TRACK KEYNOTE
Assassin's Creed: Maintaining Momentum on a Blockbuster Franchise
CONFERENCE
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DESIGN
Creating compelling, immersive games requires understanding, visualizing, demonstrating, and tuning the interactions of an ever-increasing number of game tools and systems. While game designers need to understand and exploit the possibilities of new technologies such as realistic physics, facial expressions, and lighting techniques; they must also continue to master the traditional disciplines of drama, game play, and psychology.
The Design Track explores the challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques.
2013 Sesssions Coming Soon!
2012 HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS
Alex Hutchinson (Ubisoft Montreal)
How often can you release a game in a AAA franchise? How do you keep it fresh? How much change is too much, and how much is too little? Why would an audience come back again and again to the same universe? Assassin's Creed has grown to become own of the premiere franchises in the industry and one of the few that tries to maintain a completely consistent universe of characters, history and perspective. This talk looks at the challenges of creating such a franchise, expanding into other media, and of shipping a new core title every year, through the lens of the development of Assassin's Creed 3. By breaking down the team's goals in January 2010 and re-presenting example deliverables at key milestones over the last two and half years, Hutchinson will explain how Ubisoft Montreal built AC3, and show how the studio's features and approach evolved along the way.
Making the Player Feel Bad - Breaking Rules of Player Choice for Emotional Impact
Joerg Friedrich (YAGER Development Gmbh)
The biggest difference between games and passive media storytelling is the fact that players make interactive choices. A lot of good game design rules have been written on how to create proper player choices in games, but sometimes designers should break these rules to create emotional impact on the player and tell a serious narrative. Joerg Friedrich will present three design rules that should be broken at times and how doing this will improve the emotional impact of the game on the player.
Postmortem: Sine Mora- The Struggle to Reboot a Genre
Theodore Reiker (Prior Games Ltd.)
Balazs Horvath (Prior Games Ltd.)
Sine Mora is a visually stunning dieselpunk shoot'em up game that released to universal critical acclaim this March on the Xbox Live Arcade platform. It was co-developed by Digital Reality (Hungary) and Grasshopper Manufacture (Japan), and hailed by many as the future of East-West collaborations. Theodore Reiker, who designed, wrote and directed the title will guide you through the development process of the title, the challenges represented by a co-production, and will try to solve one of the oldest mysteries of the industry: glowing reviews aside, how can a game that was tailored to succeed from start to finish ultimately fail.
$100,000 Whales - An Introduction to Chinese Browser Game Design
Jared Psigoda (Reality Squared Games)
Over the past several years, while Western game developers have been busy developing for social and mobile platforms, Chinese developers have been churning out web-based browser games by the thousand. Despite having comparatively short lifespans, these games' unbelievable monetization power has led to the birth of a whole new class of "whale" spenders. Improve your own games by learning some of the successful design techniques being used in the soon-to-be world's largest gaming market!
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