Tag Archives: GDC

Shenmue HD Re-Releases Can Only Help Shenmue III’s Chances

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Shenmue HD Re Releases Can Only Help Shenmue IIIs Chances

Shenmue is one of those beloved franchises that, as much as they love it, many fans have accepted will never be seen again short of dusting off a Dreamcast. Yet there might be a chance for the series to be revived in some capacity through Sega’s HD classic game re-releases. If Jet Set Radio can get the treatment, why not Shenmue?

Gamereactor (via NeoGAF) spoke with Sega associate brand manager Ben Harborne at GDC about the upcoming HD version of Jet Set Radio, and he briefly touched upon fan requests for other Dreamcast re-releases. He said Shenmue and Skies of Arcadia are among the most frequently asked for, adding with a smile, “I can’t say yes or no, but we may be working on them.”

Following that GamerZines claimed a source has indicated Shenmue and Shenmue II are to receive the HD treatment. Not only that, but Shenmue HD has been “finished for well over a year.” The reason for the delay in releasing it, the source said, is because Sega has been evaluating what it will do with the franchise as a whole, including the fate of Shenmue III.

It’s been nearly ten years since a new Shenmue was released in North America. The original, created with a massive budget (albeit an oft-exaggerated one), was released here in 2000 but was ahead of its time. Sales, which received no help by the game only being available on Dreamcast, were not as strong as the game deserved or needed in light of the investment Sega had made in it. The sequel was released on Dreamcast and Xbox (only the latter version made it to North America, where it came out in 2002) and also disappointed at retail.

4f682 033 Shenmue HD Re Releases Can Only Help Shenmue IIIs Chances

An MMO marketed at the Asian market, Shenmue Online, never panned out. Creator Yu Suzuki was able to get a new game made, albeit a mobile/social game for the Yahoo Mobage service in Japan. It was shut down after only about a year.

Suzuki hadn’t lost his interest in a new Shenmue game as recently as last year’s GDC; during a panel he spoke about how Sega would allow him to make Shenmue III but that there was a “budget issue” standing in the way. Since then he has left his job at Sega for an advisory role with the company and become a producer at Premium Agency.

Sega could likely get by with the HD re-releases without his assistance. It’s not as if the ones Sega has done to date have drastically altered the original games — in the case of Jet Set Radio some of the original’s music is gone due to licensing issues, and the right stick (which was not available on Dreamcast) can now be used to control the camera. But if Shenmue III were to happen, one would think Suzuki has to be at the helm.

While the chances of the game happening remain slim, the HD re-releases present as good of a chance as any for fans to convince Sega to back it — petitions are one thing; money is quite another. Strong sales of the original games on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network could send a message, and I have no doubt there would be more than a few fans willing to buy the games on both platforms just to make sure that message is clear. Hell, with Kickstarter being shown as a potential avenue for funding a niche game with an ardent fan base, perhaps Sega could look there for some assistance in coming up with the money to make Shenmue III.

Failing that, they could always ask Notch.

How Gravity Rush’s Designers Took the Third Option

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a6cde 388 How Gravity Rushs Designers Took the Third Option

The existential crisis facing the Japanese game industry lurked beneath the surface of this year’s Game Developers Conference with uncomfortable omnipresence, often giving a sense of Japanese designers coming to San Francisco humbly to take notes on what sells in the U.S., only to be scorned and derided for their trouble. Of course, it wasn’t really so dire as all that, but one could certainly be forgiven for walking away with that impression.

So it should come as little surprise that, like many Japanese devs at GDC, Gravity Rush’s Yoshiaki Yamaguchi devoted a fair amount of his panel to the conundrum of appealing to both Japanese and American audiences. Unlike many designers, though, Yamaguchi’s team side-stepped the conventional wisdom that games have to carry a conventional, realistic “American” feel or an anime-inspired “Japanese” feel. Rather than simply falling into either camp, the creators of Gravity Rush have chosen to draw upon a third option: Bande dessinée, or French comics.

“I felt that games these days are starting to look too much the same,” said Yamaguchi. “They either use a realistic style or an anime style…. There’s art that looks real, and art that feels real, and I feel bande dessinées is better suited to the latter.”

Going European certainly isn’t unheard of in non-European games, of course; the Professor Layton series is defined by its warm, Ghibli-esque visual style. Yamaguchi, however, very specifically drew inspiration from French illustrators Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Enki Bilal in order to create a visual style of which it would be (as Yamaguchi says) “difficult to determine the country of origin.”

And Gravity Rush is a truly stunning game. Not only does its gameplay appear novel — applying the gravity-inverting mechanics of games like VVVVVV to an open, three-dimensional world — its style is striking. It combines polygons with cel-shading, painterly effects, and highly saturated unconventional color schemes. It looks like nothing else on the market, even within the Western indie space, and makes a strong case for PlayStation Vita’s merit as a platform.

“We sought to strike a balance between realism and drawing, creating harmony with the CG,” said Yamaguchi. “But of course simply focusing on graphics will not move the audience… it’s like moving different strands of string to weave a tapestry.”

The team’s solution was to create something they call a “living background,” environments that create the “sensation that the character actually exists in that space.

“Games can do something that novels and movies can’t,” Yamaguchi said. “The player can interact with them. The concept is that the world that exists here is not simply a picture, but a living, breathing entity. The environment must convey information to the player; when players do not receive this information, they start to ignore their surroundings. As soon as the player starts to think of the background as a picture, they’ll stop paying attention to it.” Due to the nature of Gravity Rush’s gameplay (which sees players flipping heroine Kat’s personal sense of gravity across a variety of axes, allowing her to traverse any surface above a certain size), the team felt it essential to get Kat to look like she belonged within the world she inhabits. The illustrated-yet-natural style of bande dessinée served as the creators’ waypoint for creating this synthesis. At a time when rhetoric about the origins and nature of games so deeply polarizes the industry, it’s a pleasure to see someone approach their work from a different angle — and to come up with such an intriguing creation in the process.

GDC 2012: What Can the Next Generation Learn from Gaming History?
1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish’s mission at this year’s Game Developers Conference is informed by his enthusiasm for new ideas and affection for the games he grew up playing. Is it possible to march forward while occasionally glancing back? That’s the question he’s investigating this week.

How Saints Row: The Third Nearly Failed

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How Saints Row: The Third Nearly Failed

“Visual and quality issues were the number one complaint in Saints Row 2,” said Design Director Scott Phillips at a Saints Row: The Third postmortem at GDC on Thursday. Despite the retail performance of the second game, he explained that developer Volition couldn’t take success for granted. Producing a goofy breakout hit didn’t automatically give them the resources or insight to improve upon the game. Phillips documented how the team created a better and more cohesive experience by improving upon the last title’s tone, quality, and scope.

“How you’re going to say something can be more important than what you’re saying,” explained Phillips. Nothing could be more important for a game like Saints Row: The Third than setting the proper tone. He felt that the previous two games in the series suffered from incongruous emotional moments falling too close together — SR2 tasked you with committing a brutal murder in cold-blood after an extended “vehicle surfing” moment. He stated that the team on the first Saints Row “wanted to make…an MTV music video,” but that clashed with some of the goofier missions.

Once the game’s leads decided on the tone they would like to take, they found trouble trying to communicate that to their subordinates. “By the time Saints Row: The Third shipped, only 20% of the team had shipped a Saints Row title,” explained Phillips. “This meant that people didn’t have that automatic knowledge of Saints Row…We had a lack of buy-in as to what the game was. People didn’t know what they were making. Is fart-in-a-jar [weapon] too far? …I had to re-explain constantly.”

The leads responded by producing a short video featuring scenes from movies that fit the tone they were aiming for — Hot Fuzz and Bad Boys II among others. Those that still didn’t understand found help as the team produced prototypes and pre-visualizations. This reflects the need for better communication on larger projects like SR3, something that can be time consuming and expensive to maintain.

How Saints Row: The Third Nearly Failed

Since the team wanted to turn their breakout-hit franchise into a AAA tent-pole release, they stepped up their playtesting on the game extensively. This was done to ensure that things were paced properly and that the “holy-shit” setpiece moments would really blow the player away, while still keeping the moment-to-moment gameplay entertaining. All of those show-stopping moments required a significant investment of time and resources, and a designer’s imagination could have easily outpaced the ability and budget of the team. Phillips emphasized the importance of controlling the scope of SR3. Pre-visualization — like a studio might commission a movie — gave the team a clear idea as to what they should aim for. He showed the audience the pre-viz sequence for the game’s opening mission — where the player robs a bank, jumps out of a plane, and parachutes back into the vehicle, then out again. The rough sequence (which featured little more than marble white, untextured models) let artists and others learn what the leads were looking for. Previously the team relied on written communication which Phillips found to be vague and prone to misunderstanding.

The proper tone and score were only discovered through trial and error. Phillips explained that for the first six months of the game’s life it starred an undercover agent infiltrating the Saints. Retooling the story caused even more confusion. For over a year the game featured an Assassin’s Creed-style parkour system that allowed the player to effortlessly leap over cars, but processing limitations forced designers to remove the system that the team had spent a great deal of time implementing.

Problems like this are an unavoidable part of game development on even the smallest titles. But the economics of scale involved in modern AAA development exponentially increase costs, and a title has to sell more to stay profitable. Though Phillips didn’t address it directly, his talk reveals why “go big or go home” has become the mantra for hardcore console games in the past few years.

GDC 2012: Gaming’s Vanishing Middle Class
The disappearance of mid-sized developers and publishers worries associate editor Ryan Winterhalter. How is the industry preparing for the age of the very large and very small? Will innovation eventually create a new middle, or is the future filled with nothing but Call of Duty-style blockbusters?

Harvest Moon Creator Yasuhiro Wada on His Game’s Cross-Gender Appeal

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Harvest Moon Creator Yasuhiro Wada on His Games Cross Gender Appeal

Take a look at the list of retro game post-mortems at GDC 2012, and Harvest Moon may seem out-of-place; after all, there’s no question that Gauntlet and Fallout changed the industry, but a niche farming sim? On the surface, at least, Harvest Moon doesn’t seem as relevant as the other old games being dissected this year, but this late Super NES release actually laid the groundwork for outrageously popular titles like The Sims and Animal Crossing by showing the world that day-to-day drudgery could make for a highly addictive experience. Original developer Yasuhiro Wada (now of Toybox) and Natsume Vice President of Operations Graham Markay sat down with me after the panel to discuss how such an atypical concept has been able to thrive over these past 16 years.

Harvest Moon owes a great deal of its success to cross-gender appeal; women make up nearly a third of the game’s Japanese audience, a percentage doubled by its American user base. But, initially, Wada never intended for Harvest Moon to strictly appeal to women; later in the series’ history, the “for girls” releases would feature the same essential experience as the games with male protagonists. And further down the line, male and female protagonists could be selected from the very start, allowing players to decide on their gender of choice without having to buy an entirely different game.

Wada explains the inclusive approach that makes his series so appealing: “[Harvest Moon] doesn’t dumb anything down for either gender. If you play as a guy it’s not like all of a sudden you’re this big, buff guy, and you get all the best equipment… And if you play as a female you’re [not] this [busty]-looking [character].” He added that his team didn’t always show such sensitivity; in the original “for girls” version of the PlayStation Harvest Moon, the game outright ends when your female protagonist gets married — sending an implicit message that made many fans uncomfortable. This problem was remedied in future versions of Harvest Moon, giving Wada a window into the importance of listening to fan feedback.

“Girls were playing the boys’ version to begin with,” says Natsume’s Markay, “They liked what they were playing, even though the protagonist was a male.” Wada added, “If there was a difference, the fan base would complain, and we wanted to avoid that.”

Little is known about Wada’s new venture, Toybox — named after the original Harvest Moon development team — aside from its mission statement of “We are gaming for Love, Peace and Earth.” Though this may sound a bit touchy-feely, Toybox has already won over the hearts of gamers worldwide with the announcement of a Deadly Premonition special edition, due at some point in the future for the PS3. At this point, it’s uncertain if Toybox will bring us the same gleefully creative Wada creations as the recent Little King’s Story, but anyone interested in his idiosyncratic, heartwarming touch should look forward to this year’s E3, where Toybox’s newest creations may be unveiled.

GDC 2012: How Can Games be Friendlier to Women?
1UP features editor Bob Mackey will spend this year’s Game Developers Conference investigating why games have a habit of turning off 50 percent of the world’s population. Is there hope for this industry, or we continue to wallow in regressive stereotypes until the end of time?

A Quick Look Back at Heavy Rain in the Shadow of Kara

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Just before David Cage’s Game Developers Conference presentation yesterday — at the exact moment Apple announced its new iPad, in fact — the Heavy Rain director was stuck in a meeting room doing press appointments. A few hours later, he would entertain the Internet with a tech demo called “Kara” showing a robotic girl convince herself that she is human (seen above).

Much like Quantic Dream’s “The Casting” tech demo released prior to Heavy Rain, the team designed Kara as a glimpse into the technology they are experimenting with rather than as a hint to the content of their next game. So during my appointment with Cage, I clarified a few points on the video — the virtual actress Kara won’t appear in the team’s next game like Mary Smith from The Casting did in Heavy Rain, Sony funded Kara, and Cage’s team is working exclusively with Sony at the moment. But since he couldn’t say much more than that, I figured I’d use our limited time to sneak in a handful of questions about Heavy Rain in retrospect.

1UP: If you look back at Heavy Rain now, now that you’ve have time to let it seep in, what do you think you would do differently if making that game all over again?

DC: Nothing. I mean, there’s nothing I would like to change. I think Heavy Rain was the best we could do at the time with what we knew.

A Quick Look Back at Heavy Rain in the Shadow of Kara

1UP: That was at the time, though. If you were doing it now…

DC: You know, it’s useless to think, “Oh if I’d done this, if I’d done that.” What matters is what you’re doing now, and what you’re going to do in the future, not redoing the past again and again. I’m pretty proud of what we achieved with Heavy Rain — with its good sides and its mistakes and everything — because it’s who we were at the time we made it. It explains who we are today.

1UP: I remember before the game came out or maybe right around that time, you said you wanted to do multiple DLC episodes, one for each character that wasn’t explored in the main game. Obviously that didn’t happen, and I assume that is now off the table.

DC: [Nods in agreement]

1UP: Why didn’t that pan out?

DC: Well, after Heavy Rain, we discussed the situation with Sony, and we said, “OK we are prepared to spend a little bit more time on Heavy Rain, but we don’t want to do a sequel. And we don’t want to spend another two years doing DLC or whatever.” The team wanted to move forward. I wanted to move forward. We had other ideas that we wanted to test. So we had to make a choice between developing the Move version or the DLC. And we ended up agreeing with Sony that the Move version should be what’s next. As a studio, it gave us time to start working on Kara at the same time, because this demo is a year old actually. We’ve made a lot of progress since then with the engine, with the technology, with everything.

A Quick Look Back at Heavy Rain in the Shadow of Kara

1UP: So if you were to do Heavy Rain DLC, which it sounds like you’re not, which would be the first character that you’d delve into?

DC: Actually I wrote four DLCs giving the backgrounds of the four main characters. So there was a very good explanation for the past of Shelby, of Madison, of Ethan, all these characters. It was a prequel in a way.

1UP: Would you ever release those scripts?

DC: Oh, not really. We make games. We don’t release scripts.

1UP: If Sony came to you and said, “We want Heavy Rain on Vita,” would that be something you’d be interested in?

DC: Oh Vita is a very, very interesting platform. Now, would we want to go back to Heavy Rain and port it? I don’t think so and I don’t think that’s the value of the studio. The value of the studio is really innovation in creating new IPs and discovering new ideas.

1UP: What if another team was to do the work? Do you think that game would make sense in a portable environment?

DC: I think so. I think so. Maybe the format would have to change to put in episodes and shorter pieces of it to be played as you travel, but I think the narrative format makes a lot of sense on portable hardware.

GDC 2012: The Future of Indie Games
During this year’s Game Developers Conference, 1UP’s Matt Leone is hunting for games and trends that hint at what we can expect from indie games down the road. Really, he just wants an excuse to play lots of cool experimental stuff. And to write more about Heavy Rain.

Crazy Facts We Just Learned About Portal 2

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Crazy Facts We Just Learned About Portal 2

Even if it’s not strictly related to my topic, I couldn’t resist going to “Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn’t Need One” panel for Portal 2. Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, in the space of 40 minutes, detailed some of the craziness and creativity in creating a sequel that would be more compared to Grand Theft Auto III rather than Titanic 2. The talk alternated between sage advice (“if you’re going to do a comedy game, make it co-op”) and amusing quips (“so in the end, we finished and released the game, and there was one clear winner for most game of the year awards: Skyrim“), but below are the biggest takeaways from their talk:

Portal 2 Was Originally Set In The ’80s And Had Giant Chickens And Smoking Robots

Last year’s Final Hours of Portal 2 app for the iPad had already revealed that Valve’s initial approach to Portal 2 was a project featuring a new gameplay mechanic codenamed “F-Stop.” The developers still think the central mechanic of F-Stop can be used for another game, so there’s still no description of what “F-Stop” actually means. Though, they released a few more details about Portal 2′s inception.

For instance: Cave Johnson (who was mostly relegated to the middle act of Portal 2) was the “whole deal” in F-Stop. And that while the writing team consciously removed GLaDOS as a character, she had a cameo as a little robot called “Betty” that had a “Gyroscopic Liability Absolver and Disk Operating System,” and every time Cave spoke, Betty/GLADOS would chime in about how Aperture Science wasn’t responsible for whatever Cave just mentioned. Faliszek and Wolpaw mentioned that the dual dialogue of Cave saying one thing and GLADOS saying another was inspired by how commercials for medicine often featured imagery of puppies while a stern voice warned about side effects such as “rectal bleeding.”

Also, while the setting started with the ’50s, much of F-Stop was actually set in the 1980s, and focused on a robot uprising. I unfortunately do not have these images, but Valve’s Powerpoint slide featured images like mannequins having a smoke break, and a giant chicken running amok within an Aperture office space.

The Co-op Campaign Originally Featured A Sub-Plot About A Bad Garfield Knock-Off

The co-op campaign’s initial premise was that GLaDOS would continue to perform tests using the robots introduced in the single-player, but without a human observer around to interpret the results, all her testing data would be in a “weird Schrodinger’s cat of quantum uncertainty.” In order to make up for this, GLaDOS sends the robots out into Aperture to find human artifacts and try to understand how humans think. One of the first items they would bring back is a crappy Garfield knock-off called “Dorfeldt” (without Wolpaw and Faliszek’s slide, here’s an early Dorfeldt strip by Valve writer Jay Pinkerton from when he was just a freelance humor writer).

Crazy Facts We Just Learned About Portal 2

Except, between GLaDOS and the two co-op bots, none of them understood why humans find the traditional Dorfeldt strip — complete with inane punchline about eating his owner’s lasagna — funny at all. So GLaDOS decides to re-write Dorfeldt to her standards of humor. This time, instead of the traditional exasperation of why Dorfeldt has eaten the lasagna, the owner informs Dorfeldt that he has activated the neurotoxins in the room, and the last panel has Dorfeldt thinking, “I’ve made terrible choices in my life” before dying.

There Was A Morgan Freeman Sphere

While prototyping various ways to handle the Wheatley character, one idea was to kill Wheatley early and then have the player interact with a variety of personality spheres. Mentioned in passing was a Paranoia Sphere that defended himself from being taken — but only in one direction; the player could easily just get behind that one to pick him up. But the highlight was the “Morgan Freeman Sphere.”

That one had been around for centuries — but confined in a 20×20 space. So he would dispense sage wisdom, but only in regards to that room. The moment that the player carried him outside the room — 21 feet away from where he sat to be precise — the Morgan Freeman Sphere’s mind would be blown from the new reality you just presented it. Once it got past its initial shellshock at the world beyond 20 feet, it would relegate back to dispensing more wisdom about its initial 20×20 home.

One Version Of The Endgame Puzzle Had Chell Speak

Before eventually deciding on the Moon-portal puzzle for the end, the developers tried several approaches that all followed a basic rule: they had to be extremely easy. One version had Wheatley and GLaDOS locked in a stalemate, and the player had to fulfill the role of the Stalemate Associate. Once designated as the Stalemate Associate, the player would end the game by pressing the middle-mouse button to have Chell say “yes.”

At the same time, Valve was looking into developing “mini-endings,” little jokes where the player would die and the game would end with a song recapping how you died. This was inspired by noticing that a certain percentage of Portal 1 players don’t actually escape the fire pit. “To them, that was the end — a really dark ending, but an ending.” One of the fake endings involved having the player create a portal to the moon and then asphyxiating in space while hearing a sad song. Even though the developers scrapped the idea of fake mini-endings — for being too resource intensive for too little gain — the concept of portalling to the moon made its obvious return for Portal 2′s actual ending.

GDC 2012: The Next Big PC Success is the Free-to-play Minecraft clone funded by Kickstarter
1UP executive editor Thierry Nguyen has a soft spot for PC games due to his years of service at Computer Gaming World. For this year’s Game Developers Conference, he’s tackling the topic of the PC’s future. Does it lie in porting console games with Games for Windows certifications, or in returning to garage development?

Keiji Inafune’s Charlie Sheen Moment

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49d19 592 Keiji Inafunes Charlie Sheen Moment

Listening to Comcept.Inc boss (and former Mega Man, Onimusha, and Dead Rising producer) Keiji Inafune speak tonight at Game Developers Conference 2012 was a little like taking a trip in a time machine back to last spring. You remember — back when people’s tongues couldn’t stop wagging about Charlie Sheen’s bizarre, possibly drug-inspired rants about “winning.”

“Winning” was at the very heart of Inafune’s speech on the grim future facing his native Japan’s game industry — or rather, the fact that Japanese developers (and the society at large) appears to have lost their will to win. “There’s a difference between saying, ‘I don’t want to lose,’ and ‘I will win,’” Inafune remarked. Throughout his 45-minute lecture, he constantly reiterated the necessity of a drive to win.

Of course, Inafune’s speech wasn’t really all that similar to Sheen’s “tiger blood” nonsense. Whereas the celebrity appeared to be speaking across the business end of a cocktail shaker, Inafune’s observations come after more than a quarter-century of working in the games industry and on the heels of being something of a prophet of doom to his homeland — one whose dire predictions have in many ways panned out. To Inafune’s credit, he proved fairly prescient; he helped steer Capcom toward collaboration with Western studios, which resulted in some of the most vibrant and original current-gen console titles to have emerged from Japan.

In some ways, Inafune’s talk served as a sort of apologia for his departure from Capcom a year ago to found the twin companies Comcept and Intercept. “I left behind 900 coworkers… for a company of about 20 people,” he said. Inafune admitted that he could have continued living a comfortable, secure life at Capcom, but that while it’s easy to take chances when things are going well, the true road to success is found in taking risks when the chips are down. He commended South Korea on its vibrant culture, noting that “Korean brands have supplanted Japanese brands” and that he sees in Koreans the sort of drive that Japan possessed in the ’80s. “Japanese singers and movies stars could learn a lot” from their Korean counterparts, he opined. And he feels the same holds true for the country’s game industry.

While Inafune is eager to move beyond his previous successes and on to new challenges — a significant factor in his leaving Capcom — he clearly looks to the past for lessons and guidance. He cites the commercial failure of Mega Man Legends for PlayStation as a watershed moment in his career and laments the Japanese industry’s reliance on sequels. “Establishing a brand takes hard work,” he admits, “yet you can’t rely overly on that brand.” He admitted the steady decline that affected the Mega Man series over the years, and pointed to the success he saw with new ventures like Resident Evil 2, Onimusha, and Dead Rising as proof that throwing full support behind new ideas is essential to progress.

Inafune admitted that on many levels, the Japanese industry has become a relic, comparing it to the Beatles, Steve McQueen, and classic cars. “The Beatles will never record a new album with all four members of the band, and Steve McQueen will never star in a new movie. All we have are DVDs.

“Many creations that measured up to global success were crafted by our predecessors. We have a lot of those in Japan… but we need to think about more than just maintaining brands.”

Inafune presents Comcept as an attempt to return to basics — to rekindle the spirit that fueled the Japanese industry’s landmark successes in the NES era. “Everyone then worked hard and wanted to win,” he said. “There was heated competition. Now, in 2012, we’re older. We have families. Maybe we have mortgages.” But in his mind, it’s essential Japanese developers shake off their collective lethargy before it’s too late.

“The gap between Japan and the rest of the world is growing,” he warned.

Some will find Inafune’s words needlessly alarmist, while others will nod in agreement. In any case, he offered a far more even-handed and solution-oriented approach to the problem than has been heard elsewhere at GDC, where blanket proclamations that “all [Japan's] games suck now” are the order of the day. Inafune may share a similar sentiment, but he’s struck out on his own to help mend the situation in his own small way rather than simply pointing a finger of blame. (He also “accidentally” let slip the news that Comcept is working on Vita software. GDC panels can be for marketing, too.)

GDC 2012: What Can the Next Generation Learn from Gaming History?
1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish’s mission at this year’s Game Developers Conference is informed by his enthusiasm for new ideas and affection for the games he grew up playing. Is it possible to march forward while occasionally glancing back? That’s the question he’s investigating this week.

Dyad Looks to be the Underdog of GDC

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Dyad Looks to be the Underdog of GDC

The Game Developers Conference is far from over — actually, the show floor just opened today — but if bumping into people over the past couple days has been anything to go by, a PSN game called Dyad seems to be getting the best word of mouth at the show. Well, let me try that again — the Halo announcements, SimCity, Quantic Dream’s bundle of joy, and the Independent Games Festival probably win this award I just made up. But for the underdog word of mouth, I’m going with Dyad.

A couple days ago, I was able to play it for about an hour. Developer Shawn McGrath invited some media to try the game in his hotel room, each alone, with the lights off — “the cool kids’ way of playing it,” he said — which seemed odd, but made sense when I realized the game is a weird mash-up of Rez, a light show, a kaleidoscope, and a racing game. “Weird” is his word, by the way.

The Radical Transparency of SimCity

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The Radical Transparency of SimCity

EA gave SimCity a public debut at an event last night, but it was at a GDC presentation this morning that three of the game’s developers explained how the under-the-hood mechanics of the simulation will work. Creative Director Ocean Quigley, system administrator Andrew Willmott, and gameplay engineer Dan Moskowitz explained how GlassBox — Maxis’ new simulation engine that will power SimCity as well as future titles — controls the city.

The key innovation of the new SimCity is the transparency of its simulation. Previous games in the series benefited from a strange quirk of human psychology — our need to find patterns in everything. Players of previous games would tend to attribute buggy or even random behavior as intelligent or unpredictable AI. This also frustrated players who felt subjected to rules of the game that they had no way of learning. This new SimCity does just the opposite, with almost every object in the simulation represented in some in-game visualization. “We try to build what you would expect to see, and that’s the game,” said Willmott. Rather than animations or objects representing a traffic-jam, they’re produced dynamically by masses of Sims who actually travel to and from work. When a factory produces something in game, you can see it chugging away producing objects that will then be transported to stores and homes. Other simulation games fake these effects, but SimCity actually does them.

Moskowitz displayed these systems at work. Starting with an economic example, he loaded a city just before dawn. Once the clock hit 6 A.M. the factories sent out an invisible message that trigger Sims to go to work — in a concession to processing power, Sims are recruited by workplaces each day rather than holding down a steady job. When enough people arrived at the factories, the goods and pollution started rolling out. Each puff of smoke that comes from the structure in SimCity represents a discrete decrease in air quality, just like each box that leaves the factory is sold by commercial zones is a single object that a consumer Sim will carry home.

After the economic simulation, Moskowitz displayed the same principles at work in the water system, which starts underground in a water table. Pumps built by the player in the presentation brought water out of the ground and fed it into pipes connected to homes. However, all resources in SimCity are finite, and the water can run out. Pollution from the factories contaminated the supply in Moskowitz’s example, and the pumps on the map distributed the poison along with H20. Sims exposed to pollution grew sick and stayed home from work, creating an economic drain on the city.

Moskowitz jumped forward and showed the city nearly abandoned, its citizens driven away by pollution. Abandoned houses filled the residential areas, presenting a fire hazard. One house burst into flames and began burning the flammable material in the house (calculated in the simulation) while spreading heat to its neighbors. Once the heat reached a critical level the adjacent houses begin to smoke and spread the fire. In a working city the houses would have sent a message to the local fire department, which would than dispatch a truck.

Maxis creates complexity from these simple ingredients by layering systems on top of each other. In theory, this gives the game the depth of previous SimCity titles, but allows players to easily determine what effect any given object, be it Sim, factory, or storefront, has on the city. Even when simulation objects are invisible (like the recruiting signals from empty factories) the player can easily understand how the system works and plan accordingly — something that often proved impossible in previous entries in the series.

GDC 2012: Gaming’s Vanishing Middle Class
The disappearance of mid-sized developers and publishers worries associate editor Ryan Winterhalter. How is the industry preparing for the age of the very large and very small? Will innovation eventually create a new middle, or is the future filled with nothing but Call of Duty-style blockbusters?

Quantic Dream’s Kara Demo Gives a Promising Glimpse Into the Future of Motion Capture Technology

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David Cage, the CEO and founder of development studio Quantic Dream, demoed some impressive performance capture technology during a session at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

In a session called “Virtual Actors and Emotions in Games,” Cage unveiled footage from a year-old demo called Kara. In it, actress Valorie Curry assumes the role of an android that looks similar to something from I, Robot, and displays a range of human emotions and characteristics.

Quantic Dreams Kara Demo Gives a Promising Glimpse Into the Future of Motion Capture Technology

Cage quickly clarified before the short demonstration that Kara is not his studio’s next game project, but part of the new technology in development at the French development studio could be used for full performance capture — a technique where all the aspects of a motion-capture performance are recorded at once, rather than the common practice of capturing them separately.

Cage also points out that the footage presented in today’s demo is running in real-time on a PlayStation 3 and is a year old. His studio is currently using a new version of the same engine internally.

Check out the demo and tell us what you think of Kara in the comments below.

GDC 2012: Is It Too Soon for the Next Generation of Consoles?
1UP associate editorJose Otero’s mission at this year’s Game Developers Conference is informed by his enthusiasm for this generation of consoles and his fear that the next generation of consoles is nearly upon us. Is it too soon for the impending new generation of home consoles? That’s the question he’s investigating this week.