Category: Director

Aside from wanting to see what’s going on in the game world, the Game Developers Conference offers one of the best opportunities to get together with Director developers. Like, what else is there?

The IGDA Casual Games SIG and the Casual Games Association organized the Minna Mingle Wednesday night, and a number of Director game developers met up there.

Tom Higgins (Macromedia) shares a beer with Sulka (“The Game Designer who ran out of cards” it says on his cards) Haro and Tomi (Tom, in Finnish), both of Sulake, the Habbo Hotel folks.

A face not seen on these shores for too long, Mauricio Piacentini of Tabuleiro joins the group to talk to Tom.

Ten years ago this spring, Gary Rosenzweig‘s first book (The Comprehensive Guide to Lingo) was published by Ventana. Also published by Ventana that spring: Shockwave! by Darrel Plant. Gary’s gone on to do marvelous things. Ventana went out of business the next year. About me, the less said the better!

Osma — also of Sulake — with the aforementioned Tomi. Why I don’t write down Finnish surnames before I drink is beyond me.

We ran into Gene Endrody, the creator of Maid Marian, lurking around the Shockwave.com table.

Peter Glover, VP Games at Shockwave.com came through with invitations to their party the next night.

I’m not sure of the message adveractive’s Steve Bullock was trying to get across to this photographer while talking to Gary. Just kidding!

While this photo is not technically from the Minna Mingle (it’s from the next night) it does have a couple of notable Director programmers in it. That’s yours truly on the left; Brian Robbins, the new Director of Games at Gametrust in the middle; and Rett Crocker of 3Dsolve on the right.

Thanks to Steve Bullock for taking the photo.

Maybe this construction at San Jose airport isn’t semi-permanent, but it sure wasn’t doing much for the airplane topiary.

I didn’t see this at the GDC, but Berndt Garbotz (pictofun.de) posted it to the dirGames list yesterday: “TGE Plugin now working in IE 6.0”. That’s the Torque Game Engine from Garage Games for those of you needing an expansion of the acronym. Neil Marshall’s got a Windows plugin enabling playback of games developed with Torque within a browser, and is looking for people to help with ports to Mac and Linux.

What I did see at GDC was a new book by Edward F. Maurina III (from A K Peters, Ltd.) called The Game Programmer’s Guide to Torque.

Got a copy.

Before I left for the show, someone asked me if there were “booth babes” at GDC. I replied that I really hadn’t seen many in my previous visits — certainly nothing like you hear about at car or boat shows — mostly women who worked for marketing or HR departments within the companies they were representing. And truth to tell, I didn’t see many in evidence at this year’s show, except for the booth at S3 Graphics, which was promoting its rendering technology with a Quake 4 tournament and a bevy of women in black dresses, some of whom had tattoed designs on their shoulders. Another company providing animation services had what looked like Japanese schoolgirls in French maid outfits, but I felt that taking a picture of them was just too pervy.

On the other end of the spectrum was +7systems. It just looks like he’s holding her hand.

Bunnies and turtles abounded at the GDC this year. Seemingly inspired by the PLAYBOY logo, I saw at least five variations of the white rabbit silhouette on a black backgound, of which this poster was but one (the text under each of the pairings reads: “Multiplayer / Matchmaking / Cross-Platform). Of course, with a name like DemonWare, you don’t need to worry if someone’s offended by outlines of copulating bunnies and turtles.

It’s that last pairing that intrigues me, however, as at another booth for a rendering product called Turtle, I made an obvious joke about the mismatch of a rabbit’s head with the name of the product, only to be put promptly in my place by a young man mentioning that it was an allegory to the fable with the moral “slow and steady wins the race”. Too much of a literalist I; when I learned that fable it was a hare and a tortoise, not a rabbit and turtle. No poetry award for me.

D-BOX Technologies was demoing their GameSim motion chair with a custom driving (and shooting) application made using Garage Games’ Torque Game Engine.

Inserting some code for the force-feedback into the game was fairly easy, according to their reps, and the players seemed to think it was (almost literally) a kick in the pants. They might be available by the fall. I expect the price to be about $4,000.

Microsoft was doing their best to get the message out that Vista, the next version of Windows, with its Vista Game Explorer, Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, and new in-box games is going to be the game platform for the future despite the fact that the company announced a delay in its release the same week as the Game Developers Conference. But yes, this guy was playing Solitare.

Tucked into the far back corner of the Expo Hall, behind all of the other recruiters, was a small booth with several of these posters. I have to say I nearly fell backward in amazement; just look at the second word in the line above “WANTED”. Is that bizarre, or what?

As a matter of fact, as I walked up, one of the guys at the booth was just telling the other staffers that they’d had several of these posters stolen from around the corner of the booth, and he was taking one down before it, too, vanished.

That address at the bottom is www.cybview.com, by the way. They use Director to prototype front ends for the gaming industry. And they weren’t the only company there looking for Director programmers.

There was just something wrong about walking into a high-tech show when I saw the sign doing this. It wasn’t changing. It was like this the whole time I was there.

Jake Grandchamp of RabidLab, who wrote the wacky Dodge That Anvil is pictured here with his custom-made anvil in front of the kiosk where his game was displayed at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose this week. The game was nominated in two categories (Best Web Game, Innovation In Audio) for the 2006 Independent Games Festival. It didn’t win either one but Jake did get the Special 2006 IGF Award sponsored by Adultswim.com, which came with a $5,000 prize. Read Jake’s Gamasutra.com interview.

I’m flying into San Jose tomorrow (Wednesday, 22 March) for the Game Developers Conference. If you’re signed up for the Minna Mingle tomorrow night at the Corinthian Center (and really, who isn’t?) I’ll see you there!