And Yet It Moves is an independent game made by four students at the Technical University in Vienna. Um, and yes, it was made over a year ago, don’t know why I didn’t blog about it before…
It has a great look:
Great use of production restrictions. Gameplay is interesting, but I feel the level design could be better (that’s code for: I couldn’t beat the game within 10 minutes :P). It even runs on a Mac!
There will be a Monkey Island Revival party in Vienna on February 23rd. It’s being organized by Martin Kremecek, game designer at 10tacle Vienna, with the help of many people from the Viennese game development scene. They’re putting a lot of work into this - everything short of flying over Ron Gilbert. See you there!
This 10tacle press release, which starts off:
10TACLE STUDIOS AG acquired 29 % stake in CLIMAX Group
Darmstadt, August 6th, 2007 – 10TACLE STUDIOS AG and the British developer CLIMAX Group Ltd. have entered into a strategic partnership to jointly develop computer and video games in specific genres. With this agreement 10TACLE STUDIOS AG has decided as well to acquire within the coming weeks a 29% stake in Climax Group ordinary shares.
led people to believe 10tacle was, well, acquiring a 29 per cent stake in Climax. And reasonably so: I sure thought that was what was happening.
It turns out this is not the case according to Karl Jeffrey, Climax’s boss:
“The 29 per cent rumour was all based on as press release 10tacle did earlier in the year which was factually wrong and not approved by Climax,” said Jeffrey.
“I own 100 per cent of Climax, I have not sold or agreed to sell a single share to 10tacle or anyone else,” he stated.
Well, that sounds like an amusing misunderstanding. I wonder what happened there.
“Hey Jurie,” I hear you ask, “didn’t you say you were doing some work for 10tacle?”
Yes I am. But I am actually very far removed from corporate HQ where this kind of stuff gets decided, so this was news to me.
Here are my impressions of the talks I saw at Game Focus Germany:
Greg Costikyan, “The Independent Developer Shall Rise Again”.
I could not have asked for a better keynote. My secret theme for the conference was “Thinking outside of the box of the core games industry”, i.e. outside of multi-million PC / console projects developed for publishers, a topic I find particularly interesting for the German industry. Greg covered pretty much every way you can make games without dealing with publishers, and tied it all together into a coherent whole. You can download the slides here and read his detailed thoughts on the English talks at GFG here.
Jonathan Blow, “Programming is easy, Production is harder, Design is hardest”.
And once people were open to the idea that maybe they didn’t need to work with publishers, there was Jon Blow to ask them why they were making games at all. He read Molley Rocket’s mission statement in its entirety, and got applause.
Ironically, Jon asked the same question that Bruce McMillan, former executive VP at EA asked at GDC in 2003: What is worth spending 3 precious years of your life on? Only Mr. McMillan asked whether you’d want to work on something that sells less than a million copies, while Jon asked whether it is worth spending 3 years coding (and dealing with Microsoft’s certification team), rather than, say, feeding starving kids in Africa.
Every conference needs an inspiring talk reminding people why they are in this business, and this was it. And yes, the title made total sense in the context of the talk. (Slides and audio can be found here.)
Stéphane Bura, “Inside-Out Game Design”.
Stéphane blew people’s minds with a Will-Wright-grade talk on design theory. I need to chew on the slides (all 200+) for a bit - I may also need to read a dozen books - before I can really comment on the theory, but I applaud him for thinking very big. Also, kudos for being able to answer every question with another 10 slides, and having a great answer to the question “How do I use this when I go back to my project tomorrow?” (His answer was: “Please wait 25 years,” but he made it sound convincing.)
Risa Cohen, “Zen and the Art of Production Maintenance”.
Risa described the things she looks at when auditing game projects and, being who she is, made the process sound like a nice long hug. Very interesting because it was very much from the core of the traditional games industry.
Noel Llopis, “Pragmatic game development practices for small (and not so small) companies”.
Noel explained why you need to be pragmatic when picking your working methods and used the example of his current two man company, Power Of Two Games (I forgot to ask him what they plan to do when they hire a third person). I recognized a lot from the internet development I did last summer (which I should really blog about). Hopefully it made people in the audience question some of their assumptions about which tools and practices they use.
Doug Church, “Player Expression: Central to Gaming”.
In this great talk Doug went back to the core of interactive entertainment and talked about how we should give players more means to express themselves. I totally agree with him, and this is something I want to explore in more detail in a future blog post. (Greg’s write-up of Doug’s talk explains why: I love the concept, but I disagree with the term player expression.)
Mike McShaffry, “The Third Person Camera For Thief: Deadly Shadows”.
I know Mike as an experienced game programmer, but he is actually more involved in production these days. And when I say ‘these days’ I mean ‘the last eight years’. Still, he gave a super-detailed presentation about the third person camera in Thief: Deadly Shadows, full of videos and diagrams. Third-person cameras are notoriously tricky and it was great to see it explained so clearly.
His slides are here, and here is what Mike thought of being in Germany for the first time. (I am afraid it will be hard to find a company like Arkane there.)
Kevin McGinnis, “MetaRock! The Creation of Interface Art in Rock Band”.
Kevin had the talk with the best graphics, but well, that’s his job. He gave an in-depth look at the user interface graphics of Rock Band. I couldn’t watch all of it as Thad’s talk was on at the same time, but I now know that making good head-up displays take a long time and that Rock Band is taking wayyy too long to be released here in Europe.
Robin Hunicke, “Collaboration FTW: What Game Studios and Game Studies can Learn from each other”.
Robin’s talk presented the history of academia-industry relations from 1995 till now, from her experience as an AI researcher who is now designing and producing at EA. It came from a very different point of view which I hope broadened some horizons about what game development is about.
Stéphane Adamiak, “Core Casual Gaming : how soccer moms came to play RTS games”.
Stéphane presented an overview of the casual games market, including casual MMOs, virtual worlds and widgets, from the point of view of Goa, France Telecom’s online gaming arm. He also won the prize for working for the biggest company: France Telecom’s 200.000 people makes EA look like a startup.
Thaddaeus Frogley, “Inside the Unreal Networking Model”.
Thad gave a detailed talk about how the Unreal engine handles networking. Ironically, it appears few people in Germany use the Unreal engine. Even though I only saw half of it, I came out with a clearer understanding of how to do real-time synchronization in games. I particularly liked the communication patterns he presented.
Matt Miles Griffiths, “Tell me another one: Why the importance of story-telling in games is over-stated”.
I was only able to catch half of Matt’s talk. I actually disagreed much less than I thought I might: Matt presented an idea somewhat similar to Chris Crawford’s process intensity versus data intensity, and he had the sales numbers to back up why process intensity is better.
Erik Simon and Oliver Staude-Müller, “Kooperation statt Kleinkrieg: Gute Beziehungen zwischen Publisher und Entwickler als Grundlage zum Projekterfolg am Beispiel von Anno 1701″.
Yes, that talk was in German. Oliver was the project manager on Anno 1701, which was one of the few AAA games to be developed in Germany recently (OK, I guess Crysis counts). Erik was the head of development at Sunflowers, the publisher. They described in detail how the developer-publisher relationship they built allowed them to finish a big title on time and under budget. They made it sound easy, but it is amazing that they were able to work this way.
And that’s it! All in all I am incredibly pleased with how it all turned out. I got to schmooze and listen to great talks, and everyone seemed happy about the results.
This post will be updated as more slides become available, and I will write an additional post or two about some other aspects of the conference.
Update 1: Added a link to the slides and audio of Jon’s talk.
I am back from Hannover. It was very cool. More later: I need to decompress / recover sleep / deal with my cold.
So now I can say what that milestone I mentioned earlier was: The conference schedule for Game Focus Germany 2008 in Hannover had finally been locked down. GFG is a conference for German developers and publishers, now in its second year. I got the job of finding international speakers through ML Enterprises, so since late October I have been trying to get interesting people to come and give a talk this year. And I think it worked out well! I am very excited about the line-up. Greg Costikyan, Noel Llopis, Stéphane Adamiak, Robin Hunicke, Mike McShaffry, Jonathan Blow, Doug Church, Stéphane Bura, Erik Simon, Thaddaeus Frogley and many others are coming. The hardest thing will be to choose which session to go too… (Well, and dealing with this cold I suddenly developed last Saturday. Curses!)
Clint Hocking wrote a blog post about the number of developers in Montreal, and several people have commented with info about other geographical areas.
My guess is there’s between 100 and 200 professional game developers in Vienna, if not all of Austria - I only know of a handful of companies outside of Vienna.
In Germany, I expect the biggest areas to be Frankfurt, Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet. Maybe Hannover, Hamburg (which has a surprising amount of publisher offices though) and Munich. But I have not kept a close eye on the German industry for a long time, so I may be off.
Gareth White, a programmer who worked on Manhunt 2 at Rockstar Vienna, also has something to say on the situation. Among other things, he points out that some files on the disk contain the names of people from Rockstar Vienna.
I haven’t played the released version myself, but it sounds like it’s virtually identical to the PS2 & Xbox version we finished back in summer 2006, apart from the edits needed to comply with the ESRB, obviously.
From what I hear the people at Rockstar London worked very hard, and I know that they did more than just censor the game. I am sure they deserve their credits. My point is: so did we.
Yesterday, Rockstar Games released Manhunt 2 for Sony PlayStation 2, Sony PSP and Nintendo Wii. This blog post is not about the difficulties Take Two had getting this game on the market. I merely intend to correct an inaccuracy in the game’s credits, namely the over 55 missing Rockstar Vienna employees who worked on the game from January 2004 until the studio was closed down on May 11th 2006.
To the best of my knowledge, apart from the people who briefly went to Rockstar London to assist with development there, nobody from Rockstar Vienna is mentioned in the credits of Manhunt 2.
I have assembled the missing Rockstar Vienna credits to the best of my abilities. Over the course of 2.5 years various people joined and left the project. I have tried to list everyone under their primary position. One person asked during development that his name not appear in the credits: this request has been honored here.
People from other Rockstar Games studios also worked on this title. Their names and positions can be found in the credits of the released game.
Here are the missing credits:
(more…)
After the WiiWare post a while back, more news about games made in Vienna.
It turns out the Flash game on the website of The Simpsons Movie (which I found pretty funny by the way (the movie, not the website)) was written by Root9, developers of local game phenomenon Yeti Sports. And in fact the Simpsons game is highly similar to the Yeti pinguin-bashing game.
Still, nice to hear some more game development news out of Vienna, and impressive that they got to make something for such a global website.
There’s an article (in German) about the game and the company in Der Standard, a big Austrian newspaper.
(Thanks Clemens!)
www.flickr.com
|
