It worked out very well. Every talk exceeded my expectations, and all of the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been very positive. The organizers did a great job in making sure everyone had a great time, and the mood during the conference was very good.

I either had no time or no Internet connection, or I would have tweeted my head off. But the upside is that I now have a very good reason to blow the dust off of my blog and write something longer than 140 characters.

Here are my impressions of the talks at GFG 2010:

Industry legend RJ Mical opened the conference with a look at the history of video game hardware and how hardware has affected the games we play and vice versa. RJ worked on the Commodore Amiga, a home computer which was very popular in Germany in the 80s and 90s. This, together with a rumor that RJ would reveal juicy details about the PlayStation 4, meant the room was packed. RJ is an incredibly charismatic person and his talk was great. (This page gives you an impression of his personality.)

RJ was followed by Raphael Lacoste, an incredibly talented artist, who explained in detail how he approached the art direction of Assassin’s Creed. He showed the paintings that had inspired him, including many by Caspar David Friedrich, then analyzed various shots from Assassin’s Creed to show how he had used contrast, silhouettes, filters and other techniques to create the game’s look.

Jason Gregory from Naughty Dog (author of Game Engine Architecture) explained how to set up game loops in AAA console games (especially in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, of course) so that they run efficiently on multiple processors. He succeeded in making this somewhat esoteric subject accessible, even to non-programmers. And he discussed the Uncharted 2′s awesome train level in great detail.

Risa Cohen, Jane Corden and Térence Mosca held a very slick presentation about the business side of games, talking in depth about the marketing of digitally distributed games and the use of completion bonding in games. This was followed by a panel discussion (moderated by myself), where we were joined by Mary Matthews from Blitz Games Studios and Stefan Weyl from Namco Bandai Partners. We touched on a lot of (perhaps too much) interesting subjects, ranging from marketing to finance to new platforms.

Steve Ince closed the first day by giving an inspiring talk about aspects of characters in games.

On the second day, Darius Kazemi presented a structured approach for convincing people (going back to Aristotle!) and how you can mine data at work to support your arguments. The room was not that full, but that was due to the excellent party the night before, and not because of Darius’ talk. (Darius also transcribed RJ’s talk here.)

Jeff Lander described in detail what it takes to develop very high quality character animation systems, where the pitfalls are, and where middleware will let you down. Like Jason Gregory, he did an excellent job of presenting a very complex topic so that it was accessible even to people unfamiliar with the subject.

Chris Foster from Harmonix Music Systems gave a very inspiring talk about collaboration and how it is central to game design, giving concrete examples from the development of The Beatles: Rock Band.

Matias Myllyrinne from Remedy talked about their company philosophy and how they use playtests and usability tests. He also showed us footage from Alan Wake, including some clips that had never been shown before.

Finally, Thomas Bidaux from ICO Partners talked about the state of the free to play games market in Europe. He seemed a bit worried that page after page of business statistics would bore his audience of mostly developers and students, but he did a great job of conveying what makes these games interesting, and how big they are, especially in Germany.

(Videos from all the sessions will be put online soon. You can see videos from previous years here. There’s a little German here and there, but the talks are all in English.)

I had a great time. The conference was not too big, the people were nice, the food was good, the party was great, the lectures rocked, I met old friends and made new ones, and I had lots of time to chat with other developers, which is one of my favorite things to do in the games industry. This time I had the additional pleasure of sharing the experience with my wonderful fiancée. It was her first time at a development conference. She wrote about her impressions here.

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/////// SOVIET UNTERZOEGERSDORF
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///// SECTOR II
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/// The Adventure Game
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/

An adventure marches on!

/
//
/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
//
/

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (pronounced «oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf») is the last existing client republic of the USSR. The soviet enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called “Republic of Austria” or with the capitalist fortress “European Union”. The downfall of the people’s motherland — the Soviet Union — in the early 1990s had a devastating effect on the country’s intra-economic situation. External reactionary forces threatened the last remaining proletarian paradise.
Party secretary Wladislav Gomulka has been kidnapped and is being held in US-Oberzoegersdorf. We must save comrade Gomulka! Because communism isn’t an opinion. It’s a promise.

/
// Special Non Player Guest Characters:
/ Jello Biafra, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Emmanuel Goldstein, Mitch Altman, Bre Pettis, David ‘DaddyD’ Dempsey, Kyle Machulis, MC Frontalot, Eddie Codel, Irina Slutsky, Christian ‘plomlompom’ Heller, Jason Scott Sadofsky, Hans Bernhard, Robert Stachel (maschek) — and many more.

/
// Voice Acting by:
/ Jevgeni Beliaikin, Sergey Teterin, Mikhail A. Crest, Daria Prawda, Bre Pettis — and many more.

/
// Soundtrack features:
/ The Fat Man/George Alistair Sanger, Q-Burns Abstract Message, Zoe Keating, Neil Landstrumm, Jonathan Mann aka GameJew, Blockwerk, The Extra Action Marching Band, The Lazy, antivolk – Torsun feat. classless Kulla, Jan Klesse & Felix Knoke (left), Savant Trigger, Rioteer, MC Orgelmueller, Magic Jordan, Schaua, Horace, The Vladivostoks, Limpopo, Eric Skiff, Prometheus X, Kertal (feat. sunsetfactory), Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot, Farmer’s Market, Attention, Cosmonauts!, Woodn Earf, Trishes, Krach the Robot, Prosperity Denied, Arteom Denissov, Dan Oberbauer aka DJ Chronos, LFO DEMON — and more.

/
// Operating systems:
/ Available for Windows, Linux and OSX! And many thanks to the fabulous comrades at CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com) for Linux/OSX versions. And also bloshevik geetings to the folks at Silver Server (http://www.sil.at) for bandwith sponsoring.

/
//
/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
//
/

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// For IBM PC and Non-Compatible
///
//// A true tour-de-red-force
/////
////// Russian with English or German subtitles
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//// Appealing graphical game interface
///
// Creative Commons License
/

Other projects:

http://monochrom.at/english

Two of the projects they have been working on have recently been announced: Cursed Mountain, a survival horror game for the Wii set in Tibet, and Ride To Hell, a free-roaming action game for next-gen consoles and PC, set on the US West Coast in the 60s.

As Deep Silver Vienna uses a development model that’s heavily based on outsourcing, they are much smaller than in the Rockstar Vienna days. It will be interesting to see how well these projects do: there are very few console games being made in German-speaking countries, let alone in Austria.

The big question for a lot of people in the German-speaking industry will be: What took them so long? They kept buying studios and not releasing games. My impression is that they were way better at financial wizardry than at producing games.

When I was discussing doing work for them I mentioned my doubts about public companies buying lots of studios. The guy I talked to said: “Maybe it reminds you of JoWooD?” and I said: “No… Phenomedia” (which still exists, wow).

Anyway, luck and strength to all the people trying to make good games there.

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!

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.

• 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.