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Last week the Independent Game Conference was held in Austin, Texas. Last year I attended the same event and was able to get a lot out of some of the sessions so since I’m in Austin I made sure to attend the event this year as well. Once again several of the sessions were very informative and over the next week or so I’ll be transcribing my notes about them.

Sessions were held in two tracks, business and technology. I attended sessions of both tracks and will write my impressions on them soon. There was also a very interesting keynote by Richard Garriott on game design and research. The coolest part of the conference, however, was the game festival night where attendees can show off the games they’ve worked on and everyone can check it out. I was helping show Starport but I also checked out lots of cool games which I’ll probably be talking about here as well.

I attended the event last year as well, before I started this site, and I believe somewhere I have my notes from then so I’ll try to find them and write about some of those sessions as well because there were also some very good sessions last year. So stay tuned in the coming week or two I’ll post about the talks that were given and some of the games shown, I’ll update this post with links to them as I write them as well.

The internet is abuzz today with the announcement of the Google Phone open source platform called Android for cell phones. Here’s a description for the open handset alliance site

Android™ will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications.

Now I’ve done my share of time in the cell phone game development trenches and have a better understanding of why cell phone game development is a nightmare than I’d like to. Android, however, looks like it could solve many of the problems that plague cellphone game development today. Let me elaborate a bit on the problems with cell phone game development and how Android may fix these.

The Problems with Cell Phone Game Development

First, let me give you a rundown with what I see as the greatest problems with cell phone game development.

1) Nonstandard and Buggy Platforms

The first problem is the standardization of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) [I did most of my work on the Java side of cell phone game development but the Brew (C++) side faces many of the same issues]. Java was brought to cell phones with the intent of making this platform that is completely device independent where one could write their source code once and easily run it on devices from many different manufacturers without any changes. This ideal is fantastic and sounds great, the problem lies in the execution. Today the JVMs for the phones are still buggy in many serious places and each cell phone manufacturer makes their own JVM. Thus for every cell phone there are completely different bugs one must work around and the JVMs do not follow the Java standard very well at all thus source code must be modified conditionally for each set of devices one wants to distribute their game on.

2) Vast Differences in the Handsets the Their Resources

The second problem is the huge amount of differences in the various handsets available. I remember about a year ago I had what was advertised as a top of the line phone (a Sony Ericson s710a) it had a high resolution screen and lots of other nice gamer and multimedia features. When I got further into cell phone game development and actually looked up the amount of memory the phone had the results were laughable. It’s memory available was comparable to phones that were low end trash phones or those given out free years ago. This blew my mind. However, this isn’t a very uncommon problem in cell phones their hardware specs will generally make no sense. People owning that phone expect to be able to buy nice fancy new cell phone games, the phone however can barely count to 3 on it’s own without running out of memory.

More reasons this becomes a problem is the distribution method that cell phone companies use to get people on their networks. They offer really low end crappy phones (hardware wise) that are put into spiffy looking cases and marketed as nice devices. They give these phones out free or even pay you to take them with long 2 year contracts. 2 years is a huge amount of time when it comes to technology, especially technology that is innovating as fast as the cell phone market. What gadgets do you have that are over 2 years old? Furthermore since 80% of the people on any given providers network use these 2 year old low end pieces of junk if you want to make a nice new cell phone game you’re pretty much stuck catering to the low end otherwise you have so little a market and the cell phone providers don’t care enough to let you release your game. Which leads into the third problem.

3) The Pains of Distributing Games with the Major Cell Phone Networks

The third problem as I see it is distribution on the major networks. It can be very hard to get your game released onto the cell phone game market where you can actually sell the game. The phone networks like to control the content fairly tightly and if they don’t think you’re game is a good fit then they’ll shoot you down and won’t let you release the game. This makes cell phone game development especially troublesome for indies because this happens to even the major publishers for example I worked on a game for a major game publisher which was done over a year ago and I think still has not seen the light of day of the market. The networks also will require you make your game for the lower end handsets which means any fancy features or in depth gameplay you want to include will probably be cut unless you want to make multiple versions of the same game.

How the Google Phone Android System Solves These Problems

As you can see there are lots of problems with cell phone game development these days but it can still be a very lucrative market to explore and will only continue to rise in the future as more powerful phones reach the hands of the masses. The Google phone has potential to solve a lot of the problems of the industry lets see how.

1) Android Provides a Standard Platform that Many Manufacturers Plan to Adopt

Because Google intends to provide the operating system to many different manufacturers this could potentially mean that we finally get one single implementation of the JVM and no longer have to go through the nightmare of coding for all sorts of different bugs and “features” of each vendors JVM implementation. If Google does this right and the Android platform is widely adopted and deployed it could really be a new age of cell phone game and application development. The old hope of “right once, run anywhere” could become much closer to reality that before.

2) Android Could Create a Useful Set of Minimum Requirements

It’s not yet known precisely if the Android system will actually do this or not but it would be generally helpful if Google came up with some sort of minimum specifications for phones using the Android platform. For example it might state that there are tier 1 phones which have a certain speed of processor and amount of memory as a minumum (each phone may have more but would need this amount to be certified tier 1) then it could come up with other higher tiers of requirements giving the developers much clearer targets to develop for. This is more of an industry wide problem but something like this created by Google and adopted by the manufacturers who use Android could really go a long way. This would make many development nightmares disapear as development would become much more like developing for consoles (a few machines with a specified hardware specification) instead of the hundreds of devices each with different specs developers must consider these days.

3) Android Provides an Open Platform for Deployment

Google is promoting Android as a very open platform for anyone to develop on. They’re even releasing a SDK to the public in just a couple weeks from now. If done right this will provide a much more streamlined route to market for many developers and could make indie cell phone game projects much more of a reality. Developers could bypass the draconian system of having to run every application and game idea through the minds at the major phone networks (who generally aren’t game minded folks) which could breath new life into the possibilities for innovation within the cell phone game space. We could quickly go from lots of old arcade game ports and tired platformers to games that are really interesting and push the envelope of design. Also it could lead to much cheaper development on a whole which will also help indie developers who want to get into the cell phone game market. If done right this could make the cell phone much closer to the PC as a game platform and really open up the opportunities for cell phone game developers on a whole.

I’m Very Excited About Where The Cell Phone Game Industry Could Be Headed

Before this news about Android I had written off cell phone gaming as a tired and torturous industry to work in. Now, however, I have new hope that that industry can be reinvigorated and the best days could be ahead. If Google can do for cell phone development what it has done for the internet in the last few years we are certainly destined to see some great innovations come right to our pockets. Great and innovative games being just one benefit.

I just ran across this post by Nick Yee of the Daedalus Project about research he’s done on superstitions of MMO gamers. This is when groups of gamers have certain beliefs about how things work in a game even though they have no reason to believe (and even if the programmers have said) that these things don’t effect the game. I know I’ve run across a lot of these myself while playing online games and can even sympathize with some myself (though I don’t think I’ve ever really believed any of them.) Here’s one of my favorites.

My favorite rituals would probably be the various ’spawn dances’ in EQ. People were very superstitious about what caused mobs (NPCs) to respawn (moreso in the early days, but it did continue), and would concoct rituals–spawn dances–to encourage spawns. They varied wildly - some people had special gear sets they used, others had sets and sequences of movements and animations (via animated emotes, spellcasting, terrain), ways to move or not move (must stay sitting, still, as much as possible; or must move continually/every X seconds), etc. [WoW, M, 23]

It’s a very interesting look at B.F. Skinner psychology and the psychology of gamers and people in general. It’s also a highly entertaining read so I’d recommend you check it out.

Superstitions of Gamers

This morning I attended a talk given by Glen Van Datta, Director of Online Technology (SCE-RT) at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA). His presentation was to the GamePipe Lab at USC and was about MMOG Technology Strategies that they use at SCEA.

Keep in mind that SCEA and SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) are pretty much separate companies and SOE does most of the MMORPGs (Everquest et al) but SCEA does do a lot of multiplayer online games for the Playstation systems including some upcoming larger MMOGs like the PlayStation Home virtual world. Thus the talk was not just about strategies for large persistent worlds but also for smaller world instances you may find in a typical multiplayer game.

Lots of this stuff is fairly technical and focuses on networking technologies and such but it’s certainly useful to know for anyone developing multiplayer games. This post will mainly be an overview of what was talked about and thus an overview of technologies for MMO and multiplayer games. I intend to go into much more detail about certain things aspects in later posts when I start wading more into this stuff myself.

Also one thing that was particularly interesting that was mentioned was that through experience the industry has learned that if one person cheats in an MMO game or is even perceived to have cheated to gain an unfair advantage, the game is likely to lose 100 players because of this one person.

MMOG Technology Strategies

The first thing to consider is the architecture of your typical modern MMOG. There is a game server that holds the world state that all of the clients will connect to, there is also a lobby server that the clients will connect to as well that does the matchmaking for the game. Sometimes there is also a community server which basically is a web based aspect to the game (such as the Armory for World of Warcraft) that players may connect to over the internet while they may not playing the game.

Game Server

Reliable UDP

Typically the developer will want to implement a reliable UDP system as TCP systems will generally not work well for real time games because of the bandwidth used to ensure packets arrive and in the correct order. Reliable UDP allows the developer to decide which packets are important enough to depend on and which can be safely ignored if they don’t arrive.

A reliable UDP system may provide a categorization of packets that allows the server to label packets as in-order, reliable or latency critical among other useful categorizations.

The typical connection in the US runs at 256KB/second up and 750KB/second down.

Filtering

The filtering system on the game server allows for networked LOD (level of detail) thus the server may choose not to send all information to a player. For example if a player can’t see another player they may not need to know all the information about that other player, or if a player can only see another player far in the distance then ever piece of information about what that player is doing may not be relevant. The filtering system allows the game server to make these determinations and save bandwidth by not sending irrelevant information to a player.

The filtering system can run at the sight level, the sound level or even the game object level where a particular game object may know that it doesn’t need very specific information about some other type of object. For example a Commander doesn’t need to know the specific details of each of his infantry units positions and movement trajectories but each of those infantry soldiers would since they are marching with one another.

Global Time Base

The global time base is a process by which all clients and the server are synchronized to some global time with some small acceptable variance. This allows for deterministic client calculations of when things should occur or end (for example you may receive the Blessing of Salvation buff in World of Warcraft, your client knows this lasts for 5 minutes and thus can show you when it ends without having to be notified by the server.) This can also be used to make position predictions based on trajectory of items in a game like bullets or other things as long as no other forces are acting on them that you don’t know about.

The global time base can also help when leveraging deterministic randomness, which is when a seed value is distributed to each client for their random number generator to make sure they are all synchronized. This ensures that for example the 3rd random number generated on each client that had the same seed value will be identical.

The global time base as well as many of these other technology strategies is also not needed for turn based or lock step gameplay.

Arbitration

Arbitration simply means that the server has to keep track of the state of the world and handle any inconsistencies in the clients views. For example one client may thing a door is open while another thinks a door is closed, without some way to figure this out this can be very important (depending on the game of course.) The server is responsible for pulling together all the information it can to solve these disputes, whether that means polling the clients to vote or keeping full track of the world state.

This stuff has to be considered up front and is a very important aspect for the game designers to consider. The developers must figure out what types of things are important and what are not, usually whether a player is dead or not is an important decision but whether or not some grass has been burned away or some leaves are blowing in the wind may not be as important to the users experience. Thus it is important to make these considerations during design so that the arbitration systems can be implemented as needed.

Distributed Game Servers

Game servers can become very loaded depending on how heavily trafficked your game has become. Some things can be either run together on the game server or offloaded onto external distributed servers to do the processing work needed. These things include NPC state information, AI behaviors, Scribe functions (logging, persistence information, debugging information), collision calculations and also dynamic effects such as polygon mesh changing (fully dynamic terrain meshes.) These are not the only things that can be offloaded, basically anything which you can write a subsystem for can usually be offloaded onto distributed systems that will scale better than trying to improve the capacity a single server box.

Lobby Servers

The lobby servers are the servers that perform matchmaking functions for the players as well as allow them to chat with one another and other functions. Lobby servers are typically less latency critical and are much more tolerant of lag and network traffic spikes, they also tend to use much less bandwidth. Usually TCP communication will be sufficient for lobby servers because of the somewhat non realtime nature of their functions. Lobby servers are also generally used to house friend and ignore lists as well as anti cheat mechanisms such as piracy detection and modded console detection.

Communication Servers

The web interface to the game is classified as the communication server. These can be wide and varied and can include many different things. For instance World of Warcraft provides the Armory as a window into their game world from from the web. From the Armory you can view players equipment, character builds and also information about their guild and lots of other stuff. Forums for games also tend to fall into this category. These services provide a way for the players to be involved with the game while away from the game, or to arrange groups and things for when they are playing. Web interfaces to MMO games are becoming a standard thing and tend to provide a good value and sense of attachment to a game for your players. Most any new MMO game would feel incomplete without some web infrastructure.

Testing and Production

Lastly testing is an important aspect to any game development but is especially important in MMO games where many players will be using your systems simultaneously and where exploited bugs are much more detrimental to a larger group of players.

Also production times are another important thing to consider. When you plan to develop a large MMO game you have to realize that production can take a long time, 3 years or more. Because of this it is very important to spend some time at the beginning really laying out your plans and considering what is the riskiest part of your technology plan. This time period will typically be 6 months or so and during this time you should do things such as develop gameplay prototypes, work on the riskier aspects of the game to determine whether your feasibility estimates are realistic or not and ultimately decide if you should invest much more time and money into the project after this initial stage.

MMOG Development

Ultimately MMOG development is a very complicated process. A multitude of technologies go into the creation of any multiplayer game and it is important for the involved in the development to have a good understanding of all of these technologies going into the project.

Well that’s about it, I think it was a good talk overall about the technologies going into MMOG games and I hope I’ve been able to pass some of the wisdom on to you. Let us know about any games you’re involved in making we’d love to hear about them.

Mike McShaffry a game industry vet has started a new blog to discuss things he’s learned through the years in the industry. Not much there to see yet but he does have one particular article on pitching your game that is very good. It details all the steps needed in a successful pitch and what questions and materials you need to be prepared with. It’s mainly focused on AAA games looking for 7 figure budgets but any indie who ever has to do a pitch for various reasons, whether getting some funding or finding a publisher, would do well to read it.

Matt Sakey has written a great article for the IGDA on the use of Lean methodologies for game development.

“Waste” in development could be rework, unused assets, reversed design decisions, creative clashes, you name it. Largely it would be the product of poor planning, which, I’m sorry to say, does lead right back to the “business needs more proven process models” argument.

Lean methodologies are used in production industries to reduce waste in the process and ultimately make better products for cheaper. I think this is a vitally important concept for indie game developers operating on small budgets and this article is certainly worth a read.

Eye of Judgment

I’ve been really stoked about Eye of Judgment since I heard about it and I still am now that it’s out. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Eye of Judgment is a collectible card game (CCG) for the Playstation 3 (or is it PLAYSTATION 3) that allows you to view 3D renderings of your cards monsters and units and battle against the computer or other players online. It uses the Playstation Eye peripheral to view what cards you’re playing on the board and register them into the game world that is a virtual representation of the board. They also sell booster decks of the cards that you can purchase in game shops and such to make different decks. Wow that sounds complicated when I write it out. Perhaps this cheesy video will help.

Sadly, I don’t yet have a PS3 myself but I’m sure I’ll acquire one soon and this game is certainly putting the pressure on me. First you must understand that I’m a huge CCG fan and was once (and probably will be again in the future) a rather hardcore Magic The Gathering player, so I think about CCG games a lot and they’ve intrigued me for a long time. I’ve even got a game design I did for an online one sitting around that I hope to make one day.

Anyway this game sounds pretty great but I have heard negative aspects of how the game design isn’t that deep and the decks that come with the game are pretty bland so perhaps it’s not quite living up to it’s potential but it is certainly innovative and I’ll applaud that.

The Eye of Judgment Card Hack

The game only recently came out and some ingenious players have already figured out that they can hack it to be able to get any card in the game. Basically they scan the cards into their computer and print them out. This shouldn’t work and it’s an obvious method that the developers would have thought of before hand, and they did. You see they made some special “magical?” ink that they used to print the cards that the camera was supposed to detect, apparently though this doesn’t work at all and a normal inkjet printer can reproduce the cards well enough for the camera to recognize them and you can basically use any card and as many as you want using this technique. There’s more info on the printed cards here. It also looks like you may not even have to go through all that much trouble.

Obviously many people will think this is cheating unfair and such but I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute and explain why it’s not really that big of a deal. First of all any CCG designer worth his salt knows that your game has to be balanced under the assumption that all players will have unlimited access to your card base and therefore can (and will if it grants an advantage) play with the maximum number allowed of in their deck. The reason for this is because any hardcore fans of your game will go to any length to obtain exactly the cards they want for their deck and typically how difficult these are to obtain is irrelevant. This goes back to Magic and it’s limit of 4 of any one card in a deck, as I understand Eye of Judgment has a similar requirement, thus having all players have access to all the cards shouldn’t degrade from the entertainment and fun value of the game and will probably only put a hurt on the profit margins. Any big tournament level player of Magic typically doesn’t think about whether they have particular cards when considering what deck they want to play in an upcoming tournament.

Secondly, CCGs have a long tradition of proxying cards, proxying is the process which a player will take any mundane card write on it or otherwise mark it to indicate it actually represents some other card which they don’t actually own. This process originally necessitated because of the extremely rare power 9 cards and other rare cards in Magic the Gathering which can cost $1000+ each, obviously limiting them their accessibility to the greater base of players of the game and thus granting a somewhat unfair advantage to owners of these cards. Proxying Magic cards is a pretty standard practice these days and many tournaments even allow this practice for the older formats where the cards are much rarer, more expensive and hard for players to obtain because of the limited print runs of cards before the games popularity took off. Wizards of the Coast doesn’t allow proxying cards in any sanctioned tournaments however.

Now if you are considering playing Eye of Judgment online you must realize you will now be playing against players who have access to every possible card in the game in multiples. People will abuse this hack to gain an advantage because it is the nature of a player to take and use any advantage available to them, as Raph Koster tells us in Theory of Fun for Game Design. Now every player may not abuse this initially but some will, and since some will others who normally wouldn’t will be forced to abuse this hack to even the playing field. Eventually nearly every player will be abusing this and any new player to the game playing online must do likewise to keep up. This is a process that has occurred time and time again in multiplayer games and really society in general throughout history.

Ultimately the rules of the game change. No longer is it a game about collecting and skill begins to play a much larger role in the game in the long run since personal wealth and ability to acquire cards becomes a non-factor. What Magic has taught us though is that this isn’t really a bad thing and much fun can still be had when the game becomes a game of skill and less a game of chance, this is of course in theory as Eye of Judgment probably doesn’t have the depth and finesse that Magic has and ultimately the game design of Eye of Judgment and it’s ability to be a fun game will be the ultimate test.

It’s also possible that if they’re serious about this game they’ll figure out how to fix this with the next set or possibly even with some software update and the whole argument becomes a moot point until some fancier hacks are discovered. Either way this is an interesting story to watch.

If you are interested in CCG design then stick around I’ll certainly be discussing it more in the future. CCGs are one of my pet genres so I intend to come back to them quite a bit in future posts.

The IGF has revealed the entries for 2008 and there’s some sweet games on the list. I recommend checking it out.

I’m happy to see that Sector 13 is on the list, I briefly did some work with these guys on this game a while back but had to stop when I switched jobs. I know it’s come a long way since then and they’ve done a great job with it, I’d recommend checking them out.

I’m super stoked about Fallout 3 and love game design so this is right up my alley and possibly yours. The Fallout guys have decided to hold a contest where you design a perk for the game and the best one will be chosen and put into the game. I’ll probably try to come up with a few myself as this is pretty exciting. You can find the contest page here and I’ve pasted more info below.

Celebrating 10 Years of Fallout!

10 years ago the original Fallout was released and forever changed role-playing games. Now is your chance to be a part of Fallout history. We’re giving you, the fans, a chance to design one of the perks for Fallout 3!

No, we aren’t going to tell you about any of the perks that are already in Fallout 3. First, that would spoil it, and second, we don’t want to color your ideas with anything we are, or aren’t doing. It’s a clean slate for you. Be creative.

Think of something in the spirit of Fallout. What would you really want your character to be able to do in the game? Don’t worry about any stat requirements or the level you would get it at. Just design a cool perk and we’ll fit it in where it could go.

Part of what make Perks great are the Vault Boy images that goes with them. You can choose to use one of the generic icons we’ve provided to go along with your Perk if you’re not artistically inclined (that won’t hurt your chances of winning, in case you’re wondering) or you can choose to upload a drawing, sketch, photo, or creation of your own design. Send in a photo of yourself in the appropriate pose, sketch it on a napkin and scan it in…whatever you want.

If you win, you’ll get your Perk in the game, your name in the game’s credits, AND your choice of the grand prize from the Prize Vault: either the PC or the Console flavor.

All entries must be in by 11:59 pm (Eastern time) on October 31, 2007. We’ll announce the winner of the contest, and all the other awardees, in November.

PC Grand Prize:
Your choice of an ATI or NVIDIA video card
Logitech G15 keyboard
Logitech G9 mouse
Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers
Vault Boy bobblehead
Vault Tec lunchbox
Fallout 3 t-shirt
Vault Boy decal
OR
Console Grand Prize:
Xbox 360 Pro
Logitech G51 Gaming Speakers
Vault Boy bobblehead
Vault Tec lunchbox
Fallout 3 t-shirt
Vault Boy decal

We’ll have plenty of prizes for runners-up and honorable mentions, and we’ll also pick from all the entries at random to give away some additional prizes just so everyone has a chance to win something. Prizes will include great stuff from our friends at NVIDIA, ATI, Logitech, and Microsoft, as well as Fallout schwag.

You can enter as often as you like, but you can only enter the same perk once, and you can only win once. All entries subject to the terms and conditions of the contest. Make sure you read them before you enter.

Good luck to everyone. We look forward to seeing your ideas.

Happy 10th Birthday to Fallout.

Business Week has a great piece look at some basic fundamentals of game usability. They list 10 lessons which game designers need to know and should follow in their games. You can read the article here.

I think this is a fairly good list and is definitely something to keep in mind when designing your games. I can remember lots of times even I have just quit playing a game because of various usability problems where I otherwise probably would have continued playing.