Hangin' with the CGDC crew

Last week, game developers, producers, engineers, and journalists arrived in Austin, Texas, for the Computer Game Developers Conference (CGDC) Mini Event.

While CGDC's main event is held but once a year, it sponsors mini-events throughout the year in cities that are centers for computer game development. Last Friday it was Austin, a Texas town that rivals Dallas for highest concentration of game developers south of the Mason-Dixon line. Austin is home for some of the biggest players in the industry - Origin for instance.

Unlike the larger CGDC events, CGDC Austin was a one-day event, featuring a selection of lectures and roundtables. Also, unlike big consumer trade shows like the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the CGDC is developer-oriented with many of the lectures consisting of coding sessions, case histories, design studies, and developer discussions.

Some of the highlights included:

Ultima Online, A Case Study. This was an interesting look at the development, history, and future of Origin's Ultima Online. Conducted by Starr Long, the game's associate producer and director, many issues were brought up, including the cheating/banning debates, the UO community in general, bugs, server problems, costs, and so on.

Long's use of the "sandbox" analogy seemed pretty ideal - where some players may build castles, then others will wreck them, and where some players let you play, others are just bullies.

Long also stated that many projections for UO simply didn't materialize. Early on, Origin figured on several hundred users per server, when actually it turned out that servers attracted some 2,500 players. Origin also thought that the demographic profile of UO users would be fairly broad, when in fact it was a group that consisted almost exclusively of 13- to 30-year-old males. Origin also found out to its surprise that one of the largest concentrations of players turned out to be the Japanese (where Internet usage costs are extremely high).

While complaints have been high for some time, Long contends that Origin tries its best to please the player. Since the title's introduction last September, Origin has released 27 client patches with over a thousand changes, half of which are player-suggested.

Finally, Long mentioned that the UO universe will be gradually changing as new storylines will be slowly melded into the game world and notoriety will be shifted to player control.

United We Stand: Developer-Driven Publishing. This roundtable discussion was moderated by Johnny Wilson of Computer Gaming World magazine. Joining him were Mike Wilson, cofounder of the Gathering of Developers; Jeff Smith of Terminal Reality; Harry Miller, CEO of Ritual Entertainment; and thedisembodied (speakerphone) voice of Jay Wilbur of Epic Megagames (though Mike Wilson handled the phone and occasionally provided "translations" when the voice came through clipped).

Among issues discussed were developer/publisher relations, how the developer can protect itself, and, accordingly, how the startup Gathering of Developers (g.o.d.) is trying to put the power back into the hands of the developers. One interesting note was that apparently g.o.d. will soon publish on its web site a guide of sorts for developers on signing contracts with publishers (since apparently most of them do it by the seat of their pants).

Not surprisingly this roundtable discussion drew some of the largest crowds, nearly filling up the entire conference room.

Various lectures were given by Titanic Entertainment designers concerning the development of Netstorm. The lectures covered areas of import like Internet gameplay problems and what not to do when programming a maintainable state machine in C++.

Origin's director of communications, David Swofford's, look at "The Press:Friend or Foe?" was perhaps more interesting from a journalist's point of view than anything else. Swofford discussed what the press is looking for, how to handle bad press, and how to get the press' attention.

Generally, Swofford was kind to the industry, showing a rather humorous video of broadcast news mistakes and errors to show that everybody does make mistakes.

Swofford also mentioned the idea of publicity outside of the gaming press in general and into the mainstream press (ABCNews.com has a gaming column, for instance).

The development of Quake II's art (textures, animations, cinematics, etc.) was presented by artist Paul Steed.

Various smaller product booths dotted the halls within the Austin Convention Center. Those present included Texas Instruments showing off its Permedia 2 and NEC displaying PowerVR. Also present were Intel, Newfire, the Motion Factory, Alias Wavefront, Metrowerks, and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences among others.