Australian Game Developers Conference -- Day one

Logan Booker brings you the hot gossip from the floor of Australia's biggest developer event.

Ignoring late flights, heavy traffic, and magnetic keycards to apartments that just don't want to work, Melbourne is actually a great place to be.

Particularly in December, and especially on a Thursday.

Well, this Thursday.

Welcome to the Australian Game Developers Conference 2004. It's big, it's cool and, most importantly of all, it's geeky. To the extreme. Oz has made a strong showing this year -- among the attending companies are Micro Forte, Auran, Pandemic and Irrational Games, along with hot-shot representatives such as Bill Roper, ex-Blizzard gaming king and CEO of Flagship Studios, from overseas.

All in Melbourne. How could you ask for more?

You couldn't actually. Not only are these massively massive companies and bigwigs making an appearance, they're also talking. About games, how to build them, sell them and develop them.

For instance, one of the first presentations was an excellent talk on intellectual property and how to work with it, given by Ed Orman from Irrational and David Gillespie of Auran.

'There's a treasure trove of licenses just waiting to be updated,' said Orman, using the Tribes: Vengeance as an example -- a game he's just wrapped up at Irrational.

'It's not always clear to you what it's meant to be,' he warns. 'A sequel is not [automatically] a slam dunk,' he said, bringing up Fallout Tactics, a title he worked on during his time at Micro Forte, which didn't make it as big as Micro Forte had originally hoped.

'Some people have come up with some fantastic IP,' said Gillespie. 'For the most part [there are] licenses out there that everyone would like to work on.' Gillespie used the example of Blizzard: 'Every time you see the Blizzard logo, you can assume certain things about the title'.

The two also talked about the relative strengths of a strong fan base, something that was prevalent for Orman when working on Tactics and Vengeance.

'[They have] their own perception of what the game is,' he said. Orman urged that large, passionate fan bases should be treated as a resource, not an authority. 'They have their wants -- that's fine,' he said.

'But at the end of the day, you're responsible.'

Another company here at AGDC is Perception, the Australian studio working on the Unreal-powered Stargate: SG-1, which will make an appearance on Xbox, PS2 and PC. Christian Martinez, a contract texture artist currently working for Perception, gave a presentation on the skills and techniques used by computer artists to produce the graphics for modern games.

It was, unsurprisingly, entitled: 'The Art of Texturing'.

Martinez has worked on a number of games, including Irrational's Vengeance and Freedom Force 2. In the talk, he covered a variety of topics including the much sort-after talent of making skyboxes; the needs of art directors from a decade ago compared to that of today; and the art workloads of different platforms. Sufficed to say, texture artists are busier now than they have ever been, creating alpha masks, normal maps and specular maps. Where there was just one texture, there are three or four, requiring artists to be familiar with more than just Photoshop.

Finally, Bill Roper gave a talk on design philosophies, particularly on what he has brought over from Blizzard to his new company, Flagship Studios. He discussed the myriad of problems encountered when developing titles such as Warcraft and Starcraft, and how they've influenced his current views on game design.

Roper was open and friendly, and was nice enough to take a few curly questions from a certain journalist about his dealings with his previous publisher Vivendi and current publisher Namco. He mentioned that some decisions and processes were 'difficult within the structure' over at Vivendi, to the point of being impossible -- compared to Namco where Roper and the rest of the team at Flagship have had 'very direct level access' to the people in charge.

And that about wraps it up.

Check us out tomorrow for some more sweet news from AGDC. Goodnight y'all.

Logan Booker
Senior Writer
Atomic Magazine