GDC Coverage - Day 1
Welcome to the 2012 coverage of the Game Developer´s Conference in San Francisco. Throughout the next few days we will give insight into the latest discussions and challenges of the industry and talk to designers, educators business people in our videopodcast.
Day 1 started with the educational summit. I was glad to hear the first keynote of the conference by industry veteran Brian Moriarty, who talked about his student project (glas)perlenspiel. This is a simple Java based game engine, where you can use a simple framework to program games. The whole thing lives from its reduction and offers an easy introduction to basic game design and programming. He showed several impressive results - the toolset is open to use for everyone…
This was followed by Toronto based developer Nathan Vella´s (Capy) recap of the business development process around Sward & Swarcery, that was released in cooperation with Superbrothers last year. He reflected on budget, human networks and strategies to implement such a process in a small indie developer team, which seemed not to be always as smooth as they wanted it to go…
>> http://www.swordandsworcery.com/
Around noon i met Carsten Fichtelmann, MD of German developer Daedalic at the Games Connection - a parallel running business networking event at the Drake´s. I had the chance to peek into early artwork of The Whispered World II, the promising follow up of one of their internationally well performing brands.
>> http://www.daedalic.de/?lang_new=en#1
My afternoon highlight was Brandon Chung´s (Blendo Games) presentation on his 2011 hit Atom Zombie Smasher. This amazing game was completely made by this one guy, being the game designer, artist and programmer in one person. He guided us threw the iterations of his development process and revealed a process of downsizing the complexity of gameplay towards the final version… he is one of the IGF finalist!
BJöRN BARTHOLDY
Prof. Björn Bartholdy ist Mitbegründer des Cologne Game Lab an der FH Köln und lehrt an der Köln International School of Design audiovisuelle Gestaltung. Davor leitete er das Department "Virtual Design" an der Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg und führte die Design Agentur "cutup" als Geschäftsführer. Bartholdy ist Vorstandsmitglied von "Eyes & Ears of Europe", der europäischen Vereinigung für Design, Promotion und Marketing der audiovisuellen Medien.
Kontakt: bb@colognegamelab.de
