Game Design
The Game Design track explores the challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques.
Featured Sessions & Speakers
Limbo: Balancing Fun and Frustration in Puzzle Design
Speaker: Jeppe Carlsen (Game and Level Designer, Playdead)
Session Description:
This session will teach game designers how to better balance user enjoyment and user frustration as players progress through their game. It will specifically shed light on the impact of penalties like player death on gameplay. Read more...
Designing Guild Wars 2 Dynamic Events
Speakers: Eric Flannum (Lead Game Designer, ArenaNet), Colin Johanson (NCsoft - ArenaNet)
Session Description:
In this in-depth presentation, Guild Wars 2 lead designer Eric Flannum and lead content designer Colin Johanson outline how the core content of games in the MMORPG genre has evolved over time. They will discuss the inspiration for and the implementation challenges of their Dynamic Events system, with the goal of creating an exciting, living, breathing online world that encourages social interaction between players. Read more...
Kinecting With A New Audience
Speaker: Nick Burton (RARE), Andrew Oliver (Blitz Games)
Session Description:
Kinect is the next evolution of the Xbox 360 platform and truly feels like the launch of an exciting and entirely new technology. But what is it like to help build such a platform? How is this different from building a title for it, and is this different for 1st party and 3rd party developers? Read more...
Baldur's Gate: A 10 Year Retrospective
Speakers: Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Greg Zeschuk (BioWare), Feargus Urquhart (Obsidian Entertainment, Inc.), Bob Wallace (Strategic Alternatives)
Session Description:
In this special 10 year retrospective session, Dr. Ray Muzyka, Dr. Greg Zeschuk, and Feargus Urguhardt who co-produced Baldur's Gate 2 will look back at how the game was made, received, and how making games has changed. Attendees will see living legends discuss the challenges of development and why it’s important to give it everything you've got in order to wow the audience and be relevant even a decade later. Read more...
More Buttons, Less Control
Speaker: Jon Brown (Sidhe)
Session Description:
This presentation will help equip developers with the decision making tools that are needed when it comes to deciding what the average player can really use from a set of controls, and what will be ignored. By following the process and philosophy presented, designers will be able to go back to their teams and publishers and argue that less really is more, and make better games with broader appeal as a result. Read more...
Chilling Tales from Red Steel 2: How Motion Control Will/Won't Change The Future
Speakers: Jason VandenBerghe (Ubisoft)
Session Description:
Attendees will leave this session with a clear idea of what human characteristics designers need to take into account when designing for motion control systems, and examples of what worked and what didn't work for the Red Steel team. Also, attendees will gain some perspective on the potential of the motion control market, its limits, and what the future may contain for making games with this kind of input. Read more here...
Five Rules for Draft One of Your Game Design
Speaker: Bruce Shelley (Consultant)
Session Description:
Both veteran designers and students of game design sometimes struggle with the challenge of, 'I have a great idea but I haven't figured it all out and I don't really know how to express it on paper.' In this Game Design session, Bruce Shelley shares five guidelines for the challenge of producing a complete first draft game design proposal, a road map to help designers focus their thoughts and get momentum on the process of 'getting it down.' Read more here...
You Gotta Fight for your Right to Story: Storytelling from Kids
Speaker: Kenny Shea Dinkin (PlayFirst)
Session Description:
While blockbusters like Bioshock, Uncharted and Heavy Rain make it clear that dynamic storytelling is a key component to connecting with the hardcore game-playing customer, that perspective has not always been shared within the tangential markets of Kids, Casual and Social games. Read more here...
Viral Mechanics Uncovered
Speaker: Aki Jarvinen (Digital Chocolate)
Session Description:
How do the viral mechanics of popular social games create engagement through word of mouse? In the lecture, Lead Social Designer Aki Järvinen, Ph.D., uncovers the viral mechanics of social games. His perspective combines psychological concepts such as persuasion with game design principles. Read more here...
The Tao of Level Design: A Study of 3 AAA Games
Speakers: Neil Alphonso (Splash Damage), Elisabetta Silli (EA DICE), Mikael Kasurinen (Remedy)
Session Description:
Level designers will come away from the session with an arsenal of lessons learned in different genres, and attendees from other disciplines will gain insight into the implications and ramifications of their decisions and processes on level design...and how this in turn affects the overall quality of the final product! Read more here...
Player councils in MMOs: Useful Tools or Waste of Time?
Speaker: Pétur Jóhannes Óskarsson (CCP Games)
Session Description:
In MMORGPs the usage of 'player councils' is becoming more apparent and more widespread. Games like Age of Conan, Star Trek Online, Star Wars Galaxies and EVE Online have been known to use, or are still using, player councils. But towards what ends? Can these player councils serve some better or another role as a community tool than what we have available already? Read more here...
Postmortem: Bejeweled Blitz, Cross-Platform Social Gaming in Practice
Speaker: Jason Kapalka (PopCap Games)
Session Description:
This session will go over the important design and technical challenges that PopCap's teams faced while adapting the hit casual game to social networks and establishing it as a cross-platform franchise, explain successes and failures, and discuss what lessons have been learned from the process. Read more here...
Baggies, DVDs and Bitstreams: How to Reinvent Yourself in a Dynamic Market
Speaker: Louis Castle (InstantAction)
Session Description:
The good old days weren't as good as they say and tomorrow is not as bad as it seems. Okay, you have to be from the good old days to even get that. Castle started his career in games drawing on graph paper and manually converting the images to hexadecimal. Games in those days were typed in from magazines or zipped into baggies for the AAA titles. Read more here...
Heavy Rain: How Far Are You Prepared to Go to Develop an Original Project?
Speaker: David Cage (Quantic Dream)
Session Description:
From the initial pitch to publishers to the ideas behind the key concepts, developing a project with 200 people in four different time zones, evangelizing press for two years, facing a babylonian production while trying to keep creative control, David Cage will be driving the audience through a detailed postmortem on the hurdles Quantic Dream had to overcome to produce a game such as Heavy Rain. Read more here...
Imaginary Places, Strange Maps, and How Pop Culture Resonates Past Media Borders
Speaker: Bernd Diemer (Crytek)
Session Description:
Looking at maps of imaginary places takes the attendees back to the earliest inspiration sources of the presenter, shows how this permeates media borders from pop to high culture, and how this can be used to define a foundation for resonating game content and context. Read more here...
Intuition vs. Metrics: The Big Debate
Speaker: Jeff Valadares (Playfish)
Session Description:
With Social Games taking a prominent position in the industry, there's been a lot of controversy recently about their metrics-driven approach to design and development. This lecture will take this controversial subject by the neck and leave no stone unturned. Read more here...
Keep checking back for more session updates.
