GDC Blog

Steve Fowler presenting.

• TEsting Skills
  • Testing Methodoglogies
  • Test Case writing
  • Test Plan Structure
  • System Knowledge (platform, network, client/server, compliance)
• Soft Skills
  • Communication (bug/issue reporting)
  • Integrity
  • Team dynamics
  • Tenacity and Curiosity
  • Creativity
  • Results Driven

Over Testing

• A Matrix of hardware and software could increase complexity
  • Extreme corner cases
  • Regression test complexity
  • Schedule and budget risk
• Need a balance plan - ROI

Under Testing

• Poor product goals or requirements could lower quality
  • Insufficent planning
    • Low/Poor testing skills

Test Automation

• When and where it make the most sens
  • Make it part of the spec and requirements
  • Early in the development cycle
  • Static vs. Dynamic Testing
• Ask the questions
  • Test redundant
  • Repeatable
• Why
  • Can improve test coverage, metrics, and measurement of quality
  • Can increase depth and quality of testing
  • Increase confidence in final products

So I spent some time just checking some of the stuff at GDC out this afternoon.  I got to check out Epic and Unreal Engine 3.  It is really impressive what they have crammed into that tool.  Matinee their cinematics tools was crazy powerful, as was their visual scripting engine Kismet.  Just shows lots of flexiblity from the brief part that I saw.  Probably the most impressive was their post processing effects.  Just by some clicks they can make a map go from day to night just by changing some of the color lighting values.  Other neat effects like FOV, depth of field, and color correction are all in there as well, editable in realtime.

Also took a quick peak at CryEngine2, which had some really impressive things going on as well.  I actually need to spend some more time with it before giving some real impressions.

I have been meeting all types of people from all over the world and it is great.  Tonight is the Suite Night as well as the XNA party.  Should be fun.  They need a massage station at GDC, my back is killing me...

So the room is packed, the first 30 or so rows are all reserved for more important people, so I am right after that.  It is nice I can stretch my legs.  There is wifi, but it is being hammered and it is pretty much dead.  >sad<

Starting way late...

Myamoto is using the Wii Photo Channel to do the presentation, where he showed off his peersonal garden.  He is showing how games have changed over the last couple years and how gamers are slowly becoming drones and the reputation of the indistry is going down.  The fear of always making the game game over and over again and is how does that fit into his personal vision as well as Nintendo's vision.

The Nintendo corp vision includes, Expanded Audience.  His meter of expanding the audience is the 'Wife-o-Meter'.  He is explaining how his wife wasn't interested in Super Mario or Pac-Man.  One day his daughter was playing Zelda 64, and his daughter and his wife would watch the daughter play, but wouldn't play the game.  At this point Myamoto thought, I can get her to play a game.  So he takes home Animal Crossing and explains there is nothing to kill, and his wife would actually touch the controller and she would cut down trees and send letters to their kids.  He is showing off his personal dog and how training this dog inspired him to create Nintendogs.  It totally changed with BrainAge, where his wife used games as a daily thing.  She gets so good that she brags that she can beat him anytime in Brain-Age or WiiSports.  And she does.  She likes to make Miis of family and friends.  Second Vision, is staying a game company and not to be distracted by other businesses.  Having a balance is important and working as a team.  Even though that he helped create every controller in Nintendo's history, but all were worked on by a whole team.  with the Wii controller there were multiple camps who all wanted different things.  One wanted a swing, one wanted the ablity to keep playing old games, and another (Zelda team) wanted specific things.  And they all worked together and compromized and collabroation between each team with a balnce of software and hardware.  The Wii remote is doing things that he has dreamed of for years.  Corp vision three is Risk.  Yamaguchi says ok to take risk, which is really just a challenge.  Games risk include Nintendogs and Brian-Age, and the primary goal is to make it fun.  The Wii was the biggest challenge.  With the Wii it was a difficult decision to move away from the standard control scheme of holding a controller with two hands.  Myamoto had to go around to convince people not to think of what we are losing, but what we are gaining.  This was lots of talks with producer a Yamata.  It wasn't until E3 that they knew they had done something right.

Peraonsl vision.  Always thinking of fun, and thinking of the player face while they are playing.  What feelings will they have when they play the game.  Shows some videos of people playing DS for the first time ever.  Where everyone is happy and interested in the game, not because of how the graphics or anything, but the game exudes fun.  We make a common mistake in that we as developers know too much about the game and not from the perspective of the game player.  Games like WiiSports or WiiPlay are able to attract people who aren't gamers to participate, and that reviewers should have a new score based on if non-gamers would play the game.

Super Mario Galaxy video.  End.

Yeah!!!

Sadly my battery died during the Alan Wake session today and I never had a chance to recharge my laptop before then.  I need to manage my power a little better tomorrow.  Today was a pretty good day, got to meet lots of people from 1up, Denis from Silicon Knights, as well as some other people.  It was a very long day and my feet hurt.  I crashed some parties, but I wasn't in a party mood.  Tomorrow should be interesting with the CliffyB talk as well as some other interesting ones.

Lasse Seppanen, the production lead for Alan Wake is presenting about the team and the tools.

• Remedy Entertainment
  • Independent studio founded in 1995
  • 31 employees in Helsinki, Finland
  • Death Rally, Max Payne, and Max Payne 2
  • Max Payne IP now owned by Take 2
• Alan Wake
  • Remedy own the IP
  • Published by MS
  • For Xbox 360 and PC
• Ambitious Project Goals > Strategy
• Understanding the Team
• In-house Content Creation
• Outsourcing & Middleware
• Project Managment Tools
• The Future

Remedy doesn't want to ship a game until they are comforatble that the game will score higher then 90+.

In the order of priority, making a great game is number one, while time is second because they dont want to work on something forever, and cost is last.  This allows them to buy into making their game.  Board of Directors at Remedy are very inolved and the game reports to the board.

• Game Design (5 +1 TBH)
  • Story Design
  • Creative Director
  • Gameplay Designers
• Visual Arts (11)
  • 3D modeling & Animation
  • Evniorment Art
  • Technical Art
  • Sound & Music
• Programming (9)
  • Game
  • Tools (2 Full time)
• Project Managment (2)
• Business + Legal + Finances + Office (2)
• IT Support (2)

Small & Agile Approach

• Few open jobs
  • Pick the ultimate best applicants
  • Sometimes having multiple heads leads you to find people to fill the slot so you don't lose the head, and not finding someone that will fit into the role you really want.
  • Critial mass of talent
    • Meeting every monday at 10 am with the entire staff
• A small, agile team can turn on a dime and pursue whatever makes the most sense for a great game
• Every team member is focused on shipping a masterpiece
• No politices, no egos, no empire building, no nonsense

We stay small and optimze team and process.

Made a decision early that mutliplayer did not fit the needs of the game or the team making it.

99% of everything being done is withing a single tool.  The entire world is loaded, and parts of the level can be checked out and worked on, while the rest is locked.  Parts can also be worked on in parellel as well as differnet deptarments.  Someone can be working on geometry and another can be working on gameplay.

• Outsourcing & Middleware
  • The industry is changing to a disrubuted model
  • Mature middleware providers like Havok
  • Remedy welcomes the change
    • We are experts in defining what the game is and how everything works together to make a great game
    • 1 car was made interlaly, while every other ones were outsurced and the outsource quality was higher.
    • With the staff being so senior, keeping those senior/experts modivated by challenging them is key.
  • Oucsourcing allows us to focus on the game

Project Managment Intranet

They use JIRA and Confluence.

• Project Timeline
• Goals
  • Quarter
  • Month
• Every Friday, PM Team sets the priorities for the coming week.
  • "steering wheel"

With a staff of senior people, you can provide more high level goals and allow the senior staff to decided how they want to do it.  Where you would have more hand holding with junior members.

this sessions is with Jerry O'Flaherty, the art directory at Epic Games. 

• Making/Faking film lookin in-game, orhow i use what I learned in fiilm school every day at work.
• f-stops to blooming.  knowing what causes effects in film will help crecreate them propertly.

How many people go into a performance.

1. Voice Actor
2. Facial Acting
3. Body Mocap
4. Writers
5. Animators
6. Modelers
7. Skinners

Why do we care?  Technique aside keeping the viewer interested and entertained is key.  the Story has to be rock solid or all of this stuff doesn't matter.

Life cycle of a cut scene

From the page:

Beyond talking head.  There's nothing woring with talking heads but...  Doesn't like having characters just talking for talking, and with Gears they made a point to keep things interesting with the game.Game cinematics are often the exposition between the action.  they are meant to inform the player but can easily become scenes the character stahdning.

They show off a demo of a mocap session with the end product but also having a mocap node on the hand help camera, to give it a much more natural look and feel.

Blocking out the scenes.  Having long cinematics need something to keep them interesting, either in the camera movement or change of location.

Gears didn't do any storyboards at all.  Jerry looked at more like a flim, and just had an idea and blocked out the acting in mocap.  In mocap, Jerry would speak all the lines and allow the mocap actors to deal with just their body movement.

Directing the scene.  40% camera captured and the rest being hand keyed.

User has total control over post processing of the camera.  So DOF, saturation, bloom, motion blur, exposure, and others.

I am here at the Sony keynote without wifi access, so no liveblog, so I will be just writing things down and submiting when I get back to the West Hall.

So they have these large soccer balls like you see in stadiums with goals on each side of the room.  I don't think anyone really knows what is going on with these soccer balls, but people seem to be enjoying it.  On the screens they have a score for each side side and Team B won, but a little unsure what Team B wins.

Some guy from GDC is talking about how cool and smart of a guy Phil Harrison is.  blah blah blah.

Phil has started talking, and going to theme his sessions Game 3.0, which ahigh focus on player content and you (the gamer).  Phil is using a PS3 as his presentation tool, he has a controller in his hand using it like powerpoing.  He is talking about Web 2.0 and moving that into games.  Game 1.0 static disconnected console.  Game 2.0, using static game content but connected device.  Web 3.0 is powered by active communities connected through the internet.  Content powered by the audience.  Announcing home, which launches this year.  home icon added to the cross bar.  Phil Hands off to some other guy.

So they appear they are having problems with the input feeds, and the input is rotated.  So they finally got it running.  and we get EULA, just like the user.  home has a very real look and characters, along the lines of The Sims, but even more real.  Phil is talking about how your avatar can change via what you wear and buy new clothes via the Playstation Store.  Dynamic advertizing banners within home and streaming video within the home world.  The interface looks very similar to Phantasy Star Online areas.  Within the world, you can play all types of games such as pool and bowling, as well as walk up to arcade machines and play them.  Within home you have your own apartment, which you can customize in any form you wish.  It looks very similar to the 2k rooms.  You can download new items that coule tierh be free or cacn be bought in the Playstation Store.  You can hang pictures, and any content that is on your PS3 hard drive can be displayed within the picture frame and players who visit your apartment can see those photos.  You can also place a television in your apartment and select any video on your hard drive and that video is streamed to to anyone who visits your apartment.  As well as personal locations they have themeed and sponsored locations such as a movie theatre where you can view all the latest trailers or possiblity full movies.  While watching these movies or listenting to audio you can continue to chat with others in the same room you are in.  Developers will have access to build their own themed areas using game assets.  Phil said that the tools will be provided and the worlds can be made within maya.  As well as your personal space, you will have your trophy room, which are achievements for games.  These trophies can be 3D models, 2D billboard, or even video.  Home will be free and launches beta April 2007 and lauches retail Fall 2007.

Phil is now talking about Singstar.  It really looks like something like myspace karaoke.  You can see other friends and what they are singing as well as buy new songs.  You can share your recorded audio and video, which those can be ranked, voted, and commented on.  Singstar is coming out in PAL in May/June and later this year for the US.

Playstation EDGE announcement.  How this will help making PS3 games.  GCM Replay which is a powerful RSX profiling tool, and SPU geometry processing, animation, and compression.

LittleBigPlanet is announced.  The game is being developed by the Ragdoll KungFu team,  You have this avatar and can use the sticks to move hands and the siaxis to move his head.  You can add objects which all have physics.  You can place any image on your hard drive and place them on surfaces as 'stickers'.  Long demo of a level created with the actual game tools, and after you create a level you can share it online with friends via the Playstation Network.  The demo level was extremely impressive.  Has a very strong Nitnendo feel.

So I was worries about the Warren Spector session being packed, so I decied to check out this audio session.  This session goes into the difficulty of managing a game with a great deal of v/o workflow.  The session has Greg deBeer from Sony Computer Entertainment, Ken Kato from Microsoft Game Studios, and Tom Hays and Rafel Lopez from a recording studio.

Sony has built a tool call LAMBS (could be wrong), which was developed by SCEE Cambridge.  It was built to allow for smooth audio localization on large scale projects.  Main focus of what Greg will talk about is script managment.  First draft of the tool worked with Word and Final Draft, and as well as using Excel because people seem to know it.  They are currently moving to basing the system to XML which would allow for a much more extensive oppertunties.  Once you have your script in Word or Excel, finding a way to build a class or bucket system that can be tagged in the XML output.  Such as mission 1 gets a tag of 'Mission 1' which would also allow you to search for very detailed information and build out readings or what has and has not been recorded yet.  As well as the XML is the naming convention, so something like a character named Jack who has a line in mission 1, would be JA_mission1_<idenfiier>.***, this allows for easy find as well as cuts down on duplicates.  Version control is a large pain, and one thing is to move the audio outside of the game tree in its own depot, and audio is just passed over in larger chunks.  This is still being figured out.  One thing that they have tried is using Text to Speech to place temporary audio in the game for timing and just overall fell and have the ablity to track these assets and replace them.

Ken Kato starts talking about the team they have developed interally within MGS Publishing called Gamma.  Gamma is a web based database system, the assets are protected by two firewalls that are 128bit encryption for security purposes.  Scripts are built in Excel and imported into Gamma.  The internet connection is really slow, so the demo is kinda falling apart.  The script finds a character and you can click on that character and it will list all the lines.  Metadata on the each line is stored in a database and things such as who someone is talking to and the tone they need to speak in.  Once audio is recorded, the line will become a link and you can just click on it to hear it.  Files are only named with numbers, which is generated from the line in the script.  This cuts down on the possiblities of human error.  Outside of the filename, it has a subname for outsakes, so 0001_out1.*** would be an outake for line 0001, where 0001 is the current approved version of the audio.

Tom is showing off his way of managing lines.  He has built around Excel and using batch file magic for renaming.  Using Excel and placing DOS commands within the actual fields and then export and running the newly created batch file to create file structures for locations.  It seems to work, but fairly convoluted.

First session of the day was Interactive Cinematography with Thiery Adam of Ubisoft.  The presentation provided insight on changing the way we as game developers view cinematography and not to be locked into what film is doing because we can make it interactive and we should think of it as user cinematography.  He provided a couple of examples on how certain games frame shots and change the camera for better or worse.  One example that I found interesting was framing shots in first person view.  Using Farcry as his example, he showed how the player starts in a very closed enviroment and goes through a single door and then is exposed to the lush jungle that the game would be known for.  This is a space and time in the game where the level design was able to direct exactly where the player would be looking and it comes off very sucessful as that is a great moment in the game.  I am writing this from memory because the GDC bag didn't come with a pen and I am trying to save battery for the keynote which starts in 30 minutes.