San
Diego - March 2004 Meeting
IGDA - San Diego is back! The kickoff meeting for the year was an astounding success, despite some technical issues with the announcements getting out much later than anticipated. A good sized crowd from various local studios were in attendance. A huge thanks to meeting sponsor ATI for supplying the drinks, pizza (RTP! Round Table Pizza for the acronym challenged), and great loot for the lotto, err raffle. Of course we must thank Qualcomm's Brew developer team for sponsoring the facility and bearing with us going way over our expected end time. You guys rock! More props to our other raffle sponsors: Intel, Belkin, CH Products, Perforce Software, Bawls, and New Egg for making the meeting such a success. Those in attendance enjoyed over $3000 in donated prizes (list price) !!
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With a focus on RPG Design and MMORPG development, presenters Raph Koster and Neil Hallford brought a wealth of experience to the table. This was followed by an informative presentation from Jeff Royle with ATI Developer Relations. Finally while calling out ticket numbers for the raffle, our 3 presenters addressed a slew of various questions from the crowd.
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Raph Koster now works at the San Diego office of Sony Online Entertainment as the Chief Creative Officer. He was the Creative Director for STAR WARS GALAXIES , creative lead for ULTIMA ONLINE, and lead designer for ULTIMA ONLINE: THE SECOND AGE and UO LIVE . He writes and speaks frequently on online world design topics, including influential and oft-cited articles such as "Declaring the Rights of Avatars," and "The Laws of Online World Design." He maintains a webpage at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/.
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Raph amused us with his antics and candid accounts of where MMORPGs began, where they've been and where they're headed. He discussed the enormous growth potential citing the explosion of the markets in China and Korea. His presentation took us from the earliest online games (PLATO), to the proliferation of MUDs all the way to today's online gaming market. He brought back memories of getting our butts kicked when finally trying our FPS skills that first time we took it online. "No one wants to pay to be humiliated", he explains to us. Raph scoffed at what is described as only ‘treadmill’ gameplay and that we have barely scratched the surface with MMOs predominantly only covering the RPG genre. He challenged the attendees working on future games in the genre to push the nich, go beyond the mold.
Neal Hallford has been a professional game designer for more than 14 years, and has worked for many respected development houses including Gas Powered Games, Westwood Studios, New World Computing, Cavedog Entertainment, Dynamix, Rapid Eye Entertainment, and Snowblind Studios. The story he crafted for "Betrayal at Krondor" became not only a hit game, but a New York Times best-selling novel. His work on "Dungeon Siege" is currently being produced as a major motion picture. Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games, a book that Neal co-authored with his wife Jana, is currently one of the best-selling and best reviewed books for Premier Press and has been adopted as a game design textbook at several colleges across the country. Most recently he led the design development on "Lords of Everquest", provided text and story for "Champions of Norrath," and is currently working as a freelance developer in San Diego, California. You can find out more about Neal at his website at http://Neal.Hallford.com , or contact him directly at nealiios@aol.com.
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Neal explained the importance of a good story in gaming. He described some of the current deficiencies in MMORPGs when it comes to having a real plot including:
- No direction, no story
- Beginning players are lost
- Veteran players have no benefit to playing with beginning characters
- Lack of permanent or meaningful change on the game world
Jeff Royle is in developer relations with this meeting's sponsor, ATI. He gave a nice overview of the current DX8 and DX9 technologies and how those fit into what a developers’ current hardware target should be. Jeff gave an overview of the types of costly programming mistakes they frequently see and how to avoid some of these blunders. He reminded us that ATI has been very successful in assisting developers in optimizing their code to get the best performance possible out of the hardware and to be sure to utilize that resource. Jeff also provided some hints at what might be coming in the near future with ATI.
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After the presentations our gracious presenters formed a rountable (well, it was actually square) and responded to a barrage of questions from the crowd as the raffle prize numbers were called. If only we had a few days to listen to the entertaining banter between Raph and Neal on the various gaming subjects. Some notable topics included: the future of Wireless in gaming, the difficulties in meeting time to market pressure, and the challenges of keeping on top of advancing hardware.
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Many lucky attendees won prizes including an Intel P4 3Ghz processer and motherboard, an ATI Radeon 9800XT top of the line video card, a couple of ATI Radeon 9600 Pro video cards, a couple of ATI Radeon 9200 Pro video cards, a rockin' Intel 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 CPU and 875P Motherboard, a CH Products’ Fighterstick, four Belkin Nostromo n52 Speedpad hybrid keyboard-gamepads, a couple of nice Perforce jackets, and other prizes. There was plenty of high caffeine fuel provided by Bawls to keep the crowd lively. Whether it be a nice hardware prize, some marketing schwag like t-shirts, some high caffeine boost from Bawls or the extremely informative and entertaining presentations, certainly no one walked away without something this night. Thanks again to all the gracious sponsors.
Be sure to check out the other pictures we have from the event linked on the website under photos. We'll see you for our next meeting after E3 2004 on Tuesday, May 25th!