GCA Staff Notes by Malcolm – 2

Part 2 of Malcolm Stuart Grant’s notes from GCA. Part 1 was here.:)

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16:00-16:50 "The challenge of Creating New UP"

Chris Taylor, Creative Director & Founder, Gas Powered Games.

Chris pulled out an interesting talk basically about how long he had been in the industry and not massively on topic about coming up with a new ip. He covered some early games he had worked on – Hardball II (1989), Hard Driving II and 4D boxing. I am always cautious of the use of 4D after Sony’s comments before the Playstation 3 came out. He then went on to exactly why he left and made his own company. He covered his companies games: Dungeon Siege series, Supreme Commander, Space Seige and more recently Demi God.

He went through a few slides. Essentially what’s our motivation while making new IPs.

- accepting established rules

- choosing to adopt them or not

- making a game – why ?

- money

- revitalized tired IP

- inexplicable love

He explained that a new IP needs to be cultivated with a small team because working with a big team means that they are a lot of people sitting around without work. I’ve been present in this sort of situation before, where a (ps2) sized team were waiting on my design document.

For a project to get anywhere, you need to prototype in some shape or form and remove bad ideas, once you have your game in a loose sense ready, the core can work on it. One the core has produced something tangible then full production can begin.

He then proceeded to talk about how the future was exciting with mentions of:

- PC games casuals

- java, flash, mods, XNA, facebook

- apple iphone

- xbla

- psn

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17:00-17:50 "Closing Session: Roundtable + Audience Questions of the day’s Speakers"

One word – painful.

There were 4 japanese games designers and Chris Taylor on stage. Two of the Japanese games designers had translators. Any audience questions went to the translators who would then discuss with their respective designer and then eventually a responce was gained. I feel sorry for Chris and the presentor man who was trying to keep the whole thing together. There were tit-bits of information but lost in the large translation gap.

This was quite difficult to sit through, I was glad when it was over.