Kre8tif 2010 Part 1

This is a summary of the first day of Kre8tif 2010

Jason Manley (Keynote)

Jason talked about his experiences starting the most successful online art course (conceptart.org), how he took a job that was good financially but wasn't really helping his career and he wasn't happy about it, how to put down on paper a 'Partnership agreement' to clarify things in a new startup company,  learn to be open-minded and start talking and networking with new people you meet even from unrelated fields because you never know someday you might do business with them.

David Freeman (The Secret Behind Pixar's Magic)

David defines specific techniques used in Pixar movies that enables audience to consciously and subconsciously relate to the characters in Pixar movies. Here's a couple of the techniques:

• Sophisticated psychological insight, don't look down on the audience.
• Let it get ugly, don't feel that the audience can't handle some harsh reality.
• Echo the central issue in more than one character or plot-line.
• Poignant and funny can go side by side. Slide into poignant, you can spring into funny or action.
• A group working together can win.
• A person can be uniquely himself or herself and part of a close-knit family too.
• Toss in something wonderfully unexpected, for the unexpected gives birth to delight.

His website: Beyond Structure.

Pitching Clinic

Moderator: 

Leah Hoyer (Former Director of Development, Walt Disney Co.)

Panel:

• Tracy Wong (Director of Creative Services and Marketing, Animax)
• Silas Hickey (Creative Director, Asia Pacific Animation Development, Turner Entertainment Networks Asia, INC)
• Lynette Ng (Manager of Acquisitions for Disney Channels Southeast Asia)
• Evon Koh (Channel Manager, Astor Ceria)
• Juhaidah Joemin (Representative Office Manager, Al-Jazeera Children's Channel Malaysia)

The panel main discuss about what different channels are looking for in pitches, stressing about target demography (age, gender) and how each channel work differently from different regions.

More to come.

Everywhere Zombies!

I thought I put my knowledge about zombies into good use in this blog. In games, zombies are mindless enemies with simple and straightforward set of instructions which is what game programmers call AI. Even in the most complicated AAA games, zombie AIs are encountered, those enemies that run straight at you and straight to their deaths (a.k.a. kamikaze AIs), zombies are everywhere!

I may not be a zombie expert, but I do know my zombies. Here's a quick list of zombie movies I grew up watching.

• 28 Days Later
• 28 Weeks Later
• Brain Dead
• City of Rott
• The Crazies
• Dance of the Dead
• Grindhouse: Planet Terror
• Land of the Dead
• Zombieland
• Severed: Forest of the Dead
• Flight of the living dead: Outbreak on a plane
• Diary of the Dead
• The Signal
• I am legend
• Insanitarium
• REC
• Slither
• Resident Evil Series
• Shaun of the dead
• Splinter

Not much of a classico though, I kinda hate old films. And there are tons of other crappy zombie movies not worth watching or mentioning (including some on the list).

Here's a few rules to create if you wanna make a game/movie about zombies:

1. The way it spread, by biting, virus, airborne, some relic/item/curse, etc.
2. How fast the victim become infected, in seconds, minutes after they die, or some special condition like turning into a cocoon before zombifying, etc.
3. Zombie's agility, slow/fast, walk, crawl, jump/hop, run, etc.
4. Their brains, adaptiveness, stupidity, consciousness, capabilities and abilities, can they talk? (lol) or just mindless hungry bots, etc.
5. Their senses, sight, smell, noise, heat, etc.
6. How they die, headshot, normal but more body shots, fire, poison gas, they just don't somehow, etc.
7. Is there a zombie boss, the first strongest infected, the cursed/chosen one, non-zombie like the scientist or the mastermind, etc.
8. The cure, vaccination, some immunity perhaps, purify by fire, lemon juice, etc.
9. The survivors, from the start, how much character vector changes, weapon of choice, always leave some chicks alive, etc.
10. The ending, always leave questions in the end, never solve everything, open ended for viewers/players own interpretation, or a nice epic ending for satisfaction, etc.

Have fun but beware of zombies. If the world ends with a zombie apocalypse, you can always refer back to this blog for some survival tips and tricks. I'll write more when the time comes. lmao.

Games Are Personal

Gamers take games very personally because it is what defines them. We are what we eat. In most cases gamers get very emotional (anger and stress mostly) when playing a losing or imbalance game. The question is why? As an observer, it's hard not to be judgmental when looking at people who swears prematurely while playing games. I used to be (maybe still am) one of those people who swears and curses the gods (mostly Zues) in DotA when I'm losing. It's funny when you look back.

People are angry for a reason. Nobody likes to lose. But why so serious when it comes to games? The first obvious reason is games mean a lot to gamers, or should I say, that game means a lot to that gamer. All gamers have their favorite game, the one they put enormous emotional effort into when playing. They are defined by how resourceful they are in-game as opposed to in real life. If I were training Tekken for many years and lost to some newbie who spams buttons in a ranked tournament, of course I will be emotionally compromised. Who wouldn't?

The second reason leans heavily on how competitive that gamer is. Competitiveness is double edged though. It can push for improvements (game knowledge, reflexes, teamwork) but also make you too emotional over something intangible. That is what separates the gamers and pro gamers. The professionalism in pro gamer means they are really good at their roles in their games and they are good at containing stress and pressure levels as well as their emotions. That's what make games a good sport sometimes. Game tournaments are held all around the world for popular games and some even made careers playing as pro gamers.

So the next time you hear someone raising their voice while playing a game, you know how much emotional effort is being poured in. 

The Game Developer's Fire!

Screenshot from Game Dev Story on iPhone. 

Daylight, I work as a decent game programmer/tutor. But come night, my secret indie game is on fire! The question is...

Being a game developer is not the coolest job, yet. But to all who's following this path to success, be careful what you wish for.

Level Length Research (Platformer)

How long does it take before a player feels a platformer level is too lengthy? The answer is very subjective to the players. Here's a simple Youtube research that I conducted on how long it takes to finish one classical platformer level:

• Jungle King (1982 Atari 2600), 45 seconds. Link
• Congo Bongo (1983 Atari 2600), 1 minute 54 seconds. Link
• Super Mario Bros. (1985 NES), 1 minute 15 seconds. Link
• Super Mario World (1990 SNES) 39 seconds. Tested.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (1991 Sega Genesis), 29 seconds. Link
• Prince of Persia (1992 NES), 2 minutes, 38 seconds. Link
• Donkey Kong Country (1994 SNES), 1 minute 34 seconds. Link

Some platformer games have a time limit, therefore that's the maximum time to complete the level and the minimum time is the fastest time that level can be completed, roughly. The goal is to find out a time range between the time limit and the minimum time that we can use to design the length of a platformer level. Not too long, not too short, nice balance.

Here's our first hypothesis:
A level must be completable within a minimum time of 1~2 minutes.


Therefore if a player takes shorter than 1 minute to complete a level, its too short. Before we continue, lets list down the factors that influences the time it takes to finish a platformer level:

Internal factors that we can control (in game)

1. Level length (from start to end for one level)
2. Character movement speed (acceleration, deceleration, dash, etc)
3. Level difficulty (enemies, puzzles, platforms)

External uncontrollable factors (the environment and culture, player)

1. Player's personal experience (pattern recognition, game mastery, reflexes)
2. Player's goal and motivation (exploration, completion, perfection, achievement, competition)

How do you balance everything to fit our first hypothesis? Through thorough testing. Once you get the feeling right, internal factor 2 and 3 above will become your constant to modify internal factor 1. Now back to discussion, we know what is too short for a platformer level from our first hypothesis. But what is too long?

In Super Mario Bros and Super Mario World, there is a 400 second countdown limit for each level. Because of this constrain, players are motivated to complete the level within the time frame. The only drawback is no perfection (to get every coin, to find hidden blocks, to try entering every pipe) because players don't have the luxury of time to do all that.

In Sonic the Hedgehog, the timer starts from 0 instead, thus removing the constrain and encourage players to explore and find hidden rings and bonus game portals. The drawback is sometimes player explore too much and lost track of time and position, in other words, lost.

Games like Donkey Kong Country do not have any time constrains. Players can explore all they want and try to achieve perfection by collecting all the bananas and balloons.

Too long will cause the player to get frustrated either because of repetitiveness, linearity or difficulty and makes them wonder is there an ending? There is no real way to tell how long your level should be, I guess the closest winning formula would be 2~3 times longer than the minimum time from our first hypothesis. Thats roughly around 2~6 minutes for one level.

Here's our final hypothesis:
A level must be completable within a minimum time of 1~2 minutes and not longer than 6 minutes.


There are many exceptions to the rule, like modern platformers with coops or mixing platformer with other genres. Bear in mind it works only as a guideline not a must.

Finally LG!

Looks like we won another RM10,000! To Joe and Nic: Thanks, you guys are the best! :D

TVBoy!'s Full Cast!

We went through audition for the casts for TVBoy! Looks like we've got the most promising and talented actors for the all roles.

TVBoy: Hey can we get some hands please? -_-"
TVGirl: Yiiiiiipeeee! =D
OldCoupleTV: ........!
Tvil: Boo!

This is one crazy bunch, I hope they won't mind the first few months without paycheck. *runs away with the contracts*

TVGirl: HEEEY!
TVBoy: What the *uck dude? That's not what we agreed on! 0_o
Tvil: Wait a minute, did anyone read what our contract says?
OldCoupleTV: ............!
TVBoy: Crap! T_T