Day One is down at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. It was a good day, but i’m already exhausted. Something about the nauseating flight, the endless walking, and the desperate search for wifi has sapped my energy and turned me into a shell of a man. Hot, spicy travel tip: if your hotel lists wifi as a free amenity, that does not mean the hotel offers free wifi – apparently. That means that if you go to the second floor, the wifi signal from the street will come through the window, and you can pick up the signal free. But actually logging in and getting online access is gonna cost you. Silly me – i didn’t infer all that from the hotel brochure when i booked.

Today, as with tomorrow, i stuck to the “all iPhone, all the time” Mobile Games Summit, and the Independant Games Summit across the hall. Here are a few highlights from those sessions:

Session: Why the iPhone Just Changed Everything
Speaker: Neil Young, ngmoco

ngmoco, an iPhone game publisher, has their shee-at together, yo. In his session, Neil Young (not to be confused with the guy you went to high school with who shared his name with some folk singer) spoke excitedly about all that the Apple devices had to offer. He showed a rapid-fire slideshow of some great tools that ngmoco uses to analyze and track the performance of their games, including choke points where large numbers of players got killed or gave up playing. He mentioned that ngmoco plans to license these tracking tools out at some point in the future.

i like when Neil talked about offering a point of difference in your game development. The way he put it, “what’s your superpower?” i think Untold Entertainment’s superpower is humour, but you can decide once you’ve played Kahoots.

A few stats from Neil:

1. the iPhone/iPod Touch devices have grabbed 32% of Nintendo’s massive DS install base, and 58% of the PSP install base
2. the App Store has enjoyed 800 million downloads to date (not sure if this number is inflated by updates to apps that users have already downloaded – probably splitting hairs, anyway. It’s still a big damned number.)
3. the App Store boasts over 25 thousand apps
4. 165 new apps per day are launched on the App Store.

Neil yammered on about all the great things the App Store-supportive devices can do – voip, social networking, etc etc. i wish he had taken questions at the end, because he only very briefly touched on the price pressure in the App Store. If i’d had some mic time, this is what i would have asked him:

Thanks, Neil. My name is Ryan Henson Creighton, and i run a game studio in downtown Toronto called Untold Entertainment. (pause for effect. Lick finger and smooth eyebrows. Point at a pretty lady in the audience and wink.) During your presentation, you talked about how Apple had “trained” their customers to download content from the App Store, while finding and installing mobile games has traditionally been very difficult for consumers. What you didn’t mention was the fact that Apple had also trained their customers that any piece of content – be it a song or a game – is only worth 99 cents. All of the game development goodies you mentioned – voip, mobile, etc – take additional time and money to develop. How can developers offer these features to players when they’re unable to charge fair market value for their products?

Neil: if you have your own name on Google Alerts (and i know you do!), now’s your chance to answer my question. Guy i went to high school with who shares his name with some folk singer: this is not the blog you’re looking for. Move along.

Session: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Going Indie (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Speaker: Ron Carmel, 2DBoy

2DBoy co-founder Ron, who had an indie hit with World of Goo, took a cue from Woody Allen by marrying his own adopted daughter, and then scammed one of Woody’s old movie titles to name his GDC session. Ron, who scaled back his lifestyle for two years and bet all his chips on Goo, had a lot of great advice … but it was a little like listening to a guy who had just gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel and lived to tell about it. He’s a big advocate of self-funding, eschewing publishing deals, and distributing digitally, but that’s to say nothing of all the other folks whose barrels ended up bloody, sore, and very very dead. His least useful piece of advice was “make a great game”. But here are a few decent Ron tips:

1. negotiate retail deals last, after digital distribution. Get flat fee, per-country deals. Get the money first before handing over the game.
2. don’t waste time on DRM (Doobie Brothers Rheumatic Disease) – the piracy rate for non-DRM games is just as high. It’s like that saying: locks keep the honest people out. i asked our game dev Jeff to spend a bunch of time rigging up a serial code system for the release of Kahoots … he may not be happy when i tell him to throw his work out the window. (Jeff: if you’re reading this, i still love you)
3. release globally at a uniform price

Someone asked Ron about his next game. He quipped “it’s called ‘The Sophomore Effect: An Intentionally Mediocre Game’.” If he came up with that on the spot, i’m envious.

One audience member asked him about the free-to-play model. He said “dunno – you’d have to ask some of the Flash guys about that,” prompting me to yell from the back of the room “IT SUCKS!” See the Pimp My Game series for reasons why.

Session: 2008 IGF Finalist Overview
Speakers: Two dudes.

This session was a quick rundown of the twenty-something entries into the IGF (Ichthyosaurus Grandmothering Fund). These were the ones that caught my fancy:

1. Cortex Command Deformable terrain, like Worms, that you can mine for gold. In development for over eight years (!!)
2. Feist Nice-looking silhouetted game, a la Patapon
3. Machinarium A GORGEOUS semi-steampunk graphic adventure game. Possibly the prettiest video game i’ve ever seen in my whole entire life here on this planet Earth where we as people all live
4. Mightier Print the puzzles from the game, like on an actual printer. Solve them with a real-live pen. Scan them back in or point a webcam at them – the game creates a three-dee level from your drawing. You can also draw and scan in your own lead character for the game, but at that point, i wonder whether i might not be happier playing a game that someone built for me, instead of drawing the damned thing up myself. It’s like those Korean barbecue restaurants where you cook your own food. Uh … isn’t that why i came to a restaurant in the first place? So i wouldn’t have to cook??
5. Musaic Box Underneath a totally not-awesome hidden object game lies an interesting mechanic where you have to assemble audio-enabled puzzle pieces into a song.
6. Osmos Like Feeding Frenzy or the first level of Spore, except the graphics are bearable.
7. Snapshot Solve puzzles in this puzzle platformer by taking pictures of the level and placing them on the screen to build the terrain and grab hard-to-reach goodies

Session: The iPhone Bag of Tricks
Speaker: Guido Henkel

Guido may have bored some iPhone devs to tears with his talk, but since we’re just embarking on our iPhone adventure, i appreciated what he had to say. He gave the advice to forget about Apple’s built-in Core Graphics and Cocoa APIs, and to aim straight for the hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES stuff, a sentiment i’ve heard echoed by at least one other dude, so it must be true. He also listed code to pull off the following feats:

1. start the iPhone simulator in landscape mode (hint: edit the pList)
2. detect the user’s chosen language
3. retrieve the version number of the device (for tech support and troubleshooting)
4. disabling sleep mode so that your app does not turn off (he used this on a guitar tuner app. i heard Apple doesn’t dig it when you do this though.)
5. loading and saving files
6. launching external apps
7. writing to the console window
8. fun with audio (he advocates using AudioQueue instead of AudioServices)

Session: Porting Games to the iPhone
Speaker: i dunno. i came in late. Go look it up.

The speaker ported Scrabble, Yahtzee and Sim City to the iPhone. This was a series of mostly ho-hum tips, but i pulled out a few seemingly obvious gems that might not cross every programmer’s mind:

1. provide both visual and auditory feedback on button taps
2. put button labels and feedback animations above where the finger taps the button. i didn’t agree with the speaker there: it’s very unnatural to have an icon label above the icon. But making sure the animation radiates out from and above the finger is sound advice.
3. keep buttons at the edges and (preferably) bottom of the screen, because the hand can often cover up the whole screen by pressing a misplaced button
4. eyes naturally gravitate to the top of the screen, while fingers naturally gravitate to the bottom
5. support user music wherever possible (ie users can play stuff from their own mp3 playlists while playing your game)

Session: iPhone Development for Indies
Speakers: Adam Saltsman, fabulously wealthy creator of Wurdle (what i blogged about), and Two Other Dudes, fabulously wealthy creators of Fieldrunners

Adam was a very humble speaker, and only took a few minutes. The other guys were not, and gobbled up the rest of the session time saying essentially nothing. The one hot tip i pulled out of this session (aside from “be in the right place at the right time, and bring a snorkel cuz j00 gonna be buried in teh monays), was this: prepare super hi-res (2000-3000 pixels) treatments of your game’s screenshots and wordmark, with and without backgrounds, in case the press (and more importantly, Apple) come calling, wanting to promote your game. This will save a last-minute scramble (which, Adam assured the audience, was worth it, as he massaged his shoulder blades with a back-scratcher made of tightly-wrapped hundred dollar bills).

Do I Have to Pay for Half?

It’s an early morning tomorrow, as a Canadian agency (CIAC? OMDC? The feds? i can’t keep them all straight) have invited me to do a one-minute pitch at a breakfast hosted by a Dutch delegation. Also pitching will be a fellow i met late in the day, who seems to be very excited about his fly-swatting Wii game which he calls …. wait for it … “Desperate Houseflies“. He has a movie script for it. i shit you negative. Apparently, the breaky will be attended by illustrious personnel from high-falutin’ places like EA. i may just bring my camera to capture the looks on their faces when he delivers his pitch.

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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