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At Austin, I saw some really stand-out presentations and some really horrible ones. For most of ION, it was all middle-of-the-road. There wasn’t much that was just awful, and there wasn’t anything that stood out as being exceptional.

Part of the problem comes from there being so many panels. Frankly, panels just aren’t that interesting compared to lectures. They usually rehash the same subjects, and they just don’t get into enough depth or detail. I talked to some other people about this and we had a general consensus: people who are preparing lectures spend a lot of time preparing. Panelists usually don’t spend much time preparing, and often there isn’t much they can even do to prepare. The effort that people put into lectures shows, and it’s much more useful when you’re presented with a coherent package of information.

I also thought the design track was pretty weak this year. There weren’t many design lectures that I cared to attend. I missed several of the design lectures, so it’s possible that those were was some good content hidden away. I also missed a lecture I wanted to see because I slept in. Actually, my own lecture is the only 9am time slot I made it to, and that’s only because I had to be there!

In hindsight, I missed a couple of the lectures that might have been interesting. Because I went to way too many panels and none of them were useful. It’s not that they were bad and not entertaining. It’s just that panels seem to plateau at a level well below what lectures can achieve, even with a collection of panelists that all give awesome lectures. Maybe I just haven’t been to that really enlightening panel, but I’m doubtful.

Sara Jensen Schubert’s lecture about game balance tools and longevity was fine, but it’s hard to judge I was really the wrong audience. Since I’ve basically lived in the whole MMO balancing and tool scene, I already knew all the issues and what we really need. Joe’s postpartum presents a similar problem, especially since I already saw the lecture! I wasn’t fond of the Stargate talk.

And then there was this boring keynote by Alex St. John about The PC Gaming Comeback. Or, that’s what I thought. Then I went there and it blew me away. It’s the best keynote I’ve seen. Usually, keynotes are so drab, uninformative, safe and fond of telling the audience thing they heard ten times before. This one was different. His presentation style turned away some viewers, but it didn’t bother me. He started off pretty much by trying to stir up controversy in a way that could upset people to get them to pay attention. But he backed up everything he said - including the controversial statements - with math. The presentation was filled with charts, numbers and graphs. It was worth the price of admission alone. I might talk about the actual presentation, but there’s probably a much better write-up elsewhere.

Up until that point, Brandon Reinhart’s mini-lecture on narrative design was my favorite talk. Joe claims that’s just because I want design to have our own personal concept artist to use to communicate our ideas.

Overall, it was a really valuable conference. I just wished I saw a few more substantial lectures.

ION’s all over for this year, and it was a good experience. I did a lot more networking than I did at AGDC ‘07 - that speaker’s badge helps.

I’ll be making a series of posts about ION, including my lecture slides (probably tonight), chunks from the lecture (more detailed than the slides) and conference/lecture impressions.

It’s about time for ION. I’m spending the weekend incorporating the advice other FLS staffers gave me on my presentation.

We also just released a major skill update to Pirates testbed, including a new career. My schedule’s going to be incredibly hectic once I get back into the office. I wonder how many times we’ll get accused of ignoring feedback and not interacting with the community due to a week without  when I don’t post on our forums for a week.

I finally picked up Portal a week ago. It’s lived up to the hype so far, but it’ll probably be another week or two before I finish it.

A few of us at FLS went to see Iron Man late last night. We really enjoyed the movie, but I’m going to briefly talk about The Hulk. They showed a preview of the next Hulk movie, and watched it reminded me of playing The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The brief fight scenes they showed looked like they were taken straight out of the game - I recognized a variety of unlockable moves. Anyways, who knows if the movie will be good, but there’s one thing I want to see in a Hulk movie: HULK SMASH.

I went through and upgraded the site and added a bunch of security features, but I didn’t have anything worth saying anyways. Also: still lazy.

I played around with Mr. Robot a few weeks ago. Initially, it was quite appealing even though I couldn’t quite explain why.

Mr. Robot is a pretty straightforward mix of SNES-era console-RPG style turn based battles and platforming that emphasizes box puzzles.  The sci-fi wrapper is probably the most appealing part, and it’s chock full of references. However, I haven’t felt compelled to finish the game even though it appears to be pretty short.

I had quite a bit of fun at the start of the game when I was sorely outmatched fighting battles that I was supposed to avoid before I had an actual party. Making progress took a lot of effort and I was constantly walking on the wire, always on the brink of death. Resource management was really important, because if I screwed up I was going to end up burning more heals than I could afford to purchase. The problem I ran into is that the level curve is too shallow. Once I got a party member (and a healer at that), the game became really easy. I found out I was one level away from max in one of the two types of levels that progress simultaneously.

As I progressed through the game, my party got stronger… but the fights really didn’t get harder. The “tough” guys that I was fighting alone at level 1 are the common guys for my full, high-level party. It’s only introduced a single tier of new enemies that entire time, and those aren’t that much stronger. This creates a dreary feeling of monotony, as every fight is the same (and trivially easy). If there was more variety and growth in the enemies then I’d probably have finished the game by now.

I’ve started messing around in Space Rangers 2 again. It’s a fun turn-based space game in the vein of Elite and Privateer. It has a mash up of all sorts of different types of gameplay, ranging from the traditional fighting and trading to RTS (not the game’s strength) and text-based adventures.

For example, my new, severely outmatched pirate had to land on a hostile planet to escape a pursuing bounty hunter. Once I landed, the authorities caught me and threw me in jail. I tried to make a break for it by starting a fight on the prison bus and overpowering a guard, but I only made it past a couple guards once I got my hands on a gun. I ended up in prison, where I spent time fighting, building up relations with different factions, conning people out of money and tricking the warden into thinking I was a rat. Ultimately, I used the equipment I conned out of the warden to escape from the prison after one month of my three month sentence.

I used my new found freedom to buy some new weapons for my ship, and head out searching for the bounty hunter that chased me into exile. Since I thought the weapons probably wouldn’t be enough, I assisted another pirate along the way by helping him fight off some patrolling ships. Once I did that, I used my new found favor to recruit him as my wingman at a reduced price, then I paid for information on where I could find that bounty hunter. My wingman and I chased him across three systems, took him out and sold off the parts from his wreckage.

That kind of interesting scenario is pretty common in Space Rangers 2. The prison scenario was a text-based adventure, and the rest came from the surrounding in-world events that got me caught in the first place.

Which is why I haven’t posted much this month. I really don’t have any time on a workday, as my typical day goes like this: wake up - jog - get ready for work - breakfast - drive to work - work - drive home - jog - dinner - miscellaneous task - sleep. Lately, that miscellaneous task is going over one section of my ION presentation a night. I have a long commute, leaving there’s no time left in the day. So, I need to queue up things I want to post in order to reliably get anything on the site during a the work week.

So, I’ll try to build up some stuff over the weekends.

When it comes to doing my job, there are really two things that I want. These are more logistical concerns, as opposed to the things I want in order for my job to be fulfilling.

#1: Iteration

Every design task should include a degree of iteration. Code shouldn’t get released without thorough testing and debugging. Design shouldn’t be any different, it just requires a different kind of testing. In some ways, design is like trying to predict the future, but with far fewer variables. While designers try to account for everything that’s going to happen with a system, it’s simply unfeasible to expect to get it perfect the first time. And that’s assuming that the system design can be implemented to the letter of the design - in reality, the design is likely to change as it gets implemented and it’ll need adjustments as a result.

#2: Tools

Given enough time, a skilled carpenter could build a house without any of his specialized tools. The finished product might be acceptable, but it’d be inferior to the alternative - and it’d cost more to build. Tools are a vital part of most game development jobs, and design is no exception. There should always be a robust process for creating and maintaining tools. While it’s possible to designers to build many of the tools they need on their own (albeit typically slower than with developer support), that requires allotting extra time for the creation of said tools. I’ve done some crazy stuff in Excel - Kevin teases me for building an artificial file diff in Excel, although that wasn’t very complex. Still, there are tons of cool things I could do with the resources that are already at my fingertips - Excel, SQL, etc - with sufficient staging time and no developer support. Most of my spreadsheets are hastily created to be functional, but not elegant. Tools should be elegant.

There was a time when I would have been willing to do that all in my free time. That time died a gruesome death after I got tired of working myself into the ground (~80hrs/wk avg for 3 years) and decided that had to stop. While I still spend a lot of my spare time researching design-related topics, I consider that more of a general-purpose study that’s pertinent to my career. Perhaps it’s a fine line, but the same doesn’t apply to learning how to do a particularly awkward function combination in Excel to target a specific math problem.

It’s all the same

It’s easy to succinctly summarize the preceding paragraphs: I want the time to do things right. Really, that’s all that my mini-list needs. And what’s the one thing you don’t have in game development? Sufficient time. This isn’t a knock against my employer or any of the companies I know, it’s just something that I consider to be an unpleasant reality in the games industry.

My lecture, Retention Mechanisms in MMORPGs, is scheduled for 9:00am - 10:00am on Tuesday, May 13.

That’s probably the first time slot of the conference. Will anyone be awake?