gdc2010 posts

Steph Thirion is a game designer who's been releasing some of the most inventive games I've seen on the iPhone. He started out with Eliss a little while back, and he recently announced Faraway, which I got to play at GDC. The night after I played the game (it was at a party called Gamma IV), I sat down with him to chat about developing for the iPhone, why Eliss wasn't bigger, and his biggest inspiration for the more casual gameplay of Faraway.

Read on for the full interview.

On the third day of GDC 2010, Ngmoco's Neil Young took the stage in one of the largest rooms at the conference to talk about what his company had "unlearned" in its time in the App Store. Ngmoco has become a large and polarizing figure in the world of App Store development -- after starting out with a big investment from the iFund, it's moved quickly to become one of the biggest iPhone-only developers, and after starting out with a few premium titles like the very successful Rolando, have recently made waves with its "freemium" business model. Young talked about the company's history so far, and went in-depth on Ngmoco's plan for ruling the App Store and why he believes it's the "most significant shift and opportunity for [game developers] since the birth of this business."

We've summarized Young's long address in this post. It was pretty incredible -- not only did Young lay out his idea of a clear plan for building and developing a large portfolio of very profitable App Store titles "at scale" (the company plans to release twenty new freemium products on the iPhone in the near future, as well as six titles on the iPad), but he made it very clear that he fervently believes that freemium and the model he's structured is the future of the video game business.

We actually got to play with the iPhone-controlled Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter back at Macworld a little while ago, but we didn't get a chance to see the "AR" part of it (augmented reality, of course) until GDC last week. Parrot pulled out the AR targets for us, and while the games they had running were very rudimentary, we did get a good feel for the action.

The verdict? It works, but it's not that fun yet. Sure enough, when the Drone's cameras picked up the weird pattern of black and white dots and/or the striped tube that the company attached to the top of a second Drone, the iPhone displayed a lock-on target or the weird robot that you can see above (that's the iPhone's video running out to a television, something that's technically a no-no under the current SDK). And when the drone moved around it, the display faithfully showed the 3D model -- it didn't look actually real, but you could fly around and interact with it. And after you blasted it with enough missiles, it exploded.

When I was reminded of its name at GDC, I couldn't recall hearing much about Engineous Games. It's the development studio founded by Nitzan Wilnai, a former software developer at EA and Yahoo who's gone to work making iPhone games for himself. But I did recall Engenious' first title, Tatomic, which I wrote about a while ago -- it was a great puzzler that put a new spin on Tetris' falling block gameplay.

Unfortunately, despite my purchase, Tatomic didn't sell as well as Wilnai would have liked, so he's decided to "create a game that would sell itself." It's called Sketch Nation Shooter, and he sat down to show it to me last week in San Francisco. He started off the demo by promising that he would make a game for me in two minutes, and sure enough, 98 seconds later, he had a custom spaceship shooter game up and running, as you can see in the photo above.

One of the best things about going to a convention like GDC is what we in the business call "doing research," which you might know as "playing games." We often get to check out the latest and greatest that developers are working on, and so when Tactile Entertainment offered us a chance to check out their upcoming Pocket Creatures title, we gladly took it. The company is founded by four friends from Denmark, one of whom used to be the Development Manager at Crytek (makers of the PC graphics engine and its flagship shooter Crysis), and Pocket Creatures, due out later this year, is their first title.

The game's backstory tells of an island somewhere with an egg in an ancient temple, and in an intro movie, the egg hatches to reveal the game's main creature character. But the game isn't merely a virtual pet simulator. While you can pet the little guy to make him happy or slap him to make him sad, the rest of the game actually embodies a pretty complex ecosystem, of which the creature and his emotions and abilities are only a part.

Fallen Earth is a respectable postapocalyptic MMO -- I've never played it (one MMO is enough for me, and the gigantic World of Warcraft is still claiming my time), but it's grown pretty popular since release in September of last year. And now the game is set to pick up another chunk of audience, as the owner Icarus Studios has announced that they're releasing a Mac client for the game. It's currently in beta (and was made using Wine), but if you're interested in trying out a new MMO with a postapocalyptic twist, head on over, give the client a download (you'll need a game account, though there's a free trial available), and give the team a good Mac welcome.

That's not all, though -- Icarus is also working on their very own iPhone app, and I got to play with it this week at their GDC 2010 booth. For Fallen Earth players, it'll be a must-get, but even if you're not currently a player of the game, the app is a shining example of what's possible with a "supplementary" game application -- it allows for all sorts of in-game functions directly from Apple's handheld device.

While we weren't able to stay the whole time (the life of a TUAW blogger at a covention is varied and hectic), the iPhone Game Developers' Luncheon at GDC 2010 was a pretty enlightening experience. After a little varied networking among guests, hosts PlayHaven, Cooley Godward Kronish (a law firm that specializes in startup companies), and MplayIt started up the panel discussion. The iPhone developers in attendance were Igor Pusenjak of Lima Sky (the creators of the very popular Doodle Jump) and Bryan Mitchell, a solo developer who created a game called Geared that's risen to the top of the App Store charts.

The most interesting thing we learned at the luncheon (in among a lot of legal talk about forming corporations and copyright law) was where these two developers came from. Mitchell was a filmmaker who had to work construction "after film work dried up in Las Vegas," and decided to jump in on the app business to make extra money. His game only made a few bucks a day at first, but after spending a little on advertising, Apple featured his game in "What's Hot." After that, he was off to the races.

Steph Thirion's first iPhone game was Eliss, a touchscreen-based arcade game that had you combining and maneuvering planets around one another, and trying to size-match them up with black holes to earn points. As he told us (stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the indie developer), it was pretty hard -- even more so than he actually intended it to be. So, for his second iPhone game, Faraway, he's gone much simpler. Inspired by the iPhone game Canabalt, Thirion has created a one-button game in which the goal is nothing less than to explore the universe. He has it running on a Mac at the show (so he can project the video onto a bigger screen), and we got to have some hands-on time with the new game.

You control a comet that flies around an inky black void speckled with dots and circles; the pixelated space aesthetic from Eliss is back. This time, however, there's only one control, and it's a tap anywhere on the screen. Doing so will cause your comet to gravitate towards the nearest static dot, which will then slingshot you around the star until you let go, and the comet flings off in a new direction. There's an arrow pointing off of the screen, and by timing slingshots correctly, you will face the comet in the direction of the arrow.

For the last panel of GDC 2010 day two, David Whatley of Critical Thought took the stage to talk about the App Store success he found with his games geoDefense and geoDefense Swarm, and almost dared other iPhone developers to follow his "guaranteed plan" to go from "zero to Time Magazine." He's got quite a background in the trenches of coding and game development, having designed and run online mulitplayer games for over a decade with his "day job" at a company called Simutronics, but he decided to take to the iPhone in his spare time both to learn the platform and see what he could do with it.

First things first, he said, to make an iPhone game, you've got to figure out your goals as a business. He talked about the potential on the iPhone in terms of millions of dollars, but of course, since "99.9% of businesses on the App Store make no money," it's much more likely that if something goes wrong during development or something doesn't click right, the money will drop down to just "a few bucks." It's a balance of costs (which he relabeled as "risks") vs. revenue -- it's very easy, he said, to make money on the App Store, but the issue most developers have is that they let costs get away from them by having too big a team or by investing too much development time, and that comes straight out of their bottom line.

Julian Farrior hosted a panel here on day two of the 2010 Game Developers' Conference here in San Francisco, and he told a room of press and developers about his last year in the App Store. He had attended last year's conference with a partner while considering starting up an iPhone company, and that idea became Backflip Studios. Since the company was founded in April of 2009, they've gotten five apps in the top five, and made (Farrior said he'd be honest, because it was more interesting) $2.5 million in revenue so far.

He revealed that a full $1m in that actually came straight from ad sales -- he's made deals with AdMob and other companies to put ads in his popular Paper Toss app, and he uses those ads both for straight revenue, as well as to promote his own games (more on that later in the talk). Farrior offered up a frank and honest look at what it was like to run an iPhone app company for a year.

Today, the Khronos Group announced the launch of OpenGL 4.0, the cross-platform 3D & graphics API. OpenGL was most recently at version 3.2. Updated specifications are available at the opengl.org site. Game and 3D developers are presumably salivating.

Mac OS X includes OpenGL, and the iPhone runs an embedded version of OpenGL called OpenGL ES. The mobile ES version remains in its 2.0 release and is expected to move to OpenGL ES 2.1 in the near future.

The updated OpenGL release includes enhanced shaders, better texture support, and 64-bit double-precision floating point operations, amongh other features. It offers support for backwards compatibility with existing OpenGL code."AMD sees the release of OpenGL 4.0 as another major accomplishment for the OpenGL ARB," said Ben Bar-Haim, vice president of design engineering at AMD, in a press release statement.

An OpenGL 3.3 specification has been released simultaneously with the 4.0 spec, "to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous generation GPU hardware".

"What kinds of games do you like?" Adam "Atomic" Saltsman asked of his panel audience at the Canabalt postmortem during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Role-playing" was yelled out, as was "puzzler," and eventually Saltsman picked "platformer" as the genre. Without another word, he quietly went to work on a laptop. Then, his partner at Semi Secret Software, Eric Johnson, took the podium to tell us all about what it was like to make one of the App Store's most popular games.

He started by saying that the game was originally developed in just "five very long days," and was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project and based around simplicity -- it only uses six colors and, obviously, the one button. For a game that's so simple, it actually had a lot of complex influences. It drew from older games, like Another World and Flashback, as well as modern works, like Half-Life 2 and District 9.