Posts tagged with “GDC”

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.

Welcome back to part 2 of the series on GDC 2009. While the last post covered some of the more interesting sessions from the Game Developer’s Conference., today’s post will focus on some of the more interesting people I had the pleasure of meeting. While you may not recognize all of their names (at least not yet), these are the guys and girls and who are doing new and exciting things in games. Perhaps unsurprisingly they are all independent developers and academics who are truly trailblazing new areas in gaming.

Alex Austin, Cryptic Sea
There are a large number of us who try very hard to make serious games that teach users real life skills in a fun way. Then there’s Alex, who just does it on a regular basis. He’s the brilliant mind behind Bridge Building Game (which eventually turned into Bridge Construction Set), a fantastically fun game in which you have to build suspension, draw, and railroad bridges over rivers and pits using real world physics. Alex isn’t stopping there though, and is currently hard at work on a new game… set on the moon. The premise is pretty simple, you’re an astronaut in a lunar lander, and you’re trying to take off from the moon and rendevous with the lunar orbiter so you can return to Earth. The catch? Limited fuel, a moving target, and a nasty case of gravity. It’s not enough to simply aim at the orbiter and go, you need to estimate where it will be, shoot ahead of it, and hope that you can meet up. The game sounds like a lot of fun, and will be available on Steam (hopefully soon!). The best part is that the game is just going to be part of a six pack of small, bite sized offerings, though I personally hope they all involve space, rockets, or bridges.

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I wrote this article for Henry Jenkins, and am reprinting it here for you. Enjoy!

Hi Everyone! Henry, thanks for inviting me back for my annual round up of all the interesting things that happened this year at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC). For those of you who are reading my posts for the first time I’m Eitan, local Boston game nerd and developer. I used to be a grad student at MIT doing games research, and now I’m the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games.

But enough about me, let’s talk about games! This year I’ll be doing two posts: Talking the Talk, and Walking the Walk. The first (today’s post) will be all about interesting talks, lectures, rants, and totally inappropriate outbursts heard at the conference. The next post will be all about the amazing developers I was lucky enough to meet who are making things happen. So let’s get started – what was awesome?

Usability, Motherfuckers!
Sure, it’s a little self serving to talk about your own session first, but it was a damn good talk and I want you to hear about it. A lot of people out there can’t play video games due to some sort of disability (this applies to computer systems in general). However, with a bit of extra thought and planning game developers can frequently make their titles work for many of these disabled groups, and in the process make their game more usable for everyone. This can even lead to increased sales, so spending money on making a game highly usable will often earn money! I covered a bunch of concrete tips for things that developers can do to make their games more usable, and pointed out examples of games that exemplify this behavior (like Half Life 2 and Peggle) and games that could do so much more (like Trespasser and Puzzle Quest). If this sounds interesting you can grab the slide deck here.

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