GamePro at GDC: What we learned today
- March 09, 2010 20:31 PM PST
Panels and appointments at the Game Developers Conference are loaded with all kinds of information about video games. Some of it's social, some of it's technical, and a whole lot of it can go over the average gamer's head. GamePro breaks some of it down for you here.
The crowded Farmville panel.
AJ Glasser at Rapidly Developing FARMVILLE: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks:
This was a more technical panel, focusing on data storage and redundant server strategies. Even so, I think I've got a good grip on how Zynga conquered Facebook with a golden stragety: don't trust Facebook.Zynga knew early on that they had to have total redundancy on their data-storage so random server outages on Facebook's end wouldn't hurt them.
"If [players] lose their data, that's like a shelf moment for them," Lead Designer Amitt Mahajan said. "They're not going to play your game anymore."
Sounds to me like Zynga pulled this off by relying on cloud-based gaming instead of having dedicated servers. As Farmville grows, however -- recently passing the 32 million daily user mark -- the developer is increasingly dependent on Facebook. To stay ahead of Terms of Service changes and stuff like server outages, the company is getting creative about data storage and Farmville's editable XML code.
"Eventually we're going to have to shift off of [XML]," Mahajan said, "because we're going to have way too many items."
For now, though, Farmville's riding high on the speed train to putting out Farmville and keeping it running.
"Social games are a marathon, not a race," Mahajan said. Zynga is adapting its strategies to stick around for the long haul.
One of many crazy-long GDC lines.
Will Herring at Social Networks: The New Marketplace for Mobile Games:
Michael Powers, founder and CEO of iPhone arcade directory Mplayit, offered helpful advice to aspiring developers looking to spread the word about their mobile games. Leading the pack of tips was the indisputable value of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. What better venue to advertise your game than websites devoted solely to social networking? Powers said 7 out of 10 gamers go online at least once a day, and if they're on a site like Facebook or Twitter, chances are they aren't doing much in the first place -- what better time to find a new app to download or game to play? Powers also said 53% of app discovery is through online buzz or word-of-mouth, so the sooner you start tweeting, status-updating, and wall-posting about your game, the sooner people will start playing it.
If nothing else, I learned that there are limitless advantages to living in a wired world like ours. If you're looking to break out as the next social gaming superstar, understanding social technology can make all the difference in marketing your game.
John Davison at a meeting with Todd Eckert, the North America director for Eutechnyx:
He said "when people talk about movies nothing is ever as good as something in the past. The best movies ever are always spoken of in a way that implies that the best is behind us. With games it's completely different. Collectively gamers and game designers all believe wholeheartedly that the best is yet to come."Makes what we write about every day seem even more magical.
Patrick Shaw takes in a pair of social gaming panels--Building Virtual Worlds and The State of Social Gaming.
In a GDC session held earlier today, Sulka Haro, lead concept designer of social networking website Habbo Hotel, led a discussion on “what virtual worlds can learn from social games.” Habbo Hotel, which Haro described as a pixilated virtual world where teenagers can hang out and interact with others using their 8-bit avatar, has seen tremendous success and growth since its inception in 2000.
“One of the major ingredients for social games success is making the process of finding friends to connect with incredibly easy,”Haro said. “This is really important and all social game developers should be doing this. Other ingredients include enabling meaningful parallel play and solving any distribution problems that you have, which is a problem for many developers.”
In a GDC presentation on social games, Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith gave an overview of the current state of social gaming and discussed how developers can take full advantage of “what works and what doesn’t” when creating games for Facebook and other social game platforms. Facebook recently launched something called Facebook Connect, a set of APIs for developers to bring Facebook to any website, platform and mobile device, which Smith called a “game changer” for the social media giant. He cited Facebook Connect as one of the examples of how it’s a rapidly evolving platform. Smith later said that although developers have “experimented” with social games on Twitter, he believes “it is not a social game platform” and he doesn’t see this changing anytime in the near future either.
The iPhone and Xbox 360/PS3 models of the same soldier, side-by-side. Can you tell which is which?
Last, but not least, Dave Rudden took in a pair of sessions related to portable games--5TH Cell: From Mobile to Handheld & Beyond and Call of Duty: World at War Zombies - iPhone Postmortem
The title of Scribblenauts developer 5TH Cell's session seemed to hint at more info on the recently revealed sequel to last year's best DS game, but unfortunately, new details were scarce. The speech did, however, provide some great insight into the game's popularity, as Scribblenauts Producer Caleb Arseneaux revealed the game's toolset and methods of launching the title.
Arseneaux showed off the two primary tools that fueled Scribblenauts. The first was "Tileforge," a tool that started as a map creation system in previous 5TH Cell titles, but has now evolved into a tool that can aid AI scripting. More impressive looking was "Objectnaut," the tool that allowed the developers to set the unique properties for every one of the tens of thousands of objects in Scribblenauts. Of course, we got to see a picture of Cthulu created within the Objecnaut.
Both of these tools were central into making Scribblenauts different than most new IPs, which led to Arseneaux talking about the secret to the game's success. Innovation, he argued needs to be marketable to the masses to turn a good idea into a successful IP. "You have to make it so people will talk about it." said Arseneaux.
In the next session, Russel Clarke, the Head of Engineering at Ideaworks Game Studios reflected on the creation of the successful Call of Duty: World at War- Zombies iPhone app. Clarke detailed the myriad control methods and the challenge of simplifying a system that usually uses two thumbsticks, a d-pad and 10 buttons onto a platform that only has an accelerometer and a dual-touch screen. While the company did find a variety of workarounds, Clarke got a few chuckles from the crowd when he admitted "No matter how good you think you've one, there's always going to be someone who absolutely hates it.
In light of piracy and DRM issues that have popped up in the industry as of late, Clarke had a positively heartwarming tale of an anti-piracy method that popped up amongst the iPhone Zombie players. Clarke noticed that many players with hacked versions of the game had posted queries on message boards regarding bugs in the game, to which legal owners replied that they needed to purchase the newly-updated legitimate version that "didn't have those bugs." While the pirates would often be in for a rude awakening after discovering that certain bugs were still in the game, it's nice to see a game that inspires its players to enforce piracy measures. I'll take that over faulty servers any day.
Look for more tomorrow as GamePro continues its GDC odyssey.
