15 GAMES IN 15 YEARS
Stone Librande (EA/Maxis)
REMAKING A CLASSIC: THE GAME
DESIGN OF STARCRAFT 2
Dustin Browder (Blizzard Entertainment)
/// Maxis creative director Librande has been
making a board or card game per year to
entertain his children, as they grew from age 3
to 18. What began as a simple exercise to teach
and engage with his kids wound up teaching
him important lessons about game design. In
this talk, Lebrande will outline how you don’t
need a big budget, expensive tools, or even a
studio to make an engaging game. All you need
is inspiration, and the drive to create.
registration to sponsorship, to storing the actual
finished games. With this proposed system,
could game jams approach some semblance of
standardization?
I SHOT YOU FIRST: NETWORKING
THE GAMEPLAY OF HALO: REACH
David Aldridge (Bungie )
A REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATION
TEMPLATE FOR INTERACTIVE
STORYTELLING
Ernest Adams (International Hobo)
/// STARCRAF T II was in development for a very
long time. It seems simple enough to expand
upon the success of one of the greatest real-time strategy games of all time, but when
consumer expectations are so high, a lot is
at stake. Blizzard kept poking at it until they
really had something, not only in terms of the
core game, but a strategy for expansion going
forward. This talk from Blizzard’s Browder will
lift the curtain on the company’s game design
techniques, from real-time strategy design to
multiplayer concerns—all the way through to
unique aspects such as designing for e-sports.
/// The always-entertaining Ernest Adams will
here discuss his vision for a requirements
specification template as regards storytelling
in games. That is to say, a game writer should
outline what their story needs to achieve, which
includes but is not limited to game design
requirements, player desires, and overall goals
of narrative communication. One might be
skeptical that a template would work for every
game, but using it as a skeletal framework, or
even simply a guide for your thinking could
prove very useful.
/// Network accuracy and reliability is perhaps
the most important aspect of any real-time
multiplayer game. But as everyone who’s
tried to manage this knows, it’s not so simple,
when you have a lot of players all expecting
the game to be “fair” to them. Bungie’s David
Aldridge will share insight into the company’s
network inspection tools for HALO: REACH, while
also outlining opportunities for optimization
and removal of lag. Aldridge says that after this
talk, “attendees will never again refer to game
networking as sockets programming.”
SEVEN WAYS A VIDEO GAME CAN
BE MORAL
Richard Rouse III (Ubisoft Montreal)
MEGA MESHES MODELING,
RENDERING AND LIGHTING A
WORLD MADE OF 100 BILLION
POLYGONS
Ben Sugden (Lionhead Studios) and Michal
Iwanicki (Lionhead Studios)
/// As Lionhead’s early Kinect demo turns into
the full-fledged product MILO AND KATE, the
company is looking to innovate in the visual
pipeline space as much as in the interactive AI
storytelling space. For this title, Lionhead has
moved away from traditional implementation,
and toward building the entire world using only
mesh sculpting tools. This talk brings virtual
texture streaming, complex mesh algorithms,
and billion-poly meshes into one unified
process. Lionhead’s Sugden and Iwanicki will
share common implementation pitfalls, and
also illuminate how to set up such a massive
structure for proper lighting.
FAULTY THINKING: BECOMING
A BETTER PRODUCER BY
UNDERSTANDING FAULTS IN
HUMAN THOUGHT
Chuck Hoover (Schell Games)
/// There’s always someone on the team you
just can’t get along with, and you may be at a
loss as to why. But as a producer, you’ve got to
be able to efficiently interact with—and mediate
between—everyone you’re working with. In
this deep-level production talk, Chuck Hoover
of Schell Games will discuss how errors in
perception, both the team's and your own, can
limit your ability to interact well with others. But
understanding those perception faults can be a
great tool for facilitating communication.
MORE PIRATES ON A BURNING
SHIP AND OTHER LEADERSHIP
CHALLENGES
Laura Fryer (WB Games Seattle)
HOW TO CONSTRUCT A GAME JAM
IN A BOX
Foaad Khosmood (IGDA/Global Game Jam/UC
Santa Cruz)
/// Game jams are increasing in popularity,
growing alongside the explosion of indie game
development. But managing game jams is hard,
and nobody really enjoys doing it. Khosmood
suggests an online resource with automated
tools for game jam creation and management,
which could handle everything from user
/// Continuing on from her excellent talk at the
IGDA Leadership Forum, Fryer will discuss good
management, and how it extends from the top
to the bottom of your team structure. This is
not just hand-waving. Through her extensive
experience at big companies, such as shipping
Xbox 360 and GEARS OF WAR at Microsoft, and
her current VP position at WB Games, Fryer has
actual processes that you can implement to get
your team talking more, communicating better,
and even trusting you as a manager or producer
more. That said, you can’t always make them
like you!
/// Moral choice in games has been a hot topic
since the early days of interactive simulation.
How do you make moral or humanistic
choices matter to players in a medium where
dispatching hundreds of foes in a gameplay
session is the norm? Richard Rouse III will
dissect examples of successful moral situations
from other written fiction, television, and
beyond, then discussing how these ideas can
be applied to game design. This talk follows up
his successful discussion last year of whether
games can make us cry.
THE ONE-HOUR VIDEO GAME MBA
Charlie Cleveland (Unknown Worlds
Entertainment)
/// All too often developers ignore the equally
challenging game of business. As a result, they
can end up ceding control of their companies to
fresh-faced MBAs who by nature steer toward
far less interesting waters. Take matters into
your own hands (or at least understand what
the bean counters are talking about) by learning
business administration on your own. You
figured out inverse kinematics. A profit/loss
statement will be a breeze.
BEYOND FACADE: PATTERN
MATCHING FOR NATURAL
LANGUAGE APPLICATIONS
Bruce Wilcox (Tell Tale Games)
/// Unique games such as FACADE and
SCRIBBLENAUTS have shown the creative
possibilities found in natural language
interfaces. Here Bruce Wilcox from Tell Tale
Games will explore various approaches to
natural language handling including AIML,
FACADE’s ABL, and ChatScript. The goal is to
GAME DEVELOPER | JANUARY 2011 8
