It was day three at GDC 09, and my armour has started to crack. i simply lacked the energy to slump out to the 9AM keynote by Nintendo president Satoru Iwata. i missed out on a free DS game, but as i mentioned earlier, i have a new handheld lover these days.

One highlight that i heard repeated from Iwata’s talk was the chart that he showed depicting the penetration of the three major consoles, with the Wii naturally dominating. Then he overlayed the sales data for his Wii Balance Board, which appeared to nip at the total sales for the Playstation 3. Iwata’s point (other than the damning depiction of Sony’s staggering failure) is that developers should consider developing more software for the Wii Balance board. My worry is that the same crowd who picked up Wii Fit with the Balance Board are the same folks who are perfectly happy with the copy of Wii Sports that shipped with the system. These people may not even want more software. Who knows?

Here are the highlights from my day:

Session: From Bungie to Bootstrapping: Starting an Independent Game Studio
Speaker: Max Hoberman, President and Founder of Certain Affinity Inc.

Max is a former Bungie employee who headed up multiplayer development for the Halo games, which you may have heard of. He set off to found Certain Affinity Inc. with nothing but the shirt on his back, a strong relationship with a world-reknowned studio responsible for one of the best-selling game series of all time, and eighty thousand dollars of his own money for an initial investment. Clearly, the odds were stacked against him.

Despite such a strong starting position, Max outlined the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned, and they turned out to be many of the things i’ve faced with Untold Entertainment in the past year. Max’s talk was very densely packed and very timely and very crucial for me to hear; i filled four pages in my notebook with content from his presentation. i’m not going to regurgitate it all here, but allow me to pull out a few highlights:

1. Not everyone you hire is fit for a startup. (i can attest to this.)
2. Don’t take shortcuts when hiring, lowering your standards when the need for staff is pressing
3. the smaller your team, the more critical their group dynamics
4. maintain high quality standards. This is very important for Untold Entertainment, as it is for other studios. You may not always be able to compete on price, because other developers and studios could undercut you (even foolishly, to their companies’ detrement.) The best way to remain competetive is to consistently do good work, and to consistently deliver an excellent experience with the services you provide.
5. Expect high standards regardless of role. i liked this point. Effem Foods (Mars) is a good example of this. While it’s a bit culty, they’re structured so that every person in the organization effects every other person. The guy on the low rung of the ladder in shipping is directly linked to the top-earning sales manager. Neither of them can succeed if one is not performing optimally.
6. Hire experienced people, especially when you’re just starting out. i see a lot of game development companies, especially here in Toronto, building their business with students and other inexpensive sources of labour. i was concerned i was doing the wrong thing by hiring very skilled and experienced talent. i was vindicated with this point in Max’s presentation.

Max also spoke about what he called the “myth of long-term relationships”, which says that your best and steadiest clients will always be there to give you work. They won’t. i’ve had a number of clients disappear on me – not necessarily because we under-performed, but because they’re subject to their own pressures and forces. As Max put it, “publisher interest waxes and wanes based on their own circumstances and priorities.” So it’s important that if you have a steady client who feeds you lots of work, you don’t get too comfortable or complacent in thinking that the relationship will always be that way. The client may leave for a very long period of time before finally returning.

Session: The Inspiration Behind Nintendo DSi Development
Speaker: Masato Kuwahara from Nintendo (he has a gigantic title that i won’t bother to type)

This session was in Japanese, and many of us wore headsets to listen to the translation. The engagement with the speaker was therefore broken, and due in large part to my exhaustion, i fell asleep during this session. i had hoped that the speaker would get into the nitty gritty of development for Nintendo’s newest handheld, the DSi. i wanted him to lift the veil and give us a peek behind who you have to talk to, what you have to buy, and how you have to program to address the new unique aspects of the hardware (two cameras?? That’s crazytalkin’.)

Unforunately, Kuwahara’s talk was essentially another product demo and a rundown of the features on the device. He showed one chart of sales data for the digitally distributed DSiWare games vs. their physically distributed counter-parts. i won’t even relay the data, because i think it’s way too early to refer to a chart like that. Let the chips settle first, to ensure that the data are reliable.

It was interesting to note how all of the gimmicky add-ons that Nintendo has toyed around with over the years (the Game Boy Camera, Printer and Wireless Adapter) have more or less ended up fused into one device. My overall impression of the DSi is that it looks very childish, and the UI and graphics seem to date back to ten or fifteen years ago. i was quite disappointed with nearly everything i saw on the screen. It’s the opposite of slick.

i do have a really bad-ass concept for a DSiWare game, though. :)

Session: Little Hands, Foul Moods and Runny Noses 2.0: The Research You Should Know When Making Games for Kids
Speaker: Carla Englebrecht Fisher

Carla is a very watchable self-professed geek girl who ran a great presentation. She threw out a ton of information, mostly about about kids’ physical development, that impacts the way they interface with software. Here are some nuggets:

1. 20% of nine-year-olds can’t kick or throw a ball. (of note: 100% of me at age nine couldn’t kick or throw either)
2. girls are faster to develop fine motor control, while boys are faster to develop gross motor control
3. abnormal or delayed motor development can lead to a kid getting teased, having a lower IQ, and experiencing learning disabilities. We often think of mental and physical prowess as sitting in two separate camps, so it was interesting to hear how they’re linked.
4. Stylus and touch-screen control beat out mouse and keyboard control in the kids’s space
5. when targeting kids, you should program onPress/mouseDown button events instead of onRelease/onLift/mouseUp events. Carla said that if something doesn’t happen immediately on press, a kid will keep his finger on the button, and will actually push harder on the screen to make something happen, instead of releasing his finger.
6. children maintain their balance better with their eyes open

Floored

i skipped the last session of the day to help the Canadian feds out with a video interview, but our wires got crossed and it didn’t happen. So i spent the back half of the afternoon on the expo floor, listening to demo jockeys from Unity3D and Garage Games (Torque) extol the virtues of their iPhone game development engines. It sounds like both programs have their problems. If you’ve used one or the other or both, i’d LOVE to hear your perspective.

i also skipped the IGF (Iguana Gold-Farming) awards show tonight, which i now realize would have been my chance to meet the Squashy Software developers of Platypus/Cletus Clay fame. i’m not sure they’d receive me with open arms, because it might not be so hot to be one of two developers building a game in clay. But Platypus was an inspiration to me, and we were both turned on by The Neverhood long ago. Hating me for creating a clay game is like one pixel artist hating another pixel artist for working in that style. It doesn’t make sense for there to be bad blood, so i hope there isn’t any. i just want to get that handshake in before i head back to Toronto.

The TunaSnax/Squashy guys mentioned in a Twitter post today that they had people playing with plasticine at the IGF booth. i was going to bring some along for promotional reasons as well, but i can’t IMAGINE what the folks at the airport would make of me transporting bricks of clay in my carry-on. That’s a great way to get your nads rigged up to a car battery, i dare say.

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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