Blizzard announced this morning that they are partnering with Scholastic to create a new series of children’s books based on World of Warcraft.
The series, titled World of Warcraft: Traveler, will follow Aramar Thorne, the 12 year old son of the great explorer, Captain Greydon Thorne. Due to a series of unfortunate events, Aram finds himself far from home, only equipped with his father’s magical compass and his sketchbook to help him on his way. His unlikely companion for his adventures is the second mate of his father’s ship, Makasa, who is a tough, teenage girl.
Today marks the official launch of the Oculus Rift, a high quality virtual reality headset with dozens of games to enjoy. As an avid fan and enthusiast for the medium, I am beyond excited for today.
However, I am not going to gush about my love of VR in this article, I am writing it to talk about a rather unpleasant experience:
Today a big update for Neko Atsume landed, bring joy to cat lovers everywhere!
The overall theme of this update seems to be somewhere between English high tea and candyland, with a new “sugary style” house remodel and many accompanying items!
Xbox just released on their channel a never before seen short film of the upcoming team-based shooter from Blizzard, Overwatch. The short stars two of the playable heroes, Winston and Reaver.
The short animated film is set in Winston’s lab and delves into his past, showing where he got his start as a young ape. It also brings a bit more clarity to why the heroes of Overwatch are active again.
This is the first of four expected Overwatch shorts.
Overwatch is coming to PC, PS4 and Xbox One May 24th.
This week at GDC, I was able to test several virtual reality peripherals that I was excited about. One of those was Manus VR’s glove set, gloved-based controls intended for virtual reality use.
The gloves themselves are lightweight with a battery-pack on the back of the hand. It works by taking advantage of the Vive controllers tracking and using custom flex sensor within the glove. The sensors have two bend areas per finger, allowing for tracking of precise finger movements. Unlike other hand-tracking solutions, such as the Leap, there is no constraint on where your hand movement can be sensed.
Valve took over a large section of the Game Developers Conference to show off the Vive and virtual reality games coming soon for the device.
Universe Sandbox ²’s VR mode was one of the stars of the demos. Universe Sandbox ², by Giant Army, has previously impressed me with its gorgeous space simulations, but seeing and interacting with them in virtual reality brought the experience to a completely new level. Planets zipped by my head, I threw suns and moons out into the nether and the rings of Saturn swirled beautiful around me after I displaced the planet.
Oculus revealed the prices of their release titles at the Oculus Game Day event. The event was held in San Francisco, just outside of the popular Game Developers Convention, dozens of games intended for launch were being shown.
There is a huge range of prices for the launch content, Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games listed as $4.99 while there are several $49.99 and $59.00 titles. Below is a list of the launch games, their “comfort” rating, and their prices:
This last Sunday, the Games Diversity Alliance hosted a bootcamp called “Amplifying New Voices” at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event was hosted to help prepare diverse developers that are rising in the game industry for the challenges that await them.
Oculus was the main sponsor of the event and also provided a number of the mentors who worked with the small teams of developers. Other sponsors included Intel, who has been working extensively to promote diversity in the game industry, GDC, Funomena, and Zebra Partners. In addition to receiving one on one mentorship, networking opportunities and some nice swag, the attendees were also provided with a $1,000 travel stipend, All Access badges to GDC (which currently cost $2,099), and access to a professional photographer who was taking headshots for us to use in the future.
The following application guidelines were posted on the site for Amplifying New Voices:
We’re seeking mid-career games and VR developers who offer perspectives that are currently under-represented in the industry, especially those who are not yet an active public figure. This includes women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and anyone who is willing to share how their perspective adds to the “diversity of thought” in our community.
Specifically, the following guidelines are a good rule-of-thumb of who we are looking for:
4+ years in the games, VR, and/or entertainment industries
2-3+ titles/projects shipped or work-in-progress
A developer role, including game design, software engineering, art, animation, production, audio design, etc.
Represents diversity of thought in the industry
Fewer than 2-3 major speaking or media events
Luckily, I was accepted as one of the attendees and was able to experience the event firsthand.
Robin Hunicke.
My mentor was Robin Hunicke, who has extensive experience in game design, production and public speaking. Her public speaking skills are highly regarded within the industry, especially by other women in the industry. She will be on stage as one of the hosts of the Game Developers Choice Awards being held tomorrow.
I was honored to have her as my mentor for the day and greatly enjoyed her supportive yet critical advice. My group itself was diverse, including men and women from various countries, backgrounds, ages and identities. Robin made sure to give us each advice tailored to who we were, both as we wanted to represent ourselves and while taking into consideration how other people will view us.
We had three breakout sessions, one of our biography, one on speaking and one on answering interview questions, and the amount of consideration that must have to go into self representation in each of those blew me away. While some of the advice felt like it should be obvious, hearing it directly and in the context of our behaviors and responses made me realize how novice I am in the skills required to present myself well.
There was no dancing around that my gender would color how I was viewed. I was informed in a very matter-of-fact manner that my personal examples would be more highly criticized, that many questions directed towards me wouldn’t be on my talk, but as my experiences or opinion as a woman, and that I would have to fight to not be dismissed because of my gender.
Before Amplifying New Voices started, I was unsure if I would get much value out of the event. It blew my expectations out of the water and I feel like I have gained invaluable knowledge and connections for the advancement of my career and image.
While I can’t provide the same tailored feedback and knowledge that I received to you readers, I would like to share my notes, in hopes that they will be of help to others:
Biography
Your biography should be short and goal-driven. Consider who you are writing the biography for and what you are trying to convey before you begin writing. When you write your biography, use empathy and don’t stylize your writing. Write all of the points you think you should cover, then work on editing and trimming it down to a few short, impactful sentences that highlight the essentials of how you want to be seen.
Several revisions on my biography resulted in the following:
Renee is a multi-disciplinary leader with expertise in software engineering and creative direction. She is the CEO of Stumbling Cat, creator of Potions: A Curious Tale. She led engineering and server development at Fixer Studios, designed and developed cognitive evaluation mini-games and health management systems for X2 Biosystems.
Renee is a passionate advocate and connector for developers and diversity in the game industry. Renee organizes game-jams, panels, job fairs and other developer events as a board member of IGDA Seattle, contributes to Broken Joysticks, and actively mentors game development students at Foundry10.
Public Speaking
Assert confidence to the audience and show that you are in command of the subject you are speaking on. Ensure that your talk has a narrative and flows across its points without any jumps. The audience should all be able to answer why your talk is important after listening to it.
Use few words on the slides themselves and use pictures and examples where possible. It is your job as a speaker to expand upon your points, not the job of your slides.
Public Relations / Interviews
Consider the image that you are trying to present and keep your image focused on those points. Feel free to even write down the points you want to stress and keep them on you to reference for the directions you should steer all questions.
While media in the medium, reports are the filters and they are looking for stories that will bring traffic their way. They look for new stories, ones that relate to current events and holidays, show conflicting views of popular held opinions, or are unusual or sensational in some manner.
Finally, the medium itself greatly varies the form of responses. For all media and interview questions, keep responses small so that they can be used for soundbites and also so that they cannot be taken out of context. When doing pure audio interviews, make sure to smile while talking, which is apparent in your voice. Similarly, in video interviews, use intentional body language to compliment your words.
A few blocks away from the ongoing Game Developers Conference, Oculus hosted an exclusive preview event for their launch titles and other games coming to the Oculus Rift shortly after launch. One of the games being shown was Dead & Buried, a gunslinger game that makes use of the Oculus’ Touch controllers.
Dead & Buried is being developed internally by Oculus Studios and the noticeable intent of the game is to highlight the Touch controllers. While Oculus has previously showcased their single player mode of the game, at the event they set up four stations with Dead & Buried and placed four players together at a time in a 2v2 shootout. Of the dozens of games at the event, it was clearly the most popular to both play and watch, gathering a bemused crowd of developers and media.
The Game Developer Conference (GDC) held in San Francisco is fast approaching. This will be the 30th year of the event, which is the largest game industry conference in the world.
While E3 is intended for press to connect with game companies and developers and the PAX conventions are for game companies to connect with their audiences, GDC is an event for developers to connect with each other, share their knowledge and expand their skills. There are countless talks, panels and roundtables for developers, all with their own areas of focus, from design and technical talks to postmortems and discussions about industry direction and culture. In the evenings there are all kinds of events, including dinners, parties and award shows.
Mike O’Brien of ArenaNet just announced on Reddit that Colin Johanson is leaving the studio. Johanson is the game director of Guild Wars 2 and has been at ArenaNet since 2005.
If you aren’t currently tuned into Hyper RPG!’s Twitch channel, then you’re missing out on great entertainment and all for a good cause. Hyper Rabbit Power Go! (Hyper RPG!) is a brand new Twitch channel that launched yesterday and is in the middle of a 48-hour charity stream for the HALO Foundation.
Last week I crawled out of the cave that is my home office and traveled to Las Vegas to attend the D.I.C.E. Summit, an elite game industry conference where the biggest and most influential players in the game industry meet to network, receive awards, and enjoy some time away from work for a few days.
A ticket at the door will set you back $3700, which is far outside of my modest indie developer budget. Thankfully, I was one of five lucky recipients of the Intel Indie D.I.C.E. Scholarship, which Intel and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Foundation, who hosts D.I.C.E., sponsored this year. While this was their first year of sending indie developers to the Summit, they have supported a scholarship for game development students for a number of years.
D.I.C.E. was amazing. I have attended countless industry conventions and meet-ups, but the density of powerful members of the industry had me completely floored. It seemed like everyone I met was a CEO, executive producers or lead developers from one AAA studio or another. Truthfully, for someone generally so bold and outgoing at similar events, I also felt an unexpected twinge of shyness; My accomplishments are few and minor in this realm of giants.
Renee presents a talk she prepared for a luncheon for women in the game industry. The talk is about her path to being a game developer and the struggles she faced.
