It worked out very well. Every talk exceeded my expectations, and all of the feedback I’ve gotten so far has been very positive. The organizers did a great job in making sure everyone had a great time, and the mood during the conference was very good.

I either had no time or no Internet connection, or I would have tweeted my head off. But the upside is that I now have a very good reason to blow the dust off of my blog and write something longer than 140 characters.

Here are my impressions of the talks at GFG 2010:

Industry legend RJ Mical opened the conference with a look at the history of video game hardware and how hardware has affected the games we play and vice versa. RJ worked on the Commodore Amiga, a home computer which was very popular in Germany in the 80s and 90s. This, together with a rumor that RJ would reveal juicy details about the PlayStation 4, meant the room was packed. RJ is an incredibly charismatic person and his talk was great. (This page gives you an impression of his personality.)

RJ was followed by Raphael Lacoste, an incredibly talented artist, who explained in detail how he approached the art direction of Assassin’s Creed. He showed the paintings that had inspired him, including many by Caspar David Friedrich, then analyzed various shots from Assassin’s Creed to show how he had used contrast, silhouettes, filters and other techniques to create the game’s look.

Jason Gregory from Naughty Dog (author of Game Engine Architecture) explained how to set up game loops in AAA console games (especially in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, of course) so that they run efficiently on multiple processors. He succeeded in making this somewhat esoteric subject accessible, even to non-programmers. And he discussed the Uncharted 2’s awesome train level in great detail.

Risa Cohen, Jane Corden and Térence Mosca held a very slick presentation about the business side of games, talking in depth about the marketing of digitally distributed games and the use of completion bonding in games. This was followed by a panel discussion (moderated by myself), where we were joined by Mary Matthews from Blitz Games Studios and Stefan Weyl from Namco Bandai Partners. We touched on a lot of (perhaps too much) interesting subjects, ranging from marketing to finance to new platforms.

Steve Ince closed the first day by giving an inspiring talk about aspects of characters in games.

On the second day, Darius Kazemi presented a structured approach for convincing people (going back to Aristotle!) and how you can mine data at work to support your arguments. The room was not that full, but that was due to the excellent party the night before, and not because of Darius’ talk. (Darius also transcribed RJ’s talk here.)

Jeff Lander described in detail what it takes to develop very high quality character animation systems, where the pitfalls are, and where middleware will let you down. Like Jason Gregory, he did an excellent job of presenting a very complex topic so that it was accessible even to people unfamiliar with the subject.

Chris Foster from Harmonix Music Systems gave a very inspiring talk about collaboration and how it is central to game design, giving concrete examples from the development of The Beatles: Rock Band.

Matias Myllyrinne from Remedy talked about their company philosophy and how they use playtests and usability tests. He also showed us footage from Alan Wake, including some clips that had never been shown before.

Finally, Thomas Bidaux from ICO Partners talked about the state of the free to play games market in Europe. He seemed a bit worried that page after page of business statistics would bore his audience of mostly developers and students, but he did a great job of conveying what makes these games interesting, and how big they are, especially in Germany.

(Videos from all the sessions will be put online soon. You can see videos from previous years here. There’s a little German here and there, but the talks are all in English.)

I had a great time. The conference was not too big, the people were nice, the food was good, the party was great, the lectures rocked, I met old friends and made new ones, and I had lots of time to chat with other developers, which is one of my favorite things to do in the games industry. This time I had the additional pleasure of sharing the experience with my wonderful fiancée. It was her first time at a development conference. She wrote about her impressions here.

Some of you - well, one person anwyay - may have noticed that I am not blogging much these days. There are two reasons for this:

One, I am hard at work. For ludicrous reasons entirely my own I can’t yet tell you what I am working on, but it’s fun and it’s taking up a lot of my time.

Two, like Ragnar Tornquist, my Internet activities have been largely taken over by Twitter. That means that both my RSS news reader and my blog posting application have been languishing. I write gnomic mini-blog posts, which you can see in the side bar or if you follow me on @JurieOnGames. I also get most of my news over Twitter now. It’s a different experience from reading RSS feeds, but Twitter sort of forces me to admit I can’t read everything, unlike my news reader with it’s quietly judging ‘1000 unread posts’ display.

So, there you go. I don’t intend to stop blogging, but the short messages will definitely be going on Twitter. I intend to set things up so my tweets get posted here as well, for those people who really don’t want to set up a Twitter account. Which, you know, is not that hard - set up a protected account, follow me, and it’s like reading this site on the web.

• Labuat - Soy Tu Aire - Super-cool music video. (Via Robin Hunicke.)
• Forevertron - How cool is this? Massive steampunk sculpture complex.
• Pelgrane Press Ltd - See Page XX Webzine - Robin Laws rocks. Nice (and, to me, original) thinking on pen&paper roleplaying, some of which can be transferred to videogames.

I liked the word (I tend to like certain German words), and imagined… something… when I read it. Something that had nothing to do with its real meaning. My girlfriend imagined something completely different.

So here’s a little competition: imagine what a Pestschleuder looks like and describe it here in a comment. On Sunday, April 5th Andrea and I will judge the entries. The prize is honor plus something not yet determined - it depends on who and where you are ;). It’s really supposed to be fun thing to do. At least I had fun imagining my Pestschleuder.

• Reuben Margolin's kinetic wave sculptures -
• Mystery Man on Film: The “Raiders” Story Conference - "Mystery Man" on the story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for Raiders of the Lost Ark that took place in 1978.
• The Tokyopia Wedding Game - Cute story about a custom-developed game used as a wedding present.

////////
/////// SOVIET UNTERZOEGERSDORF
//////
///// SECTOR II
////
/// The Adventure Game
//
/

An adventure marches on!

/
//
/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
//
/

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf (pronounced «oon-taa-tsee-gars-doorf») is the last existing client republic of the USSR. The soviet enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with the surrounding so-called “Republic of Austria” or with the capitalist fortress “European Union”. The downfall of the people’s motherland — the Soviet Union — in the early 1990s had a devastating effect on the country’s intra-economic situation. External reactionary forces threatened the last remaining proletarian paradise.
Party secretary Wladislav Gomulka has been kidnapped and is being held in US-Oberzoegersdorf. We must save comrade Gomulka! Because communism isn’t an opinion. It’s a promise.

/
// Special Non Player Guest Characters:
/ Jello Biafra, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, Emmanuel Goldstein, Mitch Altman, Bre Pettis, David ‘DaddyD’ Dempsey, Kyle Machulis, MC Frontalot, Eddie Codel, Irina Slutsky, Christian ‘plomlompom’ Heller, Jason Scott Sadofsky, Hans Bernhard, Robert Stachel (maschek) — and many more.

/
// Voice Acting by:
/ Jevgeni Beliaikin, Sergey Teterin, Mikhail A. Crest, Daria Prawda, Bre Pettis — and many more.

/
// Soundtrack features:
/ The Fat Man/George Alistair Sanger, Q-Burns Abstract Message, Zoe Keating, Neil Landstrumm, Jonathan Mann aka GameJew, Blockwerk, The Extra Action Marching Band, The Lazy, antivolk - Torsun feat. classless Kulla, Jan Klesse & Felix Knoke (left), Savant Trigger, Rioteer, MC Orgelmueller, Magic Jordan, Schaua, Horace, The Vladivostoks, Limpopo, Eric Skiff, Prometheus X, Kertal (feat. sunsetfactory), Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwarz-Rot, Farmer’s Market, Attention, Cosmonauts!, Woodn Earf, Trishes, Krach the Robot, Prosperity Denied, Arteom Denissov, Dan Oberbauer aka DJ Chronos, LFO DEMON — and more.

/
// Operating systems:
/ Available for Windows, Linux and OSX! And many thanks to the fabulous comrades at CodeWeavers (http://www.codeweavers.com) for Linux/OSX versions. And also bloshevik geetings to the folks at Silver Server (http://www.sil.at) for bandwith sponsoring.

/
//
/// http://www.monochrom.at/suz-game/
//
/

/
// For IBM PC and Non-Compatible
///
//// A true tour-de-red-force
/////
////// Russian with English or German subtitles
/////
//// Appealing graphical game interface
///
// Creative Commons License
/

Other projects:
http://monochrom.at/english

• It’s one of those movies where if I hadn’t seen it, I’d have wondered if it was any good. Now I know.
• I was constantly comparing it to the comic in my head, and therefore didn’t get as far into the movie as perhaps I could have. I had the same problem the first time I saw Lord of the Rings. However, unlike Lord of the Rings, I don’t think I will be seeing this movie again.
• The dramatic engine sputtered out somewhere around two thirds of the movie, and it became empty spectacle. I no longer cared about character or plot.
• The opening credits explaining the history of the superheroes was cool. The over-use of topical music was not. At times, I felt like I was watching Forrest Gump.
• I had trouble buying the central plot element in the book, but Moore had more than enough time to sell it to me. In the movie? Not a chance. Even though I can see the clues, I just don’t buy it.
• The movie both pleases and screws the fans of the comic. It replicated iconic scenes and iconic lines, but they just don’t work. Rorschach’s “You quit”, early on, just fell flat for me. Same with a lot of Comedian lines.
• The violence was needlessly increased and glorified, but hey, at least we see some cock in a Hollywood movie. But I guess U.S. audiences couldn’t deal with an uncircumcised Doctor Manhattan.
• The entire element of questioning superheroes is gone. To add insult to injury, the glorification of violence makes a mockery of that whole aspect of the comic. And that’s what made Watchmen so revolutionary compared to other superhero comics at the time: it had human, fallible superheroes, in a real world that didn’t really need them.
• In general, it had the problems of a very long story condensed to three hours. (Bonus meta-joke: Doc Manhattan screaming “Leave me alone!”, immediately followed by a 15 minute intermission.)

Having said all that: It’s about as good as I expected it could be.

Now I can read what Harvey thinks of it.

• Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage + video) - A pretty cool concept video showing computing technology in 2019. Via Aubrey.
• Watchmen: Justice is Coming | iPhone Game - An online multiplayer game for iPhone or iPod Touch. Interesting.
• Variety iPhone app (plus an observation about RSS and technical details) - Brent Simmons on how technological groundwork allows Newsgator Technologies to crank out useful media apps for iPhone / web widgets. Clever!

• Flowmaps and Frag-Grenades, Part 1 - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design - Interesting article about the integration of 'traditional' User Experience designers in the games industry, specifically at Bungie, for Halo 3.
• Zen Bound from Secret Exit - I doubt this has anything to do with zen, and I am not sure if I would enjoy this game, but I like the looks and I'm glad it exists.
• Grand Theft Auto producer is Godfather of gaming - Times Online - Not sure if I linked to this before but this is an article about Les Benzies, producer of GTA at Rockstar North. It also appears to be the epicenter of the "$100M / 1000 people to make GTA IV" story. Note the "He hasn't a clue how much GTA IV has cost to make" bit though…

• WebDU 2008 Trading Card Game - Nectarine Juice - A trading card game for a web conference, meant to encourage social interactions. I've been thinking of something similar lately - too bad there's not a lot of detail to be inspired by.
• Harvey Smith: I [heart] Left4Dead - Harvey explains why he likes Left4Dead. I've only seen my girlfriend play the demo on the Xbox so far, but I am a lot more interested in playing it myself now.
• Where are the sister series to 33 1/3? - Cool idea, I'd love to see a series of books like 33 1/3 about games.