European GDC 2012 – Day 2

AAA goes F2P: Same skills, different mindset

The guy who held the talk, is a former journalism student, who didn't get a job as journalist and ended up in the AAA industry, participating on various titles like “Total War”.

Free 2 play is all about game mechanics. You need to earn the users will to pay for it. Only nice and shiny graphics wonts sell.

There is a “3 Minute Hook”, in which you need to be able to get the player into your game. Kinda remembered me of the low attention span from a talk yesterday (5 reasons …) - but in this case it was somewhat different. When a player buys a retail game in a store, he is paying 30-60€ for it. Don't playing it would be like flushing money down the toilet. So players are willing to give the game a try. In a F2P game, you won't have this generosity. You need to get the player hooked as soon as possible – otherwise you will lose him. He talked about that 70% of registered players will stop playing at the 4th day.

One of the hardest parts in F2P is the fact, that you have to deal with different players, who have a different background and skill set. This makes balancing very very hard. So you will need mechanics which will prevent the gap between those players becoming to big. That could mean bonuses for bad players and subtle mechanics to hold “too good" players back. But this could also be very dangerous.

Addiction is the key to keep players playing (and paying). There are several approaches to this

• People want to feel needed, if there is nothing to do, they will stop playing
• People need to feel, that they want to check on the state of the game. Is someone attacking me? Is my building ready?
• Community!
  • It is easy to give up a game – but it is hard to give up friends. Even if you met them online.
  • Know what is going on in your “area” (Activity stream)

 

Secret souce for location based game's feature …

… learning from Shadow Cities. Shadow Cities is a game from a Norwegian company. The speaker didn't gave any numbers on their players, but told us, their game is played in over 40 countries (numbers would have been real nice).

Location based doesn't (exclusively) mean that you play on a real map where you are. Every game which handles real life locations could be seen as location based.

The speaker talked about eight key “ingredients”, when it comes to location based games.

• The critical mass challenge
  • If no one is playing in your city, you will feel alone, and will stop playing. Deal with it! In Shadow Cities, you can teleport to your friends.
• The sense of location
• The open world vs. curated experience
  • Thus you have such a big world, you can easily feel lonley (critical mass), but it also can get cluttered very fast.
• Stationary vs. movement
  • Most of the people play their game from home and work (76%)
• Playing with neighbors
  • Strong emotions
• Geodata
  • Where do you get your data from? Openstreetmap is a good choice, but isn't 100% reliable. Before you begin planning such a game, you need to have a look at the data, if it is even possible.
• Infrastructure: Battery, positioning and latency
  • GPS is battery sucking bitch!
• The brite social graph
  • Again it comes down to balancing. In location based games, it is even harder, because you could achieve a balanced distribution of power in a country, but does this make your city or neighborhood also balanced?

Post Mortem: Developing a city builing game ...

... thats ready for quick content iteration. That speak was a ... yeah ... SHIT! The outline for this talk seemed really interesting, but most of the topics were only touched slightly or never mentioned. In addition I often did not understand the speaker.

So here is what I could take from this talk

• Lot of iterations
• Minimize the gap between what the user wants, and what you provide
• Parallelize planing & design
• In order to scale design, the company shares all design documents with all the designers. Even back to 2005.
  • Every design decision could be understood

The Voodoo art of dynamic WebGL

Awesome talk, awesome dude (another guy who participated in making Lemmings ). But I think I went over my head, when I went into this talk - since my knowledge of WebGL is very limited. Besides some IE9 bashing (using Chrome Frame is the only solution - every thing else isn't worth it) here a short list what I took away from this talk.

• Your GPU is powerful - let it have it. All the time. You are doing something wrong (or you have so less to render ), when the GPU has nothing to do.
  • Use batches of commands
• Sprites (ok, nothing new)
  • When you make your sprites/texture pages, sort the pictures per size.
  • Big pictures first, starting in the upper left corner.
  • Add borders/padding to pictures to avoid unexpected behavior, when you scale an image.

Of course there was way more in this talk. Waiting for the slides 

Love engine postmortem:

Lean and mean C engine design. The guy who held this talk, kinda surprised me. He sees things very differently than most of us. The talk wasn't only about his engine - it was also about how you should develop things. There are a few quotes/things i want to share with you.

• Great code is not written, it is rewritten
• C++ should be named ++C if it really was any better than C
• API is the key to collaboration
• Code which makes fun to write should be written again, Code which doesn't make fun to write, should be written in a way it is reusable
• Engine decisions affects the game design
• Technology unlocks creativity.
• Engines should be throw aways
  • Developing an engine is inexpensive (A couple of engine engineers vs. hundreds of artists)

Cheaters, hackers, script kiddies ...

... the dark side of online games. The talk started interesting, but as the speaker started talking about SQL injections, I left and decided to have a look at the dom of cologne 

European GDC 2012 – Day 1

First day on the conference. Main language is English - even some of the hosts volunteers only speak English. Not a problem - just mentioning it. Of course all talks are held in English.

So what did I listen totoday?

$100,000 Whales ...

... and introduction to Chinese browser game design. The guy who held the talk, is a former gold farmer who decided to go into the Chinese browser game market. In China there is a very competitive market around browser games. Every day, there are dozens of new browser games. The only way to get into this market, is to use a existing publisher which already have a big enough user base to monetize your investment. The downside of this ... they take up to 90% of the revenue. But 90% of $ 24,000,000 is still pretty much money! Per month! Another downside of publishing browser games in China with a existing publisher is, that you need to revenue your investment in two weeks. Chinese browser games are very fast living.

But how do they make so much money in such a short time? Not only the market is very very competitive, also the players are. Whilst western players have a little problem with "Pay To Win", the Chinese players don't. Players will buy gear to progress within the game, instead of progressing within the game to get gear. The better the things are you can buy, the more they cost. As an example: A pet in Tier 1 costs $5, Tier 2 $20, Tier 3 $125 ... and this goes up to Tier 10! So it isn't a big surprise (ok, it was for me ) that there are players (the so called "Whales") which pay $100,000 and more to be the best player on their server. Ranking is all to them. Every Chinese browser game has a extensive ranking. Not only who has the best gear - the list goes from "How many kills did someone have" to "How often did you pause to take a piss" ^^

Fun fact aside: It is possible to buy a "Bot", which will kill and farm while you are asleep. This bot is fully integrated into the browser game. So the users won't download a suspicious script, the will use the integrated bot, and will pay money for it

5 Things about American Online Gamers ...

... that will surprise european developers. The guy who held the talk, had nearly 25 years of experience in this industry. Cool guy, you can read more about him on his Wikipedia article.

• The attention span is very very low. So you have to hold the audience attention for the first minutes, to get the into your game.
• Reading level is very low in the USA (he excluded Canada explicit), thus you need to show instead of tell (as less text as possible)
• Players are celebrities and want to be unique.
• Recognize that we are in the queue, user is the master.
• History won't sell ... Americans only know, that after the dark ages we got cars and plains, and that there were many wars in the last century.

Small Teams, Big Problems ...

... How to produce sustainable agile development for growing teams. The talk began later because of technical difficulties, so the speaker had to speed up the talk. Bad ass accent, fast but monotone voice. Sadly nothing surprisingly new. At that time I thought it would have been better if I watched the CryTek "My First Game with the CryEngine Free". But I wanted to go to see the ...

Core Games, Real Numbers ...

... Comparative stats for MMOs & Social games. I'm sure this talk was awesome ... I didn't see it .... To see this one, I would have needed another kind of ticket - which would cost 200 € more. So I decided to make a break, have a look at the bookstore, and wander through the "Expo Floor".

Free-to-Play game design is f*#!1ng awesome!

Very cool talk from the guys at Bigpoint! I hope I get the slides in time, because I don't remember everything - long day, and my scumbag brain lets me down.

One of the main takeaways for me from this talk, is that this business model will only work for a small portion of games. A $50M CoD could never revenue via F2P. He should us a formula - it was kinda like this:

Cost for acquiring user < Conversion * ARPPU * Lifetime * Virality (ARPPU = Average Revenue Per Paying User)

If you can manage to beat this magical line, you can buy your users and make money  Otherwise your model doesn't work, and you need to tweak one or more parameters.

The wonderful world of UX

How can we make games that resonate better and learn form approaches to music. Also a cool guy, works as producer for Ubisoft Singapore - studied music. What is UX? UX means "user experience". And this isn't the user interface only. It's about what information is presented in which way. How can the user interact with the information, and what do you want the user to feel? He compared the parts of an user experience with members of a band. As example he also compared UX with Jazz and Blues. A "Jazz UX" is very complex, not easy to understand, but can be very powerful. It may may even require some more knowledge. Strategy games and simulations are often "Jazz powered games". Blues on the other hand is kept very simple, and clear.

Jazz: Gran Turismo; Blues: Some arcade racing game, I forgot the name of

You definitely need to see the sheets.

Applying retro techniques to HTML5 development

Also a talk from a very expirienced developer. This guy helped making "Lemmings"! So awesome

The talk itself covered the following:

• Avoid loops ... you don't say?
• Images sprites ... yes we know them
• Scrolling. Browsers are not very good at rendering and composing at the same time. So you need to render your stuff on a "shadow area", and transfer them back to your "main area".
• Audio sprites. Not entirely new, but still something I didn't thought of
• Floating point vs. fixed point. Isn't a problem on desktop machines, but it is on other devices. Smartphones, tablets and what not aren't that powerful as desktop CPUs.

CryTek GDC Night

I sat till now to write this post, and now I will get dressed, and head over to this party

European Game Developer Conference

So I asked my employer if the company would pay for the trip to the European Game Developer Conference in Cologne . And he said yes - awesome!

I already arrived today, otherwise I would have missed the first sessions. The flight was fast, the airport a little bit confusing. I endlessly  walked around the whole airport to find the train station . The conference centre is only two stations away from the hotel. So it won't take too long for me to get there tomorrow. The hotel isn't the Ritz, but it is clean - I'm in the "Paris" room

Enough chit chat ... let us have a look at my agenda for tomorrow:

• 9:30
• $100,000 Whales - An Introduction to Chinese Browser Game Design 
• Operating a Game Site at Scale 
• 11:00
• 5 Things About American Online Gamers that Surprise European Developers 
• User-Generated Content In MMOs - From Champions Online To Neverwinter 
• Passion For Entertainment: 10 years of Battlefield/ 20 years of DICE 
• 13:00
• A Developer's Guide to Surviving the Zombie (Freemium) Apocalypse 
• My First Game with the CryENGINE Free (Presented by Crytek GmbH) 
• Small Teams, Big Problems - How to Produce Sustainable Agile Development for Growing Teams
• 13:35
• Core Games, Real Numbers: Comparative Stats for MMOs & Social Games 
• Dead Island: How to Create a Mega Seller on a Moderate Budget 
• 14:30
• Free-to-Play Game Design is f*#!1ng Awesome 
• 16:00
• How Draw Something Absorbed 50 Million New Users, in 50 Days, with Zero Downtime 
• The Wonderful World of UX: How We Can Make Games that Resonate Better and Learn from Approac... 
• 17:30
• Applying Retro Techniques to HTML5 Development 
• Seven Silver Bullets in Production and Operation of Free-2-Play Browser Games 

As you can see, there is much more tracks I would like to listen to - sadly I cannot fork or clone myself :/ Luckily, it seems the host is recording the tracks. But I'm not sure, if the recordings are covered by my access pass.

After this brain challenging day, there will be the "Crytek GDC Night" Looking forward to it ...