Nordic Game Conference 2006

[Sairon]

Didn't find my notes but using the program and looking at the diffrent seminars I assembled a short summary.

Hilmar Pétursson
CCP
Iceland Has Game Developers?

This seminar was mainly about EVE online.
Major graphics update coming next year.
They're growing faster than ever, don't have the data now but I seem to recall 270 000 subscribers by somewhere in 2007 if the trend continues. They thank Blizzard for this.
Very good retention, ~27% of the people who started at/near release are still playing, I believe the number was something like ~47% for 2005.
Contracts coming in expansion/patch ( don't recall ). As I understood it contracts will be a mechanic to somewhat fight scammers.
Heavy prototyping was used for development. The game was created 11 times, a lot of which seemed like very complete incarnations. A lot of them had a radar which got scrapped in the release version.
Some team members had some experience of a really crappy educational virtual world, apart from that this was their first major project.

Dr Barbara Lippe
Avaloop
When the niche becomes a mass: What should a sexy character look like?

This seminar was held by a women who had spent a bunch of years in Japan working on character design. She talked a lot about how the west should adopt the movements in Japan where a genre for girls has developed called Yaoi. Yaoi basically seemed to be gay female boys flirting with each other. There also were some discussion about how lead characters are designed totally diffrent in Japan in order to intrest the female gamers. The characters are more emotional and less macho than our western counter parts.

Masu Masuyama
TV-Game museum Tokyo
Money Games

This man had a vision to combine money making activities from real life with games. He's currently involved in a project over at Konami for a stock dealing game for the DS which did seem a little intresting. Overall a fairly tedious seminar where he talked about totally game unrelated things involving the stock market and his life.

Mizuguchi Tetsuya
Q Entertainment
Keynote - Game development: Inspiration led creation - How can we design a game from the first inspiration?

Long history at Sega, creating some of the best arcades to date, including Sega Rally. Also creator of original games such as Rez and Lumines. He talked about how he tries to emulate the fun from real life. The game design for Rez was for example gained when he went to a rave party. A fairly good seminar, sadly it suffered because of his weak english skills.

Jorgen Tharaldsen
Funcom
Business models for games

AoC will become available as a digital download. They won't be using distasteful ingame adverts in the world, might use in eventual loading screens. There seemed to be a very large intrest in using ingame adverts amongst the participants in their games. There was some graph shown how the earnings through in game advertisements had grown and it went up through the roof. Wasn't much mentioned about the MMO being developed after AoC, but I seem to recall it being mentioned that it would be a blend of the games already produced by Funcom, don't quote me on that though.

Adam Batters
Pandemic
Multi-threading for PS3/X360

Pandemic has developed a design model allowing construction of xbox 360 and PS3 compatible games. The model is optimized for the PS3 but functions on xbox 360 due to its flexibility. A couple of common design errors was also discussed.

István Fábián
SCEE
Playstation 3: A parallel Universe

Mainly about the PS3 design and why it's designed as it is. Sony states that developer might as well get used to multiple cores because that's the road our desktop CPUs will take as well, and future consoles. The PS3 cores are more specialised than your normal cores, which has its trade off. It's very fast for some operations but sacrifices flexibility. It's in some situations faster to just brute force some things and later on scrap the results if they're not relevant, instead of trying to decide which things to calculate and what to not calculate.

Johan Lindfors
Microsoft
Intro XNA

Microsoft XNA is geared at hobbyists, there was no mention of using it as a tool for serious AAA development to speed up the development process. XNA encourages community sharing. Some home Brown components was demonstrated which was fairly impressive. Seemed great for prototyping.

Randy Smith
EA LA
Game design workshop

Basically boiled down to the following: Playtest a lot, board game prototyping can be useful, and that EA uses a framework called MDA, which I didn't totally agree with.

[Sairon]

Oh, and Battlefield 2142 was up for testing. Very high production values but apart from that it seemed like battlefield 2 in the future. Controlled some cool mechs when I tried it out. Didn't spot any new mechanics though.

[tazelbain]

Dr Barbara Lippe
Avaloop
When the niche becomes a mass: What should a sexy character look like?

This seminar was held by a women who had spent a bunch of years in Japan working on character design. She talked a lot about how the west should adopt the movements in Japan where a genre for girls has developed called Yaoi. Yaoi basically seemed to be gay female boys flirting with each other. There also were some discussion about how lead characters are designed totally diffrent in Japan in order to intrest the female gamers. The characters are more emotional and less macho than our western counter parts.

No.

[stray]

American games could use less macho crap though. We're not all 10 year old fatasses gorging ourselves on Hungry Man dinners and playing with G.I. Joes.

[tazelbain]

Doesn't that have more to do with oversized breasts and thong armor on female characters than if the male characters act like whiney, underfed rockstars.

[Engels]

the male characters act like whiney, underfed rockstars.

as opposed to whiney overfed rockstars.

[Strazos]

The accusations levied against "western" lead characters only applies to certain games. There are plenty of examples where the lead is very opposite from the image put forth by Lippe.

All the Bioware games, NOLF 1/2 are just some of the games that immediately come to mind.

[Kail]

The accusations levied against "western" lead characters only applies to certain games. There are plenty of examples where the lead is very opposite from the image put forth by Lippe.

All the Bioware games, NOLF 1/2 are just some of the games that immediately come to mind.

Eh?  Isn't the main character in NOLF a girl?  And every Bioware game I can think of has a blank slate "Your name here" main character.  Can you even make someone like that yaoi?  I suspect that if they designed Baldur's Gate 3, but made it so that every possible male conversation option portrayed the main character as an effeminate homosexual, there would be... uh... some criticism.

I don't doubt that there are some exceptions, but there are some strong stereotypes in a lot of western video games.  In that regard, I wouldn't mind seeing some change.  I don't think that throwing away our stereotypes just so that we can replace them with Japanese stereotypes is automatically a good idea, though.  Are their cliches somehow better than ours?

[Wolf]

Good stuff

Thank you! :)

[Strazos]

Eh?  Isn't the main character in NOLF a girl?  And every Bioware game I can think of has a blank slate "Your name here" main character.  Can you even make someone like that yaoi?  I suspect that if they designed Baldur's Gate 3, but made it so that every possible male conversation option portrayed the main character as an effeminate homosexual, there would be... uh... some criticism.

Yes, the main character in NOLF is a female, but she's not the stereotypical wimpy type, or like Lara Croft.

And the BG main PCs were a blank slate, but you were given a fair amount of leeway in how to portray your character, especially in the second game + expansion.