I’m writing after a really long time. Approximately after a year.
Do people still read blogs? Not sure, but I’ll still write one!
It’s been a long year, lots of reasons to celebrate, and lots to think and ponder over.
The year began with a visit to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last year. This was my first time at GDC and it was a great experience being around creative talent from the gaming industry and learning from them. I came back to India feeling a lot more motivated to start working on good ideas.
One of my games won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for the ‘Best Use of Games and Simulations for Learning‘. Brandon Hall Awards are one the most prestigious awards in the field of learning, so winning a GOLD was quite exhilarating. The game that won an award is called ‘Develop Your Drug’ and it takes the player through an end to end development cycle of a new drug.
I became part of the NASSCOM Special Interest Group for Applied Games and got an opportunity to learn about some very interesting serious games and their best practices, specifically those from the Dutch Applied gaming industry. My shift from the commercial gaming industry to applied games enabled me to speak about my projects at the first NASSCOM SIG Applied Games meet-up at TCS.
I started developing games with Unity. It was long overdue since my focus till recently had be the Adobe Flash and AS3 platform. But the web just made Flash the bad guy, so Unity and HTML5 is what naturally came next!
Jordan was a destination I had been planning to visit since a long time. But the plans never transpired because I had my apprehensions about visiting a country whose geographic location is in the center of the Arab Spring chaos in the Middle East. But then in an instinctive moment, I went ahead and booked myself a trip last November, and thought I’d take each day as it comes. Turns out, it was one of my best decisions and the time spent in Jordan was indeed fantastic and memorable.
I spent lesser time online and sometimes never got online. But a digital detox always does good, right?
As the New Year is running in full swing now (a month has already gone by), I have no plans set for the rest of the year. But I do intend to write more, travel some more and build some great games.
While thinking about the week spent at the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), I can’t help but recall the immense learnings I had there. And learning was not all, there was a lot of inspiration to bring back home and start the new year building games using that inspiration.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality (VR) was one of the biggest draws this year. No one can say for certain whether this technology will thrive or cease to exist in the future. But at the moment, the VR experience is realistic and engaging, similar to living the game world created by the developer.
The great part of VR is that when it is combined with other hardware simulators, it gives VR a whole new dimension.
For example, the motion simulator along with the VR device from Nexperience brought about an awesome 6D experience.
And then there was Birdly that used VR with a mountable stand to explore sensory-motor, wind generator along with strong visual impact to create a fantastic flight simulation experience.
Unlimited Hands was another interesting technology that used VR along with a haptic game controller to help the player feel the objects in the gaming world. This controller used muscle sensor, 3D motion sensor and multi-channel electronic muscle stimulator to detect the users hand movements for responsive feedback.
Virtual Reality Games
The Virtual Reality devices were incomplete without the games. Some of my favorite games included –
The Climb powered by the CRYENGINE gave a thrilling experience of climbing a rock mountain. There were times where I missed on catching a grip on the rock, the experience of falling down the rock thereafter was terrifying.
Paranormal Activity, the game is built on the popular horror film franchise. As a player, you will see yourself inside a house at night time interacting with objects only to realize you are not alone. The game does a fabulous job of making you feel uneasy!
The Everest is a must try, especially if you love the Himalayas. The virtual experience of of climbing one of the highest and riskiest peaks of the world is just as terrifying!!
Alt. Ctrl
In today’s age of technological advancement and gaming gadgets, the alt.ctrl at GDC was quite a pleasant surprise. Alt.ctrl stands for alternative controllers and almost all the participants were entertaining with their ideas. Some of the ones I played and liked included –
Crank Tank powered by Aurdino used crank controllers to play a multiplayer arcade game.
Threadsteading is a two player strategy game using a modified quilting machine.
Palimpseste is a first person exploration game that makes use of Filtered Reality i.e. Using a mounted device to view the game through the independent RGB filters. When a color filter is changed, it can show the player areas of the game unseen through the earlier filter.
Augmented Reality
Image Metrics is a face and expression recognition technology. It can capture head movements and rotations, as well as extract face textures. It then uses this facial data to overlay it with graphics. I played around a little with their IOS app Turned which used this technology brilliantly to create zombies out of our faces.
On the subject of Augmented Reality, I must mention another AR technology – Magic Leap. Although I did not see this at GDC, there is so much I’ve heard and read about it.
It is said to be the most exciting thing in Augmented Reality right now. It’s basically a startup which is working on an augmented reality technology. It overlays digital 3D graphics onto your view of the real world via a headset with transparent lenses or smartglasses.
I’m looking forward to Magic Leap opening up to developers soon.
Development Engines
Unity is one of the most popular engines that developers use to make games. CRYENGINE, UNREAL, and Amazon Lumberyard are other interesting game development platforms.
Google had a large space of their booth dedicated to PROJECT TANGO. Project Tango is a technology from Google where it uses vision sensors on devices to move through the world just as humans do. It uses 3D motion tracking and depth sensing to understand position, orientation and depth of objects in the real world. For example you can measure your floor using the phone before you go carpet shopping. Or walk into a maze and use Tango to quickly give you its plan in 3D for you to escape out of it.
Overall GDC was a massive event. There was so much to do that the week was not enough. But the good part is, the inspiration that I drew from it, will be enough to make me keep reading, learning and experimenting more till the next GDC!
I would personally like to thank Blake Merriam and the GameDesignersNetwork to enable the scholarship and provide networking opportunities with game developers within India and outside.
If you too are interested in attending GDC 2017 next year with a scholarship from GDN, make sure you fill out the form and stay in the loop for the announcement.
The Nasscom GDC 2011 ended in Pune yesterday making it one of the well attended events in India. Since we don’t have many conferences like these happening here, it was great seeing this one unfold connecting the Indian gaming community on a single platform. It was also encouraging to see gaming now being accepted as an industry with students taking it up as a career option – something which did not exist some years back.
The 2 days of the event had back-to-back sessions covering various aspects of the state of the gaming industry, gaming platforms and technologies and sessions for budding entrepreneurs.
I was invited as a part of a panel discussion covering Flash vs Unity vs HTML5 and it was a fairly well attended session (we had 2 very competitive sessions running parallelly so a well attended session is a compliment!). It was great to see that most of the audience were into Flash development at some level and keen to know what the panel had to say about the three most spoken about technologies in the recent times. The panel came with their expertise and spoke about the strengths of the platform they specialized in.
HTML5 is a platform that Zynga believes will be the future with social games. They are already looking into it; their Words with Friends being a classic example of a successful HTML5 social game going cross platform.
Cha Yo Wo on the other hand felt that HTML5 has it’s disadvantages and is better suited for enterprise applications rather than game development, especially when getting it across multiple platforms. They had some good talk to share about their engine allowing easy porting of code across different mobile platforms.
Glu Mobile belives in Unity and had some good points to share about using the platform to develop freemium games.
I spoke about my experience of working with Flash on different platforms, specifically devices. My thoughts were that Flash developers have the advantage of taking their ideas to multiple mobile platforms through the Adobe AIR runtime, but that can come with some limitations. The native platform for devices offer more polished APIs than AIR thus giving it an edge over Adobe AIR. With the introduction of native extensions, Adobe AIR can open up better development options but that will only be known in time.
However having said that, HTML5 is an new standard for the web that developers can be excited about, especially since Apple has been talking about it for a very long time, Adobe is investing heavily in the tools, and companies like Zynga believe that they can push the envelope of online social gaming with it.
The consensus was that a developer should never be limited with an idea because a technology is known and comfortable to work with, instead choose tools and platforms that best help bring the idea to life.
I’ve been reading about the FITC Mobile Conference recently, and am glad to know that it is back in it’s second year in Toronto, Canada. The event is scheduled to be held between 16th-18th September this year.
FITC is slated as one of the only events covering all aspects of mobile content development, such as iPhone/iPad, Android, Flash 10.1, Windows Mobile, HTML5, Unity, Marketing, Usability, and other relevant topics in the mobile world.
The event will have a good mix of technical and non-technical topics as well related to marketing, funding, and other business aspects of mobile development. Besides presentations, the event will have pre-conference workshops, demonstrations, and panel discussions for those attending.
Currently FITC has an Early Bird offer on the conference and pre-conference workshop ticket prices.
They have also offered a further discount of $50 on any event ticket. Please message me if you want to attend this event and avail the discount, and I will send across the code.
