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Here’s A Look At All of The Elaborate Booths of GDC 2018

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Rae Michelle Richards

The 2018 edition of the Games Developer Conference has come to a close but there is still a lot more for us to show including gameplay videos, developer interviews and exclusive hands-on with several AAA and indie titles.

In this post I’d like to take a quick jaunt through some of the cooler booths on display at this year’s show. By “cooler” I don’t necessarily mean “elaborate” or “expensive” but visually impressive or booths that offered attendees a unique experience.

Epic Games Booth

A booth with a ride-able Fortnite llama in place of the traditional riding bull is a win in my book. This tough looking llama was a draw for the entire conference, sadly I didn’t get a chance to go for a ride.

Above said conquerable llama was a large screen that showcased the Fortnite live-stream that Epic had going during the entirety of show-floor hour.

Folks check out the PlayStation 4 Pro version of Fortnite Battle Royale.

Not to be left out, the mobile version of Fortnite was fully playable on a large TV.

Day of the Devs

Double Fine’s indie focused Day of the Devs event took place off-site as per usual but this elaborate skull themed display greeted attendees when taking the escalator down from the South Hall. In addition to playable demo stations you could also catch some of the developers behind featured games like Exo One, Minit and Knights & Bikes.

IGF Pavilion

The 2018 Independent Games Festival awards took place alongside the Game Developer Choice Awards on the Wednesday of GDC week. Throughout the show-floor days (Wednesday – Friday) all of the nominees could be played at a single station in this circular configuration. Games like Night in The Woods, Baba is You, Cuphead and Shenzen I/O were playable by attendees. In years past it wasn’t uncommon to actually meet the developers behind these games while playing them at the IGF booth – sadly I didn’t get to meet anyone from the excellent Night In The Woods team this year ☹.

Train Jam 2018 Booth

Over 80 independently created games & experiments were playable over at the Train Jam booth. I was lucky enough to take part in this year’s 52 hour game jam and our game Emotional Support Cat Girl was also playable at this booth as well. Creators from the Train Jam are also GDC Attendees for the most part so it wasn’t uncommon for creators to hang out at the booth and walk folks through their creations.

I didn’t have much time to go  1 on 1 with folks to show them Emotional Support Catgirl in person but I will have an exhaustive blog post outlining our amazing cross-America journey later on in the week.

Microsoft Azure Services Booth

A large Azure Services booth greeted attendees when taking one of the two main elevators down to the expo show-floor. Microsoft had a large floor presence this year aimed squarely at game developers and the cloud based development services that can help devs collaborate, test and deploy their upcoming projects.

Services like Azure Application Monitoring– which gives developers real-time reports on the use of their games and applications, Visual Studio Enterprise – Microsoft’s premium integrated development environment and the Xbox Live Creators program – which allows independent developers to publish on the Xbox One platform – were all on display.

By visiting four of the available demo stations developers were able to score both $2500 USD worth of Azure Credits for virtual machine testing and a free Xbox One controller. Disclosure: as a member of the Microsoft Developer Network and Bizspark Program I was not the intended audience for these workshops, I already have access to all of these services. The free controller will definitely be useful for my development work, however.

Google Booth

Google uses its presence in the mobile space with Android and its real-world presence in Silicon Valley to attract Android developers to GDC.  Not only do they host a keynote focused on the future of their mobile platform but also full day workshops for developers on pre-launch and post-launch support of their mobile games.

Aside from the giant G logo and familiar Google Employees in blue shirts there wasn’t much on display at their booth to speak of. At GDC Google did announce the interesting “instant app” addition to the Play Store which allows customers to download a small 10MB trial version of a game and play it within seconds without needing to install anything on their device. Given the size of some Android Games 10MB could be as small as a 30 second sample of the gameplay, while other smaller games have the chance to offer players a much more feature complete experience within those confines.

PlayStation Booth

Sony always has a huge display at conventions like PAX East, E3 and PAX West but did the development focus of GDC stop them from bringing some of the latest creation on their platform? Of course not!

Playable games at the PlayStation Booth included the recently released Shadow of the Colossus remake, Monster Hunter: World, Gran Turismo Sport and Ni No Kuni: Revenant Kingdom.

Sony also held a number of developer talks and workshops across the five days of GDC focusing on the visual arts achievements that Sony has made on the PlayStation 4, how devs can help fight fraud in an online gaming space and a Final Fantasy Collaboration focused workshop.

Unity

Unity has quickly become the darling of indie creators and the engine that powers some of the most notable AAA releases as well.  Upcoming titles like Escape From Tarkov, In the Valley of the Gods, Praey For the Gods and Hollow Knight all use the suite of tools made available for free by Unity Technologies.

While Unity might not offer the complete beginner friendly experience of something like Game Maker or Clickteam Fusion but it does offer a great gateway to full fledged game development. Alongside a whole range of professional grade 3D, 2D and lighting tools – developers also get access to some of the most exhaustive documentation systems around. Also the Unity community has probably answered almost every question asked about the engine at this point.

I’m not trying to come off as a paid Unity shill or that this section of the post is an advertisement – it’s not. But I’ve been personally making games in Unity for the past 2 years as my full time gig and it has been such a rewarding experience. What you lose in easy prototype-ability you gain in coding experience, game making fundamentals and probably the most beneficial to me personally – learning how to properly debug a game from conception through to post launch support.

In terms of what was on offer for newly budding developers and experienced veterans – Unity offered a quiet lounge space for Unity devs to hang out, grab a coke and just relax from the high stress environment. This space wasn’t entirely ultrisitic however – staffers from the engine developer were also on hand to inform visitors about upcoming Unity focused events like their Rendering Bootcamp, Keynote, Work Flow workshop and also to recruit for Unity Europe. Also on the floor of the West Hall (where most GDC panels take place) was a large “Made With Unity 3D” booth which gave folks the chance to check out multiple games made in Unity 5.

Ark: Survival Evolved Mobile

Lastly I’d like to highlight something I spotted at Unreal’s massive booth. Sandwiched in-between all of the Fortnite chaos, live engine demonstrations and AAA games was the mobile version of ARK Survival Evolved that had just been announced days prior. I didn’t get a chance to snag any off-screen video of the game running (tho I wish I had) but I did manage to snag a few interesting stills that I’ll post in the coming days. Suffice to say that the upcoming mobile conversion for ARK looks and plays rather faithful to the original – oh and there’s also the upcoming Nintendo Switch port of ARK, which was not on the show floor.

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What does the possible elimination of the NEA mean to video games?

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Meghan Kass

In the United States, there is a federal agency that goes by the name the National Endowment of the Arts. According to their website, they are “an independent federal agency that funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation.”. On January 19th, a report from The Hill, and an unnamed source reported that the NEA was on the chopping block for budget cuts under the reasoning that taxpayers should not have to pay for such things such as plays, paintings, scholarly journals or other such works and that it was a “waste”. While it can be debated whether or not the NEA is necessary or not, what can not be debated are the numbers. The NEA and NEH (National Endowment of Humanities) would only be 0.0006 percent of the 2016’s federal spending, a minuscule amount for something that provides a lot of opportunities to so many Americans. This is also particularly disappointing as only as recently as 2012 was the NEA paying attention to the world of video games and funding such projects as Walden, a game and allowing what was once thought of as mere children’s toys to be seen as a serious medium for art. How will the elimination of the NEA effect the gaming community?

A Still From Indie-Cade 2015, a popular gathering of indie developers.

In 2012, $290,000 in grants were given to 4 video game projects. This opened the door to new types of video games and new creators. It was even inspiring non profit organizations such as the WITS (writers in the schools) to utilize grant money to incorporate video games into the education of students in reading and writing by using their inspiration and knowledge to make whole video game projects and stories. If not for the NEA, some creators may not have had the opportunity to explore video game creation and bring their ideas to life in this medium and with the NEA offering millions of dollars in grants each year, who knows what new creations could be made or what brilliant new artist could be discovered? If the NEA is eliminated, this could potentially hurt the progress of video games being explored and expanded as a medium even further, especially since it had only just gotten its chance to shine as a federally funded art form in America.

 

The freedom of indie developers mean that exploring with emerging technologies like VR is possible.

While the gaming industry is still going to be standing and even the indie community will still find its funding, especially with crowd funding as an increasingly viable option, the elimination of the NEA still destroys an opportunity for learning and growth for some and it is now more than ever important  for Americans to help support its gaming  community and its creators and continue to grow and evolve video games. Art, in any form, is essential to culture, building creativity, empathy and education and that most certainly includes video games.

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Digital Homicide filing lawsuit against Valve

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Meghan Kass

Indie developer, Digital Homicide has been under hot water recently. The developer is currently looking to raise money and seek legal representation to sue steam users due to poor reception of their games. While Digital Homicide states they are fighting against harassment, Valve had a different perception.

Digital Homicide has produced over a dozen games, such as Galactic Hitman (as pictured above), using the steam platform. These games have received numerous poor reviews and have gained the attention of the Steam community and YouTube personalities. They have been accused of using paid assets and having very little effort put into their games, which is reflected in those poor reviews, along with a reputation of putting out games fast and low quality. Because of these accusations and comments, founder James Romaine filed an $18 million “personal injury” claim and a subpoena with the demands that the data of 100 steam users who are part of a consumer advocacy group. According to the Digital Homicide website, they are still currently raising the money and seeking legal representation.

[Ed Note: This video explains just how publishers like Digital Homicide make their money off deeply discounted bundles and Steam Trading Cards.]

Valve’s response to Digital Homicide’s claims was to discontinue business with the developer due to “[hostility] towards Steam customers” and ban them from using Steam to produce their games. Digital Homicide had in turn, released a response on their website stating that Valve was “disgusting” and they were excusing harassment of not only the development team, but the customers who were legitimately interested in their product.

Currently, the subpoena has not been signed by a judge and therefore has only been proposed, not granted. Should the subpoena be granted, Valve can contest the claim at a hearing. Along with this, there are also plans to bring a lawsuit to YouTube personality, Jim Sterling over videos criticizing the group’s development practices and quality of their products. Whether any of these lawsuits are successful, only time can tell.

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Key Resellers a Huge Threat to Indies

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Renee Gittins

Key resellers have a reputation for being sketchy and potentially harmful to the game industry. Recently, the magnitude of their negative impact was shown.

Earlier this week, tinyBuild, an indie game development studio and publisher, revealed that the key reselling site, G2A.COM, sold thousands of keys of their games without tinyBuild ever seeing a dime. Almost $200k was pulled in by G2A, though tinyBuild has noted that the keys sold at retail value would have been worth $450k.

tinyBuild's calculations of sales and lost sales based on sales information from G2A.

tinyBuild’s calculations of sales and lost sales based on sales information from G2A.

G2A’s response to this reveal was not an apology, but demands that tinyBuild produce a list of the keys that are fraudulent (a rather difficult and absurd request), and a criticism of tinyBuild’s loss estimate, clearly not understanding what “retail value” means.

G2A.COM calls for tinyBuild to provide their list of suspicious keys within three days from the date of this transmission.

The CEO of tinyBuild, Alex Nichiporchik responded that:

The way our business works is we work with a ton of partners, and tracking down individual key batches is an insane amount of work. Even if we did that and deactivated certain batches, each one of them will have a bunch of ‘legitimate’ redemptions… I [also] believe [G2A would] just resell those keys and make more money off of it.

Alex’s distrust of key resellers is understandable, especially considering the response from G2A. Instead of taking down tinyBuild keys or providing compensation of the sales to the studio, G2A is still happily making money off of assisting scammers.

One of tinyBuild's games, Punch Club.

One of tinyBuild’s games, Punch Club.

Key resellers seem to have a pretty reasonable business model at first glance: a person gets a key for a game they don’t want or already have, and sells it on a key reselling website to make a few bucks and put the key in the pocket of someone who will use it.

The internet is not a kind place, though, and key resellers provide an opportunity for fraudsters to easily cash out. They use stolen credit cards to purchase keys, like from Humble Bundle and even key resellers, then turn around and resell them on the key reselling sites that are more lenient in their security. The key is resold and gone on to more legitimate hands long before the first seller is hit with the charge-back from the stolen card. Publishers and developers lose, while scammers and sketchy key resellers win.

“They’re basically helping people launder money” noted Mike Gnade, from IndieGameStand. “This scam really pisses me off – mainly because these people aren’t stealing from large rich corporations but taking advantage of smaller companies and indie developers.”

While stolen credit cards are a large part of the problem, there are other places that these key reselling merchants are finding keys: bots and scammers.

Bots happily search streams, Facebook and other channels for posted codes to snatch up and resell, and the losing side is always the developers. Not even the smallest game studios are free from these risks.

My inbox often gets emails like the following:

Hello!

My name is Anas, nice to meet you.
I found in the Steam list your game Potions: A Curious Tale and would like to submit it on my channel.
I plan to try your game on one of the my closest twitch-streams, and if I liked it – make a full review on YouTube channel.
I will be very grateful, if you send me few extra keys as a small thanks for advertising (I want give them to my friends, who are just beginning to engage a streaming).
Thank you for your time. I hope to hear your answer, even if it is negative.
Sounds pretty cool, right? Someone wants to stream Potions: A Curious Tale, and, wow, they have 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube. An amazing opportunity, right?
Probably not. It’s like that this person is just phishing for keys. They’ve made a gmail account with an address that seems similar to what this streamer would use and are probably using a bot to write emails like this. Notice how the only detail about my game is the name of the game itself, and, of course, they want multiple keys, not just one.

With an unreleased game, I am particularly sensitive to requests like this, because the game is not intended to be released to the general public yet. Reselling of my keys would be extremely harmful to Potions: A Curious Tale, not just due to lost revenue, but because the game is unfinished and may be received poorly.

Luckily, there are services like Distribute(), created by Vlambeer to help indie developers sort legitimate requests from illegitimate ones. They offer tracking of “Verified press contacts [to] help you ensure press requests come from a trusted source. Verified press contacts help you avoid fake requests from video content creators or people pretending to be from larger websites or YouTube personalities.”
Still, the night is dark and full of scammers.

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Dev Talk: Building and Managing Your Team – Renee Gittins

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Renee Gittins

Renee Gittins discusses how to recruit a team and lead them to help you create the game of your vision. Balancing your own preferences and desires with theirs, you can build a strong team that respects each other and works well together towards a common goal.

Renee covers details such as compensation methods, communication and management tools and other items you need to transform your personal project into a full team project.

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