Posts tagged with “GDC”

Last year CEO and creator of ByteJacker, Anthony Carboni, hosted the Independent Games Festival. As you know Fire Hose Games is excited to be part of the record breaking number of entries in the 2011 IGF.

Anthony was able to give us a bit of his time and tell us about his experience as a host and as a gamer at last year’s festival.

You were able to host the 2011 IGF awards, what was that experience like?
Awesome. Amazing. Unbelievably great. It was so wonderful to not just meet the people whose games I’d been talking about for years, but also to have some small part in recognizing and celebrating their work.

Why do you think the IGF awards are important to indie game developers?
Well, in a practical sense, there are a cash awards and obviously a lot more visibility. There are fewer marketing opportunities and a lot less money available for indies to get their name out there – something like the IGF awards can really help with that. On another level, one that I think is just as important, after a hugely grueling project, it’s nice to get the recognition and respect of your peers. Plus you can totally meet Tim Schafer there.

What do gamers get out of the IGF awards?
It’s hard to get into indie games – that’s why I started Bytejacker.[Bytejacker is a review show that only reviews games that are available for download only. It often features Indie titles] Having the IGF awards is a highly visible and accessible way for gamers to see what’s out there and get that sort of gateway into what is essentially another entire gaming industry, with just as many choices as the mainstream one they’re used to.

How is the IGF unique from the GDC?
Indies give you less swag but more high fives when they see you.

What are you looking forward to for this year’s IGF awards?
The whole experience was a whirlwind for me last year – it was my first GDC, my first IGF, I had a show to shoot while I was there and a whole other one to host. This year I’m just looking to go and take it slower and have some more fun.

What do you think about Go Home Dinosaurs?
Looks good! Tower Defense can be a crowded place to make your mark, but if I learned anything from Slam Bolt Scrappers, it’s that you guys can weave genres together in some very unexpected ways.

You can read more from Anthony on his site.

Where do you feel most like yourself?

The best version of yourself. The one where every moment of the day is
a smile because in that place there is no-one else you would rather
be?

Is it strange I feel this way volunteering for a conference?

For the last eleven years, the Conference Associate (CA) program at
the annual Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco has not only
been the source of all my best opportunities to find contacts and work
in the game industry, it has been where I renew my spirit and love for
this industry and its people.

As a CA volunteer, I have badged session lines, run errands for show
management, managed hordes of t-shirt hungry attendees, and served in
many support capacities for other volunteers. None of this is what
you might call glamorous stuff. At any other show it would be grunt
work–the most boring and uncreative labor this side of leaning on a
wall.

But the leadership of the CA program, Tim Brengle and Ian Mckenzie,
make it amazing. They call it an experiment in management; to start by
choosing an exceptionally trustworthy team (of 400!) and then to
explicitly entrust that team with the power to think and act
independently, employing numerous systems to make that trust and
support evident. As a member of the CA team, I feel as creative
supporting a speaker’s talk experience as I would making my own concept art
or animation.

Last week was the 2011 GDC in San Francisco. It was also the 25th
anniversary of the conference. Tim Brengle is one of only two people
who have attended all twenty-five. As one of the founders of the
conference, he initiated the spirit of all future CAs by seeing a need
and diving in, volunteering to create a system to manage attendee
needs. For over twenty years he and then Ian McKenzie have grown this
system with the support and input of their many hands and eyes, the
Conference Associates.

The selection process is famously mysterious. The people chosen to
serve are exceptionally varied in age, background, and physical
ability, with a gender balance and ethnic diversity that is a far, far
better approximation of game player culture than the industry normally
displays. Students work beside industry veterans. After 11 years, I
have seen an extraordinary number of those students become industry
veterans. The selection process is only mysterious to the CAs. Those
around them quickly see why they were chosen in the energy,
inventiveness, and joy they bring to the job.

Many of us at Fire Hose Games has served as CAs. Programmer Jeff Ward
was a CA in 2004, programmers Sharat Bhat and Ethan Fenn in 2009 and 2010, and
Marketer Alec Shobin joined this year. It was our pleasure to supply
evening entertainment to the CAs last Thursday by bringing a PS3 dev
kit and big screen to the CA lounge for them to play Slam Bolt Scrappers.
It was a particular pleasure for me to be able to share our game with
people who have meant so much to me for so many years.

Much thanks to the more than sixty CAs who played SBS last week and to
the many more CAs who said they are looking forward to our release
next week. Special thanks to Jennie who loaned us her TV screen.
Heartfelt thanks to Tim and Ian for supporting our studio by having so
many of us on their team.

See you all next year, CAs!

GDC is over, and my talk “From College To Industry: 20 Lessons Learned for Getting the Most out of Your Early Career” went fairly well I think.  The room was packed, which was no small feat considering how big it was, but I think that was mainly because those attending the Career Seminar had nowhere else to go during that time.  I could be wrong, though.  The title could have been that good.

Regardless, the slides for the talk are now posted and available for anyone.  I’ve been asked to give this talk a few more times, but I think I’m going to revise it a bit.  I really want to emphasize the two points about knowing business and making sure all the founders of a company are on the same page.  Of all the points in my talk, these two feel like the most important, but also the most belabored by other speakers, and also the most ignored.  They may be lessons that you have to learn the hard way, but want to do everything I can to really hammer those points home.  Hopefully I can accomplish that with revisions.

If you attended the talk, I’d love to hear your opinions and feedback. You can also check out my blog (http://www.jeffongames.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@fuzzybinary).

Next week, a portion of the Fire Hose team will be in San Francisco attending and participating in the Game Developer’s Conference, the largest professional conference for game developers in the world. GDC is the place where game developers gather to share their accumulated knowledge, network, do shady business deals and, of course, party.  And as you know, we at Fire Hose know how to party.

But it’s not all fun and games. The Fire Hose team will be out on the floor, showing off Slam Bolt Scrappers at the Sony Online Entertainment booth to old fans and new fans.  A few of us will also be wandering the show, looking for new friends and connecting with old ones, and hopefully finding a few that will be buy us drinks.

While GDC is targeted toward the professional game developer, it also has a lot to offer students and industry hopefuls as well.  On Friday, GDC offers its Game Career Seminar, a track targeted at students looking to break into the industry.

I will actually be speaking at the game career seminar at 3:10, in a talk titled “From College to Industry: 20 Lessons for Getting the Most out of Your Early Career.”  The talk is about my own journey, starting as a programmer at a small government contractor, moving into AAA game development, then into game middleware, and finally settling at Fire Hose.  I’ll talk about the things I’ve learned going to GDC for 10 years, such as the importance of networking, and how much you can learn just by listening to people. I’ll also talk about lessons I’ve learned in the industry, like how to match your company to your own career goals.  There is also a reference to killing babies.

So if you’re heading to GDC, come and say hi to us either at the SOE booth, or stop by my talk on Friday to maybe learn a little bit.

I just got back from San Francisco, where last week I was attending the annual Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). There were a bunch of great talks, and you can get the low down on them from plenty of other sites, so I won’t try to recap what has already been discussed.

Instead, I’ll talk about GDC from the incredibly important (and somewhat irrelevant) board game angle. One of my favorite parts about going out to California is that I get to visit a lot of my friends from college (Zetes, you know who you are) and a big part of what we do nowadays is play board games, usually while trash talking each other and eating/drinking.

This year was defined by two games, Pandemic and Dominion. The first is a strange board game in that it is a cooperative affair; everyone works together to try to eradicate 4 rampaging diseases before they wipe out humanity, and in each game the entire team either wins or loses together. It’s a lot of fun to strategize together to figure out what to do next, and there are some really neat mechanics (like how outbreaks work, or that the same cities tend to keep getting infected) that really do a great job of ratcheting up the pressure. The specialized abilities for each player is great too – everyone has their own role (i.e. superpower) that really drives each player’s personality in the game. I’m a big fan of the Medic and Scientist, but maybe that’s because they are the most newbie friendly and I haven’t played it much. It’s worth mentioning that the box art for the game is some of the worst I’ve ever seen, it seems to scream “I’m an educational game, don’t play me, I’m not fun!”. Hilarious.

Dominion is a f*ing expensive card trading game that is ridiculously addictive, and pretty well balanced too. If you play with the two expansion sets (which you should) the game has a whopping 75 sets of cards, and in each game you will randomly play with 10 of those sets. Each set represents a different rule for the game, so the game basically has infinite variety in that you will probably never play the same game twice, and which rules are available in each game drastically changes how that round plays out. Dominion also has the added bonus of being a quick game to play, so we found we would frequently play 2-4 games back to back. It’s so addictive that I found myself often thinking about playing while I was at GDC, which is impressive considering how much attention grabbing eye candy abounds there.

If you like these board games go check them out! Also props to Jeff Ward for organizing a kickass board games night at the beginning of GDC.