Day Two at GDC 09 is down. My dogs are barking, and my feet hurt too.

The day began with a breakfast organized by a Dutch delegation and the Canadian government. The meeting was held at Jillian’s, a restaurant/bar across the street from the convention. They served the best croissant i’ve ever had in my life. Warm, flaky, and fresh. Much like myself.

The Canadian government put out a call to Canuck companies to do a one minute elevator pitch to the crowd. i signed up, and was a little intimidated by the number of people in the room. But before long, my theatre background kicked in. i had practiced my pitch from the moment the alarm went off, and by the time i delivered it to the group at breakfast, i had it down cold. i think i did a decent job. Then i broke into a rendition of “Aint’ Nothin’ Like a Dame” and ended the whole thing with jazz hands. It went well.

Here’s a rundown of some of the sessions i attended and the gems i picked up there:

Session: Navigating for Success in Today’s Mobile Landscape
Speaker: Travis Boatman, VP Worldwide Studios – EA Mobile

Travis’s session was a just big ad for EA’s newest products on the iPhone. Very disappointing. i rather wished the session title would call a spade a spade. Maybe some folks legitimately want to see an EA showcase? i for one didn’t.

Travis also came out the great gems like “smartphones are not good for the mobile business.” That was an old sound bite of his that the press latched on to. He qualified it somewhat this morning, but it seemed like a pretty myopic thing to say at any point in history, ever. Kind of like saying “scissors are not good for the craft industry.”

Session: The Indie Advantage? The View from Both Sides
Speaker: Rod Humble – EA

Another EA guy, Rod is a long-time producer who has straddled the big publisher side of things at EA, and the Indie side by creating his own games in his spare time. Among these is The Marriage, an artsy and abstract offering about himself and his wife. Rod led with a joke from an unnamed comedian:

Someone asked me how i got so rich. i used to go down to the fresh fruit market and buy apples from the produce truck for ten cents apiece. i’d take the apples home, polish them, and then sell them uptown for fifty cents each. Then my uncle died and i inherited four million dollars.

Rod called indie game development “a great way to blow fifty thousand dollars” (although, he added, there are faster ways – namely the stock market). He also recommended that his intelligent audience vie for a life of crime, because most criminals are dumb, and smart people would do very well (and “probably not get caught”). He listed a number of things for indie game developers not to worry about:

1. publishers who you believe are out to get you (they’re not – they just want a great ROI from you)
2. NDA’s (amount of secrecy is inversely proportional to coolness of idea)
3. fighting with a publisher’s lawyers. You WILL get out-lawyered, so don’t bother.
4. message boards, which Rod claims aren’t a good measure of your actual customers. i don’t agree with him – i’ve seen first-hand the power of a strong community driving sales. Imagine if places like Habbo Hotel ignored their boards.
5. Peers
6. This week’s top ten. (i know a company that builds its games purely based on what’s selling right now. i wouldn’t want to live like that myself.)

Rod suggested to the audience that they SHOULD worry about:

1. forecasting sales
2. development cost, which should be less than 30% of your projected revenues (the average is less than 20%). These numbers surprised me.
3. your marketing spend should be around 10-20% of your projected revenue
4. your schedule – it’s important to stay on-track and finish something
5. what to do when you’re overrun (look at cost-cutting, lay-offs, shutting down, etc). He also suggesting that knowing what “overrun” looks like is important. Is that when your annual take is zero? When you’re in five thousand dollars of debt? Fifty thousand?

The best thing Rod said was to think about the games market like a book store. Everything’s pooling towards the Action, Sci Fi and Puzzle sections of the store, but there are gaping holes that you can fill. What about romance? Self-help? Religion? Mystery? Lots to explore here.

Session: The Art of Independent Game Promotion
Speakers: Kyle Gabler from 2DBoy (World of Goo) and Phil Fish from Polytron (Fez, which you HAVE to see in motion. i had only ever seen screenshots and didn’t know what the big deal was. Wow! It’s a big deal.)

Here are some tips the guys shared:

1. Spend money on PR, not marketing (i think they meant “PR, not advertising” – PR is marketing)
2. Don’t spend money – just talk. Give interviews, do podcasts, meet people, etc.
3. Make a trailer. Then they showed Michel Gagne’s Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet trailer. i saw this last year, and am bummed out that the game’s not here yet.
4. don’t use overplayed songs in your trailer, including o Fortuna from Carmina Burana, any Kill Bill song, the main theme from Lord of the Rings, and Yakkety Sax from Benny Hill (alright, boys – i’ll try my best, but no promises. Oo-er.)
5. don’t be a dick. They referenced the creator of Bob’s Game, who locked himself in his room when Nintendo wouldn’t give him a dev kit. Bob apparently told everyone later it was all a hilarious PR stunt. i thought he was saving face, but the speakers thought it was just a lousy joke. Either way, dickish.
6. use big eyes in your screenshots. Kyle noticed that media outlets kept using the same shot from World of Goo. The big difference on that screen was a big character with huge eyes. So the guys added more character stuff with big eyes to the entire game, to great effect.
7. A PR crisis is good for the industry (AKA “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”). They cited Jonathan Blow’s pricing “scandal” with Braid on XBLA, among others
8. Don’t show your stuff too early. That’s why i waited until the game was 85% complete before announcing Kahoots.

The very last slide of their presentation was worth the price of admission to me: a list of press outlets, their writers, and those writers’ email addresses. Holy cow. i didn’t get a picture, and the slide was up very briefly. i spoke to Kyle afterward and very much hope that he keeps to his promise of posting the slide on the 2DBoy site.

Session: Beyond Single Player: Hunting for an Artistic Niche
Speaker: Jason Rohrer

i accidentally found myself at this session, expecting a different one to start. i would never voluntarily attend a session where the subject was “are games art”. As expected, the talk was a rather large wank. Rohrer developed Passage, a one-off about life and death, which i was tempted to satirize with a game i’d call “Pretentious”, in Rohrer’s same pixel art style and shrinky game window. As it turns out, Jason seems well-liked by the indie community and appears to be a super-nice guy, so i spare him the wrath of my cynicism. He is, however, distractingly thin, and shaped somewhat like Abe from the Oddworld games.

Session: Hothead Games: Episodic Content and the Evolving Indie Landscape
Speakers: Vlad Ceraldi and Joel de Young from Hothead Games (Deathspank, Penny Arcade Adventures)

This was my favourite session of the day. The guys made some sound futurist claims:

1. the VCR was released in 1977, and the Sundance Film Festival launched a year later. Digital distribution is the VCR of our time: a completely game-changing technology that will (and has begun to) revolutionize the game industry.
2. BluRay is the last mass market disc format

They offered this advice, echoing some sentiments from Kyle and Phil’s talk:

1. sell direct (ie offer the game on your website)
2. go cross-platform
3. make some noise about your product

The fellas also gave a rundown on why the episodic model they’d pursued for Penny Arcade Adventures wasn’t really where it’s at: chiefly because of the huge drop-off from part one to part two, and their inability to pre-sell an entire season as a fund-raising exercise to cover off development.

i also attended two roundtables. They were both a bust, because the speakers treated them like lectures, instead of exploiting the format and actively soliciting discussion from the peanut gallery. An excellent discussion broke out at one roundtable regardless, where a TV and mobile guy from TBS gave his perspective on why the inferior television ad model is so entrenched. We agreed that intertia was holding the ad industry back from embracing digital advertising, His explanation, which i’ve heard before, is that the metrics aren’t compelling enough. But he’s the only guy who actually explained that perspective to me, which i’ve never understood (the metrics you can gather from online advertising, compared to teevee, are obviously staggering). Here’s his explanation: sure, there’s data, but no one is qualifying it. No one is assigning value to any one metric. Are impressions good? How good? What’s the value? What about click-throughs? Or time spent? We’ve got the numbers – we just don’t have agreement on which numbers will form the basis of how ads are purchased, monitored and valued across digital advertising channels.

Since companies can easily mis-report their metrics, we both saw the need for some third party company to provide secure stats reporting as an industry standard. He mentioned a few folks who are trying to do this, but no one seems to be getting a foothold; i suggested that the industry, not the advertisers, could drive that a little by rallying around one company and proactively picking a winner. At the end of it all, he was much more optimistic about the whole thing than i was, claiming the share of ad revenue would improve dramatically after three years. My gut tells me that the 30-second teevee ad protects so many interests that death and retirement are what’s holding back a bigger ad spend on digital means.

Ain’t No Party Like a Crowded Sweaty Nerd Sausage Party

Tuesday was party night. i hopped around two four different parties: one by the Canadian government, a Casual Games Association shindig (both at Jillian’s, sans croissants), an indie gamer party (too noisy and terrible for networking – i left immediately) and the IGDA party, which is always great for spotting crazies. It’s kind of like being in a room packed with first-round American Idol contestants, except they’re all in (or want to be in) the game industry.

And on that note, my Desperate Houseflies friend who i mentioned in yesterday’s post did a one-minute pitch at the breakfast this morning. While the pitch was completely incoherent (it had something to do with love), he came off surprisingly charming and good-natured. Not quite the train wreck i was expecting, but i still had no idea what he was pitching. It didn’t matter anyway: now that i’ve tasted a croissant from Jillians, the Earth is free to crash into the sun and kill us all in a fiery smash-up. Damn, that was one solid croissant.

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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