February 2008 - Posts
*DEEP BREATH*
GDC 2008 has come to a close, it's already been a week since my talk but I'm in that pseudo-dreamlike state that follows after a long and exciting week.
For the most part, GDC couldn't have gone better. We made some news, got to show some really cool stuff that we've been working on and I got to see old friends and meet lots of new people! What's not to love about that?
So where do we go from here? Well, I've still got a lot to talk about when it comes to Zune, If there are topics you'd like to hear more about leave a comment as it will give me something to blog about which is always helpful. We also are working to ship our preview of XNA Game Studio 3.0, because spring will be here before you know it.
A couple of other newsworthy items, congratulations to George Clingerman (DirectX/XNA MVP) and his new addition to the family. If you haven't seen his latest blog post yet, it's worth a read and is guaranteed to make you smile. Also if you haven't caught it yet there is a video on Channel 9 with James Silva, Mitch Walker, and myself.
Again, there's a lot more from me on the way. Hopefully I'll get some sleep this weekend and finally recover from the whirlwind that was GDC 2008!
Before I get too much into days four and five, I forgot one of the bigger events from Wednesday. which was hanging at In-N-Out burger with Major Nelson, TriXie and Chris Paladino from the gamerscore blog. It was a blast and we got to chat with a lot of people about XNA Game Studio 3.0 and the Xbox LIVE Community Games.
Thursday
Slept in today, cause I want to make sure I'm rested for my session today. I also chatted with a lot of people today, Chris Paladino from the gamerscore blog chatted with me about Xbox LIVE Community Games and XNA Game Studio support for Zune. This wasn't planned but I just happened to walk by when Chris needed someone to talk to. I also talked with Laura from On10 about the same things. Make no mistake, I'm not exactly comfortable chatting in front of the camera but it helps spread the work about our product.
Pretty much after that, it was time to head over to Albert and Dax's session on Xbox LIVE Community games. The session went really well and they covered a lot! Most people didn't know about the sessions as they were kinda secret beforehand, but we still had good attendance overall. My session was up next, overall it went great and I hope the people who attended enjoyed it and found it informative. I flubbed up a bit during my coding demo, and forgot to initialize a variable. I quickly turned it into a demo on debugging on the Zune, showing how to set breakpoints and use the watch window. From what I heard most people didn't know if this was part of my script or not. I guess that's pretty cool.
As I mentioned on the forums, I think Dax, Albert and I will do a webcast of our sessions so that people who weren't able to attend GDC have a chance to get some of the information that we talked about. Look for it soon on the XNA Creators Club site.
By the time the sessions we're over it was the end of the day, well the end of the GDC show for the day. That evening most of the team members had dinner at Chevy's (Large margaritas for everyone!) and then headed to XNA party! The party was awesome, and lots of great people to talk to. There was also the AI Challenge finals, which the final 20 seconds was captured online. Anyway it was pretty late when I called it a night.
Friday
I spent Friday morning walking around the expo hall. I checked out several of the IGF games including Audiosurf a very cool music game, this game really seemed awesome and I want to give it a try. I also got to check out Fez which won the Excellence in Visual Art award. What's really neat is I also heard Fez was built using XNA Game Studio!
The IGF Mobile games we're really interesting as well! I got to chat with the Blackflow developers, which is a cool eco friendly game where you sort trash into a series of bins by rerouting pipes. Another game Steam Iron: The Fallen, which is an RTS running on a mobile phone! I can't believe how good this looked, seemed to play very well too! Finally I got to look at the puzzle game Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles this game also seemed really great and they had it running on a GP2X which was neat. The most disappointing thing was there were only a few of the finalists there, I don't know if it was because it was the last day of GDC or the developers were unable to make the trip.
I headed back to the XNA Suites to chat with the Channel 9 guys with Mitch and James Silva, that took about an hour and just I was leaving they announced that the show was closing! It closed much earlier than I though (3PM in the afternoon!) so that shortened my day quite a bit.
Overall, it's been a great GDC. I'll be heading back to Redmond tomorrow, and I'll post some more follow up then!
(Again worth keeping in mind that these are back dated posts)
There's not too much exciting stuff that went on Tuesday and no time for sessions so I am combining day's two and three.
Tuesday
Tuesday was all about getting ready for the keynote. I worked on a bunch of Xbox 360's to get them up to date with all our other stuff. I also worked on getting a bunch of Zunes (Now that I can say what they are!) up to date with the latest games as well.
If you ever wondered how hardware gets to a show, basically there is a group inside Microsoft responsible for trade shows. They come in and set up and have all the hardware, but usually you need to get your stuff on the console as they don't really have context into what needs to be done. For most demos this means bringing a DVD with the latest build of your game burned on it. For us, it means flashing the kits with the proper version of the OS (If it's not already), deploying XNA Game Studio Connect, XNA Game Launcher, any games that need to be shown. While the process doesn't sound bad once, we did it about 20 times for different kits around the show. I'm not going to complain to much, the groups we work with for these shows are amazing, and they have a lot more to do. For the Zunes, I took them on the plane with me, you would think carrying 11 Zunes in your carry on luggage would cause suspicion. But I guess they see that kinda stuff all the time when leaving from Seattle.
Tuesday afternoon was spent hanging out to watch the practice run of the keynote. It was pretty awesome, there we're all kind of people there that I would have loved to talk to: Peter Molyneux, Tomonobu Itagaki, Cliff Bleszinski just to name a few, but needless to say I'm pretty sure they didn't want to be bothered while practicing. It was a cool thing to be a part of, even if doing nothing else but hanging out and helping set up. The practice run went well and took most of the day. Everything with the Zune demo looked great and I want to make sure it really shined. Unfortunately I didn't get to go to any sessions because I was so busy but it was worth it to help out!
Wednesday
Today's the big day where we lay it all out on the line, the day started really early at about 6:00 AM. There was one final run of the keynote, and I wanted to be there to make sure all the stuff I set up yesterday actually worked. By 9:00 AM there was already a line forming for the 10:30 AM keynote. After the doors opened and they started letting people in, the XNA Community Game Platform team sectioned out an area in the back for the team to sit. We didn't want to take good space from customers of course. I logged on to IRC (EFNet #XNA) where I tried to keep everyone up to date on what was going on in the keynote. The big announcements for our team were: Community Distribution of XNA Framework games over Xbox LIVE Marketplace and the introduction of XNA Game Studio 3.0, the first major feature being that you can write games for your Zune Media Device. This was a big deal because this is what I have been primarily working on for the past 6-8 months. I'll talk more about it in a different post.
We also announced that you can download seven of the community games right now on your Xbox 360! So go get them while they are hot. If you missed the keynote it should be available for download on your Xbox 360 so take a look for yourself. All of the announcements involved a lot of hard work from the team, it was awesome to finally share the excitement we've had internally for so long with everyone at the keynote. I think it was a great success.
Again not really any sessions today, it was mostly spent prepping for my "Game Development on Zune" talk tomorrow. Hopefully it will go well and without any trouble, I've run through the talk at least a dozen times but only the demo once so I need to practice it more. Anyway, not to much other details or time to write today. Got more interesting stuff coming up on Thursday!
(Note GDC is over but I am posting my entries that I have typed up previously, cause I hadn't had a chance to post them yet).
GDC '08 has officially kicked off here in San Francisco! My morning was pretty normal for a conference. I spent some time with other Microsoft folks and got a sneak peak at some of the stuff we're doing for the keynote, as well as setting up. An empty room that hold's 5000 people is pretty incredible to see empty. All I know it takes a special person to be able to talk to an audience that large, the room I'll be in holds 250 people and I'm overwhelmed by that!
As I mentioned in yesterdays post, most of my time was spent at GDC Mobile talks. If you've read the blog before, you'll know I am a huge fan of portable gaming. Most of Monday/Tuesday is focused on GDC Mobile so besides the XNA Game Studio developer days (Which hopefully if you your at GDC you attended!) there weren't many other sessions that I noticed.
The first session I attended talked about the future of mobile gaming and what that might look like, it was a sponsored session from Zeemote. The Zeemote is a little remote that works with your Bluetooth phone for games, it was an interesting look at game development and what the future might look like. One of the presenters had a slide that just said "A mobile phone that will connect to your TV will replace your PS3 in two years time". I must say I don't see the same future, but it was meant to invoke a discussion. The biggest question that rung in my mind was if you have HD graphics on a phone, will you have teams of 60+ to develop games for them? They also talked about how why users play mobile games, and why more people will start playing mobile games for other reasons than "They are bored". Overall the session gave me some good insight into the mobile development process and where they think the mobile industry is going.
By the way, they had a booth outside where you could try out the Zeemote and I have to say it was pretty neat to play! I could totally see my self owning one.
I also attended a session titled "Tetris: The Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever". Based on the title alone I had to see what they said. It was presented by Rick Marazzani who founded iQ212. I thought this talk was great and had a great point, Rick said that Tetris is the best mobile game ever (Heck, it launched the Game Boy!) but given the way it's designed it probably wouldn't have gotten published today. This mainly centered around that it's gameplay tends to have long sessions, and that the gameplay cant be broken up into multiple sessions. The controversy was that he also suggested that Tetris would be less well received today were it new in the fact that it's not winnable, meaning that the main game always ends the same way with blocks stacked to the top of a screen. This was something I hadn't thought about and am caught in the middle, I don't think you need to win for a game to be fun, but as Rico said "Nobody likes to be a loser".
Anyway the sessions were cool and it was a good day. More as the fun continues the rest of the week!
Tomorrow is the XNA Game Studio developer day so we've been running though talks with Mitch, Shawn and others. I was originally scheduled to do a talk today, but instead am focusing on my talk on Thursday. Today is all about getting ready for the rest of the week as it's gonna go by like a whirlwind.
We were able to register today so I finally got my badge and schedule. There are a couple sessions at GDC Mobile that I'd like to attend tomorrow. As I go to sessions as I mentioned I'll have some cool notes or takeaways from them and post them in my daily summary.
Sorry that the update isn't too informational today, we practiced our sessions but beyond that there wasn't too much going on. Overall things will really start tomorrow with lots of information. If you have any questions about what's going on at GDC feel free to leave a note and I'll do my best to answer it.
If you follow my twitter, you might have seen I had an interesting experience last night with my hard drive failing on my laptop. Everything was set up and good to go when my drive started making this clicking sound. Sheer terror struck me and I immediately copied all my files to the network and rushed to Fry's to buy an HD to replace my old one. Thus ensued a install-a-thon of OS and software.
I'm only running on about one hour of sleep after setting everything back up and getting what I needed installed for my demo. After everything though, the laptop is mostly back up and running the way it should be. I'm practicing my demo/presentation from my hotel room in San Francisco.
Not to much other news today other than my drama getting my computer set up as the show hasn't started yet. Tomorrow, we'll be working on getting our developer day set up and taking a good look at the schedule to see what sessions I want to check out. Arguably my update tomorrow should be much more interesting as the show starts spinning up. Either way the excitement is setting in and we're getting ready for a great show!
Maybe a more appropriate post would have been "When Cods Attack" to grab your attention, but since I am linking to a post with a similar title it just felt too forced. Betsy Aoki, one of the newer members of the XNA Community Game Platform team put together a series of cool tutorials called "When Cods Collide".
What's really cool about these posts is Betsy approached them from a vantage point of people who aren't familiar with game development today. She also was approaching XNA Game Studio for the first time so it brings a unique experience that you might not get from other team members. So if your new to XNA Game Studio or you just want to take a look at something fun check out Betsy's two tutorials below!
Making a 2D XNA Game - When Cods Collide Part 1
Making a 2D XNA Game - When Cods Collide Part 2
Enjoy!
We're only a week away from GDC, which is crazy because it feels like I just started getting ready (Back in December!). We've got some great sessions on Monday, in fact the whole day is dedicated to XNA Game Studio developers! I'm not speaking on Monday but will be around catching some sessions as well as talking with people. If you see me make sure to stop by and say hello!
As for keeping everyone informed, I'm going to use my blog next week as my "GDC Journal" posting stuff not only XNA Game Studio related but other sessions that I found which are interesting and informational. Hopefully I can work it out to a post a day. We'll see if I can accomplish that goal.
I also finally entered the Blog 2.0 generation and set up a twitter feed which you can get to from here. I figure it might be useful for quick updates and easily post information as it happens.
With about three days left till I catch a plane to San Francisco there's a lot to do so I better get back to it :-)
I just wanted to pass along a great series of tutorials created by Dan Waters. He's posted a series of 14(!) videos detailing how to build a game using XNA Game Studio. This covers a lot of information including character animation and the series weighs in at a whopping 2 hours and 25 minutes of tutorials. To check out the series of videos for yourself click the link and check them out.
Thanks Dan for such an awesome set of tutorials. I hope you enjoy checking them out as much as I did!
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