process. The problem comes when a designer looks at metrics as
scripture, rather than a tool. This talk will give a practical view of how
metrics should be used, and how to avoid having your creative design
process hindered by cold, hard, unforgiving data.
strategy Giordano Bruno Contestabile hopes to help you answer that
question by sharing how these decisions are made at his company,
with a particular emphasis on managing games as a service and
leveraging in-app purchases.
Live Game Disasters: How to Prepare for
the Worst Before It Happens
CR YS TIN COX NEXON AMERICA
As anyone who has worked on an online game knows, actually
launching your game is the beginning—not the end—of your
troubles. MAPLESTORY producer Crystin Cox promises to give several real
world examples of the horrors that occur after the servers are set live,
including hackers, forum trolls, gold farmers, and network outages. The
goal of the talk is to help producers overcome little disasters so that
their teams can focus on the next update, instead of putting out fires.
The Future Is Now—Emergent Narrative
Without Ridiculous Tech
MAT THE W WEISE SINGAPORE-MIT GAMBIT GAME LAB
According to MIT GAMBIT Game Lab researcher Matthew Weise,
replayable emergent narrative is often looked at as a tech
problem, rather than a design problem, which he doesn’t think is right.
Weise will outline a method for tackling this issue with creative design,
showing off the research he’s done and the prototypes developed at
MIT as part of an ongoing research project into experimental narrative
design methods.
Rapid MMO Content Iteration and Validation
with Spatial Analysis in STAR WARS: THE OLD
REPUBLIC
GEORG ZOELLER BIOWARE AUSTIN
In the late stages of MMO development, there is perhaps nothing
more important than the ability to rapidly iterate on content. In
this design lecture, Bio Ware Austin’s Georg Zoeller shows how his studio
uses spatial analysis to track player behavior on the ground level,
showing off the studio’s homegrown HoloProjector visualization toolkit
and giving tips on how to begin applying spatial analysis to your game,
even if you don’t have a HoloProjector to call your own.
Threat Modeling for Game Developers
STEPHEN BEEMAN GIZMOCRACY
“Threat Modeling” is likely not a term you’ve heard a lot about
before, but with all the recent security hacking woes, it’s one
you’re likely to be hearing more and more of. Threat modeling is a
process for identifying and preventing security risks that may threaten
the personal information of your players, and as Beeman hopes to
show, the same processes that are used on major operating systems
can still apply to 99-cent smartphone games.
The Year in Social Games 2010–2011
STEVE MERE TZK Y AND DAVE ROHRL PLAYDOM
Self-described “grizzly” social game veterans Steve Meretzky
and Dave Rohrl of Playdom will present what is sure to be an
entertaining annual review of the industry’s ups and downs. Topics from
the always-entertaining duo will include the latest trends, the most
interesting games, and notable new viral and monetization techniques.
The aim of the talk will be to separate social gaming myths from the
truth because, as they explain it, “a lot of the conventional wisdom
about the sector is actually wrong.”
SETTLERS ONLINE: Moving a Traditional
European Boxed Game to a Worldwide Free
to Play MMO Experience
BENEDIK T GRINDEL AND CHRIS TOPHER SCHMITZ UBISOF T BLUE B Y TE
All eyes will be on Blue Byte, after SE T TLERS ONLINE lead designer
Teut Weidemann’s controversial talk at GDC Europe last year
asserted that microtransaction-based games should “exploit human
weakness” in order to be profitable. At GDC Online, the game’s head of
production and head of live operations will give a mini-postmortem of
the game’s development, with a particular focus on how to best bring a
successful franchise to the free-to-play world.
EVERQUEST II Extended: Streaming a Non-Streaming Game
JOSHUA KRIEGSHAUSER SON Y ONLINE EN TERTAINMEN T
Sony Online’s technical director Joshua Kriegshauser will reflect
back on the Herculean task of switching EVERQUEST II from a
client-side install requiring several Gigabytes of hard drive space to a
streaming system. Kriegshauser says that attendees will “learn the
intricacies, initial assumptions and lessons learned of taking a live
system from file-based storage to real-time asynchronous streaming of
assets from the Internet.”
Successful Publishing on Smartphone
Platforms: iOS vs. Android
GIORDANO BRUNO CON TESTABILE POPCAP GAMES
You’ve got a great idea for a smartphone game, but what platform
do you put it on? iOS? Android? Both? PopCap’s head of mobile
Sins of the Past
STEVE JAROS VOLI TION
As Woody Allen once said, "If you're not failing every now and
again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative." In
what he hopes will be a roundtable confessional, Volition senior writer
and designer Steve Jaros will swap war stories with attendees about
failures stemming from “bad planning, over eagerness, or sometimes
just a straight up lousy idea that sounded good at the time.” As he
explains it, these conversations often happen in after-hours parties, but
not everyone gets invited to those.
GAME DEVELOPER | AUGUS T 2011 28
