Game Development Translation/Slides
From AoCWiki
[edit] Slide 1
International game development ... in little Norway
[edit] Slide 2
- Funcom - Who are we and what do we do?
- Gaming business - More than just fun and games?
- Development - How to develop an international game?
- Conan - How does it really work?
[edit] Slide 3
- Established in 1993 - Norways oldest
- Developed over ten games for different systems
- Børsnotert i 2006, solid situasjon
- Over 230 employees from over 20 different countries
- One of the worlds largest developers
[edit] Slide 4
- Developers for Hire
- Speed Freaks (Sony)
- CMX (THQ)
- Caspar (Universal)
- Pocahontas (Disney)
- NBA Hangtime (Capcom)
- Dinosaur's tale (HTE)
- Winter Gold (Nintendo)
- Longest Journey (Div)
- Independent MMO company (2001-2007)
- Alien Invasion - AO
- Shadowlands - AO
- The Nocturn Wars - AO
- Lost Eden - AO
- Anarchy Online Spec. Ed.
- Anarcy Online
- Dreamfall
- Different cellphone games
- Ready for growth (2007)
- Uniquely experienced team
- Over 5million games sold
- Own technology
- Two games in development
- Stock company
- Large community
[edit] Slide 5
Funcom comming games
- Age of Conan
- MMORPG
- Based on Conan's world
- Advanced technology
- Wanted by a whole world
- The Secret World
- MMORPG
- Our own world and time
- Established Conan-technology
- Very hush-hush atm.
[edit] Slide 6
Agenda
- Funcom - Who are we and what do we do?
- The gaming industry - More than just fun and games
- Development - How to develop an international game?
- Conan - How does it work?
[edit] Slide 7
Videogames
- 30 Billion
Music
- 31,4 Billion
Movies
- 64,5 Billion
[edit] Slide 8
Gaming industry - The gaming nation Norway
- There are over 500 000 PlayStation 2-machines in norwegian homes, an extreme penetration
- There are sold over two million games in norway every year, most for PlayStation 2.
[edit] Slide 9
The gaming industry - Extreme piracy
- Piracy hurts the game sales
- Internet increases access
- All copy-protection will, sooner or later, get broken
- Are traditional games outdated? (står tradisjonelle PC-spill for fall?)
- Are paid online games the rescue?
- Recurring income gives greater profit
- These online games are impossible to copy
- More companies start to see their value
[edit] Slide 10
The gaming industry - Paid online games?
- Gamers pay ~100NOK each month to play, a subscription
- The gamer logs on to a server via the internet to play, and all the characters are other gamers
- A internet world can have thousands of real players who participate from the whole world and play together
- An online game means a virtual world you can explore with other people
[edit] Slide 11
Gaming industry - paid online games explode (GRAPH)
[edit] Slide 12
Gaming industry - paid online games explode
"In 2006 the western MMO market topped one billion dollars." - Screen digest
... mainly thanks to ...
According ot Screen Digest's reseachers, the income for World of Warcraft capped three billion NOK in 2007. Yes, 9 million people play World of Warcraft.
Many people wants a piece of this cake.
[edit] Slide 13
Gaming industry - everybody wants in on the online gaming market
Everquest Ca 500 000 gamers, Peaked in 2001
World of Warcraft Ca 9 000 000 gamers, released in 2004
The potential audience is growing extremely
[edit] Slide 14
Gaming industry - Everybody wants in on the online gaming market
(Pictures of games)
More online games are on their way, and many allready exist - is there room for more?
[edit] Slide 15
The gaming industry - online games are hard to create (this is in english allready :P)
[edit] Slide 16
Agenda
- Funcom - Who are we and what do we do?
- The gaming industry - More than just fun and games
- Development - How to develop an international game?
- Conan - How does it work?
[edit] Slide 17
Development - What do you need?
- Economy
- To develop an AAA-title has become extremely expensive in the last years
- Age of Conan costs between 100 and 200 million to make (likely to be in NOK)
- Technology
- Codebase - Do you buy or create your own?
- Funcom has builts it's own technology
- Staff
- An AAA-title today needs over 100 people
- People from over 20 different nations work at Funcom
- Concept
- You need a good idea, that needs to work as a game
- Age of Conan is based on a solid lisence
[edit] Slide 18
Development - Everything has become larger (Development cost in DKK) GRAPH for Hitman costs
[edit] Slide 19
Development - But why?
Production values
- Graphics: Everything should look extremely realistic, and this takes time
- The world needs to be bigger and more immersive
- The physics needs to be realistic, which requires a lot of code
- Animations and voices are recorded by actors
- Games should prefferably be released on several platforms
- Music: Keyboard isn't enough, needs a choir!
Marketing
- If you want to sell the game, you need millions to advertise it
- You need a good lisence, which is expensive
- You want to tie a known name to the game
- Eternal struggle against hundres of other good titles
[edit] Slide 20
Development - Then and now
- Super Mario 8bit had simple graphics and few elements. Age of Conan looks almost photorealistic, and has thousands of elements.
- In Pac-man your goal was to eat white dots, so the gameplay-code was simple. In Age of Conan you're living a virtual life and exploring a whole world.
- Commander Keen gave you small beeps from the PC and wasn't even based on real instruments. In Age of Conan we have choir, musicians and thousands of real sounds.
[edit] Slide 21
Development - production process
A god idea
- Brainstorming meatings
- Write down the ideas
- Create a "design bible"
Planning
- Structuring the project
- Parts of the team
- Milestones and processes
Production
- Code, art, content
- Prioitizing, cutting
- Tie together the pieces
Test and release
- Quality control the product
- Marketing
- Distribution to the market
[edit] Slide 22
Development - Who do you need?
- Designers
- Programmers
- Graphics
- Sound technisians
- Content builders
- Marketing
[edit] Slide 23
Development - Designers
- Comes with the ideas, gets them on paper
- Describes every detail of the game
- Sets the parameters and defines the rules
- Thousands of pages with pure text
- Formulas, excell-sheets, statistics
- Cooperates with the developers
[edit] Slide 24
Development - Graphics
- Takes the designers requirements and realizes them visually
- Tens of thousands pieces of graphics in every size
- 3D, 2D, concept, animation
- Work in 3Dmax, Photoshop etc
- Technical limitations
- Motion-capture and hand-animation
[edit] Slide 25
Development - Coders
- Makes all the pieces of the game work together
- Engine-coders, gameplay-coders, tools-coders
- Hundreds of thousands of Lines of code
- Visual studio and other programs
- Weekly merging of all code
- Continuous bugfixing all the way
[edit] Slide 26
Development - Content-creators
- Takes the graphics and builds a world from it
- Writes thousands lines of dialogs
- Scripting situations in the game
- Creating quests for the player
- Defines thousands of objects
- Create all playable content
[edit] Slide 27
Development - Sound technicians
- Has to create thousands of unique sounds
- Compose music that should hold for hours
- Creates everything from yelling to footsteps
- Makes the sound work with the technology
- Tens of sounds play simultaniously
- Voice acting and actors
[edit] Slide 28
Development - Testers
- Tens of testers are testing the game constantly
- Testing every detail of the game
- Everything is logged and structured
- Communicates with the developers
- Apporves every version
- Works with external testers
[edit] Slide 29
Development - Marketing
- How to get the press' attention with hundreds of games released every year?
- Working with ad-campaigns on TV, radio, online, gaming magazintes etc
- There are only 10-12 covers for each game magazine each year, how do you get one?
- Market the game to the community, building a community that should hold for years
- Reveal features at regular intervals, resist the temptation of telling everything right away
[edit] Slide 30
Development - The lisence
- More and more developers use established lisences that gives them a good basis for creating games
- A good lisence can sell the game for you, even if the game is bad
- Extreme pressure on releasing the game together with other products is a trap
- A strong brand that can help the game, especially movies
- Age of Conan is built on the Conan lisence, and Funcom has the rights to create a MMO of it
- The Conan lisence is solid, with books, movies, comics, characters, posters and more
