Game Dev School Video game design & development articles

I'm not sure when this article was posted, but it's from the PBS series The Video Game Revolution. Entitled "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked", the article points out several research studies and theorist viewpoints about some common video game related myths... well, you may have viewed them as facts, but the point of the article is to mythify them based on the research. Good stuff, from my perspective.

I could go on for a while citing articles from the above site.. very good stuff in there. If you're unfamiliar with the social and psychological studies being done revolving around the video game industry, you might find a browse through that fantastic resource to be very fruitful. I'll likely just go through the essays and articles more and set up a better overview of the site. It's really quite impressive and will stand very nicely on its own, without my filtered commentary.

I've been generally in charge of adding game development and industry events that I can find to the Colorado Game Developers' calendar and it got me motivated to set one up here... I'm just not sure how to make it work nicely. For now, I'm going to use an "event" module to post video game conference dates and other similar events, so we'll see how it works. View the GameDevSchool Event Calendar to see what it looks like for now.

If you know of a video game development related event coming up that I've missed, please send me a note and tell me about it!

(If the calendar looks goofy for a while, please bear with me as I figure out how this thing works! ;-)

[UPDATE: The 2006 Indie Games Con has been cancelled ! I decided to leave the listing here so you know about this, but don't buy any tickets for traveling to this event or you'll be in Eugene all by yourself!]

Sponsored by the great folks at Garage Games, the Independent Game Conference (Indie Games Con or IGC) has become a very popular annual event for many indie game development shops. Here's how they describe what it is:

IndieGamesCon (IGC) is a fun, informal and informative gathering of independent game developers from around the world. IGC is designed to be a summit meeting of like-minded developers with the shared goal to focus on collaboration and building community. This is an unprecedented opportunity to meet other indie developers, professional guest developers, hardware manufactures as well as the GarageGames staff.

If you're an indie developer or you're interested in networking with people who want to make games outside the big corporate machines, you really ought to give this conference a look. The people at Garage Games are really excited about making games and the community that they've brought together over the years has a ton of energy and motivation to continuing to build the strength of indie shops.

The quest for a new (for me) game development platform continues for me. I've been using Macromedia Flash (someday, I'll just give in and call it Adobe Flash or whatever... not today) and some Director/Shockwave to make games for the past 1.5 years. The main two projects during that time involved the need to deliver on PC, Mac and online... hard to ignore the validity of Flash as the tool of choice here, eh?

The thing is... I want to do something bigger in the future and I'm not sure Flash cuts it. Director is certainly better for bigger projects, for the most part... better performance, arguably better support for large data handling, cheaper multiplayer support (for now), etc. Flash is catching up in a lot of ways and Director is falling behind in other ways... I'm just getting antsy to try something else. There are many options, but here's one I'm targeting for further review:

I've put a lot of effort into learning about Garage Games' Torque Game Engine in the past. I've had a license for TGE since around 2003 and it's very sweet. The thing is, it's recently gotten immensely sweeter due to recent movement by GG toward making the XBox 360 another platform you can potentially deliver content on!(!!!) Yeah, that's right, it's possible to make a game in TGE (more acurately, Torque Shader Engine, I think, TSE,) and a path exists to create the game for delivery on Xbox Live Arcade! Suhweeet.

Now, it's not free since there are special licensing fees involved, but it's still not very expensive considering what it's typically cost to make a game for a console. The biggest excitement for me is that I can play around with TGE for my $100, move into TSE if I decide to continue development and only when I think I have a solid game for the 360, begin the push in that direction using the same core game code!

Seriously, it's got me frickin' stoked! It's not easy, but the potential set in front of me (and us) is astounding to me. I hadn't put much thought into developing on a console for many years, considering I didn't command a few million bucks minimum. Now, I'm starting to consider it something plausible to target.

I'll point out the technology a little more later, but for now, the above links can get you started on the path to learning more about Torque and what Garage Games is doing to support Indie development. Yay.

One last point about GG's products: their 2D game kit implementations of the TGE tech are really sweet. I'm looking very seriously at the Torque Game Builder also, which is the product formerly called "Torque 2D" I think. It's looking more and more viable as a 2D game dev platform, especially given their new level/map editors they introduced at GDC. This might just be a platform I start developing some 2D games on instead of just Flash all the time.

We'll see...

I think this will be a Good Thing, but I'm not sure what the best implementation of it could be... I'm opening up a sub-set of my blog called Hoza's Game Design Research Journal. For now, until I find a better method, this is really just part of my blog posts, but under a category with this formal name (which is just a sub-cat of my blog.)

Basically, I do a bunch of research about video game design stuff nearly all the time -- well, "design" in general, since I see most of life as a game, not just the "video" part! ;) Since I'm almost constantly thinking about games and design, it leads me down a lot of different paths of research (or "research" as it were, since much of it is so informal as to be considered wandering more than hard research.) I have struggled to find a central location to record my progress and findings... I think this medium might be at least one answer to that. Yay, if so.

Let me introduce why I want to do this in these pages...

Research has been somewhat of a passion of mine for as long as I remember. I've been a "tinkerer" in the physical world -- building stuff and dismantling neat things to find out how they work -- and that seems to have bled over to my game and online endeavors. I like to find out about new technology and such, even though I may only barely understand whatever it is. Just knowing that something exists might be enough to trigger a nifty game design or even a little widget to include in a game. It's a behavior that got me to refer to myself as a "Knowledge Sponge" since I can't seem to satiate this need to explore information. Fun for a geek, it is.

So this year at the GDC, Will Wright (I'll talk about him a LOT, but I'll introduce him to you later if you don't know him yet) gave a wonderful presentation where he talked a lot about how research -- and lots of it -- played a large part in his game design world. I talked about this briefly in a post on MassMOG.com, but I think you're seeing here in my journal a more concrete example of the impact of that talk for me.

I hope this journal will inspire me to formalize my research at least a little bit... well, not "formal" per se, but if I treat the journal as a companion in this journey, it might just enrich the whole experience of research for me. Maybe I'll inspire someone else too, which would serve the point of the site nicely, of course.

Oh yeah... and these ideas will all be searchable and I can browse them much easier than if I wrote them in my books and such... considering my blatant lack of technology use at home. Searching is nice.

Well, I'll let you go now since I'm most definitely babbling at this point. Please let me know if you like this idea and DEFINITELY let me know if you found it useful or inspiring at some point!

Thanks again for visiting! (I've been saying that a lot lately. :)

Hoza

"Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price."
- Samuel Johnson

"the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."
- Chaucer

In my continued quest to learn as much as possible in the shortest period of time, I stumbled across this gem: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. If you've fallen for the "Learn X in Y hours/days/whatever" and found the process wanting, give this article a buzz. No, don't buzz through it... READ it! I do that "buzzing" thing all the time and I just get the tip-o-iceberg. Sometimes a little encouragement to calmly digest something helps.

Maybe I am too concerned with learning new things and less concerned with learning what I've got WELL?? Yeah, I've thought about that on many occasions, but it's good to be reminded. Check out that article.

...now, I'm not saying I won't be cramming huge quantities of data into my skull on a regular basis, but hey... it's good to remember that many crafts are not quickly acquired. True skill and proficiency takes time and effort. Bummer, but it does. :)

This white paper, What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It? is a great read if you're in the business of developing "casual games" or online games and you've pondered the value of Flash in your life. I've been really strongly researching alternatives to using Flash and Director/Shockwave for online games, but this is a good article showing many details about what Flash offers and where it fails.

I've been working with Flash for a long time now, but only within the last couple years have I really dug into it to see some of the power behind it. I worked with Macromedia Director (yeah, I know it's Adobe now) for a long time and moved to Flash because of clients. I like them both for different things, and I despise each of them for some stuff. This article at least analyzes the product from a non-marketing angle. It's a presentation the author gave at a Game Developers Conference one year and I think it's still pretty complete.

For bigger projects and shareware projects, I'm still considering other tools... but I'll discuss that later. :)

I've been an active member of the Colorado Game Developers Association for something like 12 years, I think. I'm not even sure anymore when I first started going to the monthly meetings. Mark Baldwin (co-creator of Empire Deluxe, The Perfect General and many other grand classics) and the late Eric Dybsand formed up the group maybe 15 years back and it's been going strong ever since. It's apparently the longest-running formal gathering of game developers in the whole U.S.! Pretty sweet.

Since I'm one of the "old salts" of the group, I've been taking more of a mentor-like role for a lot of the video game design & development students from many local colleges and universities. There have been a lot of students showing up to our meetings during the recent years, since we started meeting at Denver area academic institutions like Colorado Art Institute, Westwood College and DeVry Institute. Each of these schools has a formal degree program for some form of video game design or development and their programs are growing.

Aside from talking about these schools and their programs on GameDevSchool.com, I'll look at many other schools around the country to see what's going on in the bigger campuses and more progressive schools offering game development curriculae. The local Denver schools have professional advisory meetings regularly, which I've taken part in as much as possible. I'll work on reporting about their progress as much as I see it being relevant.

We clearly need to start up some form of school directory for game and game art programs, but I'm not sure how to structure it yet. It's hard to "review" an institution without attending it, but I'd like to post details about the curriculae and degree programs on some level. Other schools around here, like the Front Range Community College and the University of Colorado and University of Denver are all putting together more advanced/inclusive programs that I look forward to researching more.

Well... I just wanted to drop a note to point out some plans for GameDevSchool.com so you know why the heck this site exists! Hope it comes in handy for some people.

Oh... I also plan on blogging about my own game development research from past projects I've done as well as my ongoing game design work and projects. Yay! I have a lot of work to do! :)

Thanks for visiting!
--Paul Hoza

Woot! I've finally found time inbetween all my game development and web projects (among other things) to build up this site a bit. Yay! It's going to be a long road, but hopefully I can pull all the strings and make this puppet dance. :)

Soon, I'll be separating out the general video game development articles and research links from development info specifically focused on "serious game" development. In fact, you might have found this site by following a link to www.SeriousGameDev.com, so sorry if I confused you. The serious games space is growing rather quickly and I've been doing a lot of work in that realm for a few years now so I thought I'd start up a dedicated site for that stuff soon.. and I'm a domain registering freak. Ugh. I can't help myself.

For now, you'll have to get comfortable while I get things set up more, but I'm looking forward to setting up a nice little network of video game design & development sites specific to your needs. You'll be able to log in and post to any of these sites from one account (which is cool), but it will help to separate out the communities a bit and keep those interested in casual game development from having to wade through serious game design stuff to get at what they're looking for, and vice versa. It will all be one community at heart, but hopefully this approach will help people focus easier and get at their desired content quicker.

So, until next time, thanks a TON for visiting GameDevSchool.com and I hope you enjoy how things shape up!

Best Regards,
Paul Hoza