By popular demand, here are the slides from my web based talk on Rapid Iterative Prototyping. Take a look why don’t you! If you’d like to present this to a class or to someone else feel free to do so, please just give me a credit somewhere.

If you have questions on the talk or one that didn’t get answered during the presentation please feel free to ask in the comments section and I’ll answer it there, alternatively you can just e-mail me. And if this is your first time here then welcome, and be sure to join our twitter/facebook/rss feeds!

Oh man, I’ve gotten soooo many good suggestions for awesome web comics from this talk

This talk is awesome. I mean, really, really relevant stuff if you are an indie trying to get your game onto XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, or Steam. Dave Edery delivered a fantastic keynote at the Digital Distribution Summit in Australia on what indies can really expect to have to do to get their game accepted onto the Xbox Live Arcade, where the bar is an how it’s moving, and how to best hedge your bets and make sure that your game does as well as it possibly can.

Skip to 8 min in and then watch the entire video. It’s super business oriented but again, if you make games and are serious about making a living doing so then I would really recommend checking this out.

Yesterday I gave my talk to the GDC 2009 Serious Games crowd, and it went pretty well! I covered why we made AudiOdyssey and what we learned in the process, and then doled out some extra large scoops of take home tips for developers in the crowd. It seemed to go over pretty well, I only saw a few audience members fall asleep and I got some great feedback afterwards.

I’ve gotten a bunch of requests for my slides from the talk, so go ahead and grab ‘em!

Eitan’s GDC 2009 Talk on AudiOdyssey, Usability, and Accessibility

Going to GDC this year? Not quite sure what is worth checking out? Well never fear, I’ve got your back with a list of what I suspect will be some of the more interesting talks at GDC this year. Of course, I think the highlight will probably be my 1:30 talk on Monday at Serious Games on AudiOdyssey and all things accessible/usable, but here are the other great choices:

Monday, 11:15 – 11:45am, Simon Carless talks about Indie games sales and stats in room 304 of the Indie Games Summit.

Monday, 1:30 – 2:00pm, I’ll talk about Mega Man 9 errr AudiOdyssey in room 305 of the Serious Games Summit

Want more? Follow the link!

Tuesday, 9:00 – 10:00am, Frank Lantz gives a Keynote on new ARG (Augmented/Alternate Reality Games) techniques in room 305 of the Serious Games Summit

Tuesday, 2:00 – 2:45pm, Kellee Santiago talks about how to manage a small indie team in room 131 in the Indie Games Summit.

Wednesday, 2:30 – 3:30pm, Eric Zimmerman (and Steve Meretzky!) do the game designer’s challenge on “My First Time”. Should be hilarious. It’s in 135 of the North Hall.

Wednesday, 4:00 – 5:00pm, Matthew le Merle talks about finding early stage funding for small video game start ups in room 2002 of the West Hall.

Thursday, 9:00 – 10:00am, 10 panelists talk for 5 minutes each about whatever the hell they want relating to game design, it should be really interesting. 2007 in the West Hall.

Thursday, 3:00 – 4:00pm, Chris Eden gives a talk on Indie self publishing on PSN in room 3002 of the West Hall.

Thursday, 3:00 – 5:00pm, Jon Blow heads up the Experimental Gameplay session in room 135, North Hall.

The Independent Game Conference East is going to be held right here in Boston this May 7th and 8th. It’s going to be a fun conference where small indie gamers can get together, learn tricks and tips for making games with real impact, and meet their peers. A lot of our friends are going to be there giving talks, including Ravi Mehta (Viximo), Darius Kazemi (Orbus), and Scott MacMillian (Macguffin Games). You can see a full list of speakers here.

But there not the only ones! Ethan Fenn and I are going to be giving a talk as well, titled “Rapid and Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics”. We’re basically going to talk all about the super sneaky ninja techniques you can use to make games quickly before you work out every detail of a game. It’s going to be really fun, and yes, we really are going to talk about how we used Dinosaur Comics. Follow the link for the full talk synopsis -

Full talk description: You want to make a game, but you’re missing an artist, you don’t have the design nailed down, you need to find funding, and you don’t know what platform you’re going to develop for. How do you even start? With prototyping! In this energetic talk we’ll walk through the iterative rapid prototyping process we went through making our first title, and we’ll demo builds created along the way to highlight key points. The lessons we’ll cover are useful for both new developers figuring out how to get off the ground and for seasoned industry vets.

Come check out the conference and our talk if you’re going to be in town!

That’s right! The whole Fire Hose crew is going to San Francisco for the last week of March to check out the annual Game Developer’s Conference. GDC is an insane free for all where a couple ten thousand game developers convene for a week to network and discuss how awesome/shitty the past year was. We’ll be going and blogging about what happens, who we meet, and what neat lectures we see. It should be really fun!

I’m also going to be giving a talk on AudiOdyssey and Video Game Accessibility on Monday, and it should be really cool! If you are going to be at the conference I’d love it if you can come and check it out, it’ll be very sad if I end up speaking to a room full of crickets. You can read a full synopsis of the lecture by clicking on this pretty button.

Here’s the description from the conference website:

Not all serious games need to be those with visually exciting graphics or even graphics at all. AudiOdyssey is a game that provides the serious games community with an interesting twist – developing a game that can be used to engage visually impaired gamers and gamers together in the same shared experience. The story of AudiOdyssey is itself a journey not only into game design for the visually impaired but overall issues with how to create games with easy UIs and engaging experiences. During this talk Eitan Glinert who built AudiOdyssey while at MIT will present the story of AudiOdyssey while also covering further issues in usability that are useful not only for improving access for people with disabilities but all levels of people learning, training and doing more with videogames. Together this talk provides some critical highlights of issues that are of paramount importance to games that don’t get to be selective about their audiences and gives insight into a game that moved beyond presenting just a graphical experience.

Last night Chris Swain, assistant Professor at USC and the co-founder of the EA game innovation lab, visited MIT to give an interesting talk on all things games. Touching on myriad subjects, Chris hopped from how we came to our current state of game development, what areas/genres of game development are still ripe for exploration, and what trends he has been observing in the games industry. He ended with a quick piece on how he believes development will change over the next few years to remain sustainable.

Chris also made some controversial claims about how games will be the dominant form of media in this century, which while I happen to agree with him I don’t think I’d make the statement so strongly, and I wouldn’t count out less interactive media like film. Overall the talk was really enjoyable; Chris really knows his stuff, and has the development chops to back it up (full disclosure: I worked with Chris on Immune Attack).

Follow this fantastic link for more details on the talk –

Chris opened by discussing how we got to the current state of gaming where we have defined genres with tons of titles, but lots of unexplored areas ripe for development. Chris defined his own interest as a mix of strategy and simulation, and his preference for games with a message of some sort. To that end he discussed The Redisctricting Game (a future fun + free entry), a great title which teaches users about congressional gerrymandering through gameplay, and which in my opinion does an exquisite job of getting users angry about our need for district line drawing reform.

Chris then jumped into the meat of his talk, the trends of gaming. He discussed the need to innovate and the high cost of growing development teams and game sizes – GTA4, for instance, cost $100 million to make, and many AAA titles cost $50 million nowadays. He suggested that one way out of this might be through procedural content generation and user generated content as was done in Spore, though the game cost $80 million to create so perhaps it wasn’t the best example? I believe the point he was getting at is that most of that money went to design though, and as these algorithms become more widespead costs will decrease.

Finally Chris discussed indie developers (sweet!) and their contributions to the industry. He talked about the talented students who make great games and then go on to become indie developers and release their game commercially. I think he gave the two groups a bit too much distinction as one sure as hell feels like the other to me, though I suppose there is a major difference between creating a title for a thesis and for commercial release. Of course, Chris is a huge fan of indies, and thinks that over the next few years we’ll see more and more small studios cranking out interesting new games.

All in all the talk was a lot of fun. If you e-mail Chris he’ll be happy to share his slides with you.