playing games. However, we are planning on have more than just lectures in the future and having meetings where people participate more like a mini game design jam contest or a games night. Do you have any additional ideas for meetings? Before and after a presentation everyone is encouraged to meet other local developers - getting people to network with local developers is one of the main points for having the meeting. Also, it sounds like some pretty cool stuff you've been up to for the last 8 years!
-Ian
Calimer: Yup, it's very much in the vein of the classic DQ and FF games. Final Fantasy 4 still remains my favorite FF game, and I always had hoped one day KQ would be able to do all that FF4 does.
Kyle had developed KQ1 back in 1997 with games like Final Fantasy Legend in mind. The first version was designed to be very basic, even more-so than a Gameboy game (not even an action button!,) until me and several other level authors got him to add more useful features to the engine and editor.
Yes, Kyle's Quest is both an editor and an engine. Level authors can design their own tiles, and since RPG Maker offers a lot of tiles, users often fall back to these tiles when developing a level. Which is why it resembles RPG Maker at times. But no, it was entirely self-developed by Kyle Poole.
I use a lot of tiles modified from the Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy Legend games in my adventures. Slightly unethical, perhaps, but I credit Squaresoft in the readme. I am really only a game designer/writer, not a 16x16 bitmap artist, so I'm not going to presume to be able to handle the graphics on my own. I'm just here to tell an amusing story and lead an entertaining adventure.
The demo is fully-functional aside from the ability to save your progress. If you enjoyed DQ and FF, then you should enjoy it. For KQ1, I created the pack-in "No Bones About it", as well as "King of Rogues", "Fatal Fantasy", "Support Your Local Swordsman", "Support Your Local Sidekick", and the "Legend of the Orb" remake. For KQ2, the pack-in remake "No Bones About it Deluxe."
Istead: I learned about IGDA from the videogame channel G4. They were doing one of those episodes on Vicarious Visions, and mentioned them being in Troy. I live in Cohoes, and I recognized VV from somewhere (I own Jet Grind Radio for the GBA...) and was surprised that a game company was near me. I hit their site, then saw the link to the Albany Chapter of IGDA, and here I am.
I'm not sure what you mean by a mini game design jam contest, but participation certainly sounds interesting. If it's some kind of colaborative game development thing, of course I'd be interested. If there's any use for a designer/writer. Heh.
Yup, as soon as the meeting I attended wrapped up, my friend was itching to get out of the building. I convinced him to stay a bit longer by reminding him that Katherine was going to show us the game testing room, but after he'd seen that, he was pretty much beating a path to the elevator. I saw people standing around chatting, and figured that's what happens after the meetings, but he was my ride...
Of course, I'd have been too shy to start talking to anyone there first anyways. I had to work up the nerve just to speak up during Katherine's lecture and let her know if she maximized the video, it would be easier to see dark parts of the video (because the less bright light surrounding the video on the screen, the brighter dark video appears.) Yup, that guy was me. O_O!
FF4 is actually my favorite final fantasy as well. I love it so much because I had the best battle ever against the last boss. I was told that it was impossible to beat in under 30 hours, so I was determined to beat that number. I ended up beating it in around 16 hours I believe, and even found a bunch of the secrets and stuff like that awesome dwarf cave. But needless to say my characters were very low level since I had spent zero time leveling so when facing the final boss my guys were getting wiped across the floor. It was a super intense white knuckled battle and eventually some how I pulled through. There were many times where I only had one guy left, mainly the dragoon guy. That battle was so much fun and so challenging, I loved it. FF6 was good too, but I really am not a fan of the FF's that came to the playstation. I hear all this raving about FF7 but to me that game was really boring. I ended up healing the levelmasters half the time just to give me more time to steal from them. What do you think about them?
I'm interested in playing your games if you're so willing. You have me really interested in downloading RPG maker again and creating some new content. Also this game seems very interesting to me:
http://www.crimsonfire.com/kqd/
It reminds me of the concept of dungeon keeper. I did play it for a while when I had it emulated on linux but it crashed every so often so I did not get too far. I'll have to check it again now that I'm back on windows.
Take care and thank you for all of your interesting information that you've posted on here. I would love to even possibly talk about ideas for an RPG with you. Also I do plan on creating a FPS type RPG as well which you can find out some information on here:
http://lms.d3files.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1538
Have a goodnight and nice to hear from you.
-calimer
I attended the August meeting that had Katherine speaking. My friend (just a gamer) went along as my ride, and he was pretty much rather bored with the lecture (he felt like he was in school again.) I could not convince him to go to the second meeting to sit through another lecture, and I couldn't get a hold of him in time to try to convince him to go with me to the last meeting. So I've only been to the first one this year.
As far as I'm concerned, the lecture was interesting, as character design is certainly relevant to what I mostly do, but I don't know if I could really get into it if lectures were all there is. I'm really not sure what else could be done, though, as this was my first time at such a meeting and I wasn't sure what to expect.
As far as my position, I'm trying to break into the industry. Well, I had been trying to since 1997, but it's stalled over the last couple years... I did not work for anyone, it was entirely self-operated, except for the RPG engine the games ran on. I wrote RPGs using an open-ended RPG engine, Kyle's Quest (1 & 2). Popular amongst Palm and WinCE users mostly, it allowed anyone who bought the engine to download adventures ("levels") developed by regular people using the editor, and play them.
Since 1997, I have written seven of these adventures, and they are some of the most popular levels amongst the users, especially for their humor, depth, and level/map design. And they have won awards over the years, which were voted on by the users. My first level was even chosen as the pack-in title you receive when buying the engine.
The creator of KQ, Kyle Poole, sold the company, Crimsonfire, to a group of investors a while back, who have been pretty much slacking off over the last year and a half, they have zilch as far as a customer support and have not updated the engine or editor to remove the bugs or make it more user friendly. They announced KQ3 around the time they bought the company, and it's still in limbo. Mostly they have been announcing new games left and right, and not producing any results. What used to be a fairly decent company when I got involved with them is now a laughing stock.
So basically, my dealings with them are complete, as I no longer have time to sit around and wait for them to push out this new engine. My epic story is only partially told (as each adventure were different episodes in a huge storyline,) and all I have in my portfolio now is seven titles.
So I guess for a while, until I'm "discovered" (yeah, right... *looks at watch and wonders where the last eight years went*), I'm back to being a normal gamer, as most game companies are not interested in game designers and writers, but rather programmers and artist...