One of the best technology demos at the Game Developers Conference last week came from Epic Games, which created an incredible-looking futuristic fight scene that pushed the boundaries of 3D graphics.
Nvidia executives also showed off the technology today at their analyst meeting and we’ve captured video of it below. The 3D graphics represents a new peak in realistic graphics and it represents Epic’s proposal for what the next-generation of console games — whenever they come — should look like.
“This next-generation technology preview is what we would like to see from the next-generation of gaming hardware,” said Alan Willard of Epic Games, which is the well-known game developer that has created games such as Unreal Tournament, Bulletstorm and Gears of War.
The cinematic video shows graphics that are running in the Unreal Engine in real-time. It is real-time computer graphics, not a video of pre-fabricated computer graphics.
The scene depicted resembles the futuristic, gritty city in the film Blade Runner. You can see cool effects in the glowing blow torch, the smoke rising from the cigarette, the detailed facial hair and wrinkles, and the morphing of the man’s skin. The guy takes out a bunch of cops beating up an old woman. As he does so, the screen freezes to slow motion and you can see all of the details that would otherwise be a blur.
Willard said that one of the effects is called bouquet depth of field, where you see a bright spot that is out of focus and then it is replaced with another image. You can also see reflections on all surfaces, such as the water on the streets reflecting light from the street lamps. Those reflections do not show through objects that are blocking it from view.
When the light hits a human face, you can see an effect called sub-surface scattering, when light penetrates through the layers of skin and makes skin glow as the light bounces around inside the skin. You can see the water trickling down the man’s face. The man’s jacket tail sways and moves as he does, thanks to an Nvidia clothing rendering technology.
The demo ran on a PC with an Intel Core i9 microprocessor with three Nvidia GeForce 580 GTX graphics cards connected through SLI technology. The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build.
Epic Games’ vice president Mark Rein said that the demo is considered ideal for next-generation console technology. But no console maker has yet acknowledged that it is building anything to replace the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3, or the Microsoft Xbox 360. See the video below.
Video game ad network Intergi Entertainment is launching its Playwire video publishing platform today to make it easy for any web site to make money from online video advertising. The Playwire video platform makes it easy to stream online videos, share them, and then make money from video ads.
Deerfield, Fla.-based Intergi finds advertisers for more than 300 game publishers that post their titles on the web. Those publishers have more than 64 million users a month. Intergi specializes in tailored and integrated ad campaigns. That means it can find lots of ads to plug into videos. With Playwire, Intergi is creating a platform that simplifies the process of making money with online video ads for the under-served “long tail” of the market, or small-demand items that add up to a lot over time.
Many people who publish video on the internet never make money from video ads. But Intergi hopes to change that. Playwire uses a free Bolt open source video player that can deliver high-definition video. Playwire supports more than 100 video formats and can stream video to mobile devices. It also has a built-in ad server. Playwire also includes everything else people need to publish videos online: encoding, hosting, content management, analytics, syndication, and monetization. Publishers pay for this infrastructure only as they make money.
Jayson Dubin, chief executive of Intergi Entertainment, says that advertisers shouldn’t ignore the long tail of content publishers who can reach a lot more people now thanks to the internet. “No one has ever really tried to reach this customer base,” Dubin said.
Playwire’s launch partners include Adap.tv, Adobe, Amazon web services, AOL, BrightRoll, Google, Specific Media, Tidal TV and Tremor Media/ScanScout.
Other video platforms often require video publishers to sign up for contracts, where the videos have to get minimum views to make any money. That has stopped a lot of small businesses from signing up. Playwire’s “pay as you go” business model allows publishers to get up and running quickly without paying upfront money. Publishers only pay for the storage they use each month and the more they use, the less they pay.
Rivals include Ooyala, Brightcove, YouTube, Kaltura and others. Dubin said Playwire is starting out small, with 500 beta testers now. Within a year, he will be happy if there are 5,000 to 10,000 publishers using the service. Intergi was founded in 2007 and has 20 employees. The company is self-funded.
Mahmoud Khasawneh is the founder and CEO of Quirkat, a games development company based in the UAE with studios in Jordan. He is also the IGDA Middle East Chapter Leader.
As the games industry in the Middle East has grown and evolved over the past decade, video game development and game localization aimed at the Middle Eastern market remains a tremendous opportunity. At first glance, the complexities of language, values, social fabric and an entirely foreign pop culture can, understandably, seem daunting to developers and publishers, particularly from a Western perspective.
However, publishing video games for a Middle Eastern audience can yield positive results despite its challenges. Reliable statistics for the region are few and far between, but the Middle Eastern gaming industry is likely worth somewhere between $1 billion and $2.6 billion in terms of revenue across software and hardware. Western developers and publishers have the chance to successfully enter and influence a very green and receptive market, ready to be engaged and monetized.
The “Global Audience”
Many publishers and game developers claim to target “global audiences,” but the reality is that this target often doesn’t extend to the Arab world and rather focuses on North American, European and South East Asian markets. There is virtually no presence of big publishers in the Middle East and North Africa.
There doesn’t seem to be a clear reason for this, as numbers show that the market is rife with opportunity. For starters, simple demographics indicate these regions have a population of more than 400 million people who speak a single language — Arabic. And many Arabic-speaking countries have young populations, some with more than 50% who are under 25 years old. The demographics also show more than 200 million mobile phones and a strong Facebook presence.
These numbers highlight a wide spectrum of gamers that aren’t being addressed at core or casual levels, nor on the web, via smartphones or through traditional retail channels. There is still no player in the multi-platform, core game development space. By some estimates, there’s an install base of about 8.5 million consoles in the Middle East (excluding gray imports). Sony has long been the dominant player in the Middle Eastern market, but recently, other hardware makers — notably Microsoft — have begun making moves in the region. But given these numbers, there can and should be many more players in this market.
Development History
The games industry in the Middle East has evolved over the past decade. Initially, the few developers who attempted to create original content for the Middle Eastern gamer faced an uphill battle in establishing a foothold in their home markets. High rates of piracy and a disconnected retail landscape fostered a difficult path to market. The few local games in the industry’s early days had gained notoriety for having political agendas, and the typical gamer was looking to the likes of EA and Ubisoft for his or her gaming fix, due to the initial perception of inferior quality associated with locally developed games. Eventually, through partnerships with ISPs and mobile network operators, that perception was gradually shattered and local developers started seeing success. Further partnerships with Western studios and publishers yielded bigger, more impressive projects and higher quality games.
Local developers also turned their eye to outside markets, one example being Egypt-based Timeline Interactive, developers of CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars. Today, a more structured retail environment, higher bandwidth, online payment channels and investor interest in the game development space have all lead to greater opportunity in the market.
The Challenges of Localizaion
The groundwork that was laid by the early pioneers in Middle East game development has paved the way for current Western developers and publishers to successfully enter the space today, and they are more cognizant of the challenges and specifics of this market. One of the greatest challenges along the way included attempts at pure language localization that weren’t met with much success. THQ was one of the first western publishers to enter the Arabic speaking market and quickly learned the necessity of cultural relevancy: Ifirst localized title, Wall-E, was unsuccessful, as it was marketed to Saudi Arabia, a country with no cinemas.
Yet another important localization lesson was learned when Arabized MMO games first started showing up in the Middle East. The purely Google-translated text made no sense, and a lot of technical flaws were exploited, like the lack of standard Unicode text, RTL (right-to-left) support in the marketing assets, and lack of support websites. With heavy ad spending, however, the developers saw traffic pick up from the region and the more far-sighted ones forged local partnerships for better localization and on-the-ground CRM. This resulted in the tremendous success of games such as Travian.
Content relevance and adherence to familiar themes is crucial in developing and publishing games aimed at Arab markets. Sony understood this as far back as 2004 when it introduced This Is Football in Arabic for the PS2, given that football (soccer) is the region’s biggest sport. Sony continues to cater to the market today, being the only console producer with Arabic content for its motion control platform with the release of Start the Party! in Arabic. The publishers that take the time to go beyond pure language localization and understand the gamer demographic and culture can reap the benefits of this wide open market.
Cultural Sensitivity
In addition to language localization and content relevance, cultural sensitivity is another important element that must be considered. On the surface, the guidelines might seem straightforward: Sex, gambling, alcohol and nudity are obvious subjects to avoid. The reality is slightly more complex, as approaches to topics such as family, workplace ethics, politics and war are all areas that could easily be misrepresented in a game environment. Additionally, the social and cultural guidelines are not consistent across the many countries that comprise the Arab world. A deeper understanding of these variations and how product positioning varies from North Africa all the way to the more affluent Gulf market is a sure way of guaranteeing stronger returns on any game investments made in the region.
Ultimately, once the barriers of language and culture have been successfully understood and penetrated, the Middle Eastern gamer is no different than any gamer anywhere else in the world. The interactive experience sought and enjoyed in the Middle East is no different than the typical fun, entertaining game developed for the U.S. markets. It is my strong belief that partnerships between Western and Middle Eastern developers are the key to success; with new marketplaces, stores and digital distribution channels, there is no reason why a successful game cannot — with a little bit of effort and insight — bridge the cultural divide for a truly global game experience.
The building for frog design in New York’s Greenwich Village sits in an innocuous patch of offices just by the Holland Tunnel. Inside and seven floors up, however, is a bustling hive of designers and creatives thinking in broad strokes and typing details on their sundry Macs. Off the large, open workroom is a small, dark alcove filled with sticky notes, charts and candy: the hard work of MTV’s latest social good campaign, “The Get Schooled College Affordability Challenge.”
While the firm deals with numerous ongoing projects, MTV’s campaign has been its focus for the past two weeks. MTV set out to create a crowdsourced, student-led, digital tool to help increase college completion rates by making it easier for students to navigate the financial aid maze. After vetting more than 200 submissions, MTV narrowed those down to three finalists who would work with frog to break apart, redesign and refine their ideas.
The winner will get $10,000 and see his or her idea brought to life by MTV, the CollegeBoard and the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, with a development budget of up to $100,000. Not too shabby but also not too easy. We sat down with one of those finalists, Larissa Simpson, to get a peak inside the intense design process at frog, and to find out what it takes to make a socially-minded digital tool.
Simpson’s Project
Simpson came up with her idea — a video game that guides students through applying to schools and for grants and scholarships — while locked in a hotel room in South Korea. A part-time model and Brooklyn native, Simpson began modeling during her second year at Brooklyn College to make money while navigating her education. She spent much of last summer doing shoots in Milan, Germany and Korea as a way to build up her portfolio.
On one shoot in Korea, the models were asked not to leave their hotel rooms. Bored and searching for scholarship to help her pay for a new media program at the New School in New York, Simpson came across MTV’s challenge and began brainstorming. The game, nicknamed “The Avatar Project,” would function like a mix between Super Mario and the Sims, in which the challenges weren’t based on gold coins but actual funding and school applications. “You get to know yourself by applying to scholarships,” Simpson says.
Each of the three finalists have taken a unique approach to helping students pay for school. Dekunle Somade is building an SMS platform to serve as a college on-ramp for low-income students, while Devin Valencia is creating a Facebook app that will help students find and apply for FAFSA and other scholarships.
Simpson’s project draws from different parts of her background. “I did spend a lot of time doing computer games,” Simpson says, “Me and my sister used to sneak into the computer room secretly to play.” She was drawn by how games created their own space, a trait that could help educate students. “When I played games, what I really liked was being able to get into the world and tuning everything out and I think that environment could be really useful when people are learning,” she says.
She’s hoping to take that interactive element into her future studies and her future career: using video in an interactive, immersive way to improve people’s live.
Viacom tasked its channels to embrace the challenge in their own way. MTV, with its naturally younger (and presumably tech-savvy) audience, went directly for enrolled and would-be college-students. Rather than just build a digital tool and call it a day, MTV wanted the project to spark conversation and come from the people that needed it most. “We could have just made [a tool] ourselves but we thought it would be much more impactful if we went to college students who go through the process every year,” says Jason Rzepka, vice president of MTV Public Affairs.
To that end, the MTV audience plays a large role in selecting the winners. While MTV has a panel of judges pulled from the project partners, the public will get to weigh in on the finalists, Rzepka says. An open, crowdsourced vote will play a significant factor in which project wins. To help all three projects be as ready, useful and polished as possible, MTV has paid frog design to devote a team of specialists to each contestant for a one-week intensive session. The days may be long, but the process is anything but.
In the Trenches
Frog design is a place where people have titles like “interactive designer” and “technologist,” and meeting rooms are officially named “fish tank” or “grotto.” The seemingly vague descriptions are actually pretty spot-on for the kind of high-minded work that goes on at the design firm. A “technologist” doesn’t just code and program, he or she also has to understand what technologies best complement an idea or solve a grand, conceptual problem. Simpson was paired with technologist Elliot Winard, interactive designer Brandy Bora, a strategist and frog’s creative director JF Grossen, who also worked with Somade in New York (Valencia joined the Austin “frogs,” as they’re called).
Simpson’s work room is about the width and depth of a Hummer. Packed into that space are thousands of notes and sticky notes spread across two massive boards. At the center of the room is a faux-wood table, piled with three Macbook Pros, masking tap, pens and markers, bug-eye sunglasses, tea cups, coffee mugs and an untouched granny smith apple. The room is one of the only in frog without natural light, instead, a multi-bulbed floor-lamp and round wall lamp give off variable glow, depending on how many planning boards and flow charts are stacked in front of them.
Grossen, dressed in a dark grey, wool, shawl collar sweater, jeans and black leather shoes, explained the basic steps of any design process at frog. One board, measuring about three feet by six feet, is an “ecosystem map.” This is the first step and is essentially structured brainstorming. On it are references, ideas, inspirations and goals for the project. “Tell us everything,” Grossen says, “What space will the idea live in?”
Simpson’s ecosystem had pictures of Sims video games, a Super Mario over world map, the paperclip from Microsoft Word and a The Simpsons avatar creator, among many others.
The next step is a “journey map.” This deals more with the project’s narrative, taking all the references in the ecosystem and identifying what are starting points, end points, rewards, stages, challenges and so forth. The journey map is a flow chart of sticky notes, color coded to denote points (yellow), rewards (dark yellow), questions (pink), etc. A giant white board dominates an entire wall. It’s reserved for the project’s elevator pitch, revised and rehearsed every day. Simpson has to give the pitch to anyone that walks into the room. Still early in the process, there’s a lot of writing on the board. “It’s a pretty long elevator ride, right now,” Grossen muses.
Media training is a big part of this design boot-camp. Despite its charity-roots, MTV is still running a competition that requires Simpson to be able to present, speak and promote her idea in front of experts, camera crews and eventually her peers.
The inexperience of all the contestants is a blessing and a curse. It means that they bring a freshness and intimate knowledge of the problem they’re solving, but it can also mean that their ideas can get away from them. It’s a concern that everyone is aware of. “At the core, we’ve got three really powerful concepts,” Rzepka says. “This whole process is to refine that concept.” Frog’s mission is to make that a reality without steamrolling their young wards. Grossen says whenever Somade felt pressure, they would immediately re-adjust to make sure he was happy with the end project. Says Simpson: “I feel like the idea has remained pretty much what it’s supposed to be. Some things have been eliminated or put back in, but it’s still pretty much the idea I came up with in the first place.”
Where Does It Go From Here?
Since we spoke, Simpson has given a presentation to both a panel of frogs and project heads, she has been interviewed and filmed for MTV promos and longer pieces explaining her project. All this while working 9 to 5 days pulling her ideas apart and trying to put them back together. Voting begins soon.
If she wins, she’ll be given a budget of up to $100,000 to actually make her game. But the project doesn’t end there for MTV. Committed, via Viacom, to its partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rzepka says there are at least three more years of planned advocacy and support. The idea is to look beyond financial aid to other major hurdles in college completion, such as first-generation Americans, and developing other tools that can best help their young demographic get there, “This is a long term and sustained effort,” Rzepka says.
Regardless of whether she wins, Simpson has been inspired by the process. From a hotel room in Korea to a candy-strewn design studio in Greenwich, she has come a long way toward making her game — and the college dreams of young students — a reality.
Game website design is often maligned by designers interested in the usability of their interfaces, and for good reasons. A bunch of Flash menus and explosive animations don’t make a great website–not an easy to use one, not a fast-loading one, and most of the time, not even an attractive one.
In this round-up, we’ve dug up 12 game website designs that we think are actually attractive–and in some cases, usable as well.
World of Warcraft
Blizzard recently updated their aging World of Warcraft website. Not only is the new design more vibrant, it’s far more usable as well–the main navigation in particular is no longer an epic list of links, but a hierarchical approach that is easier to drill down through. Points go to Blizzard for creating a design that incorporates the art of the game world without sacrificing usability.
Little Big Planet 2
Little Big Planet 2′s website conveys the brand’s sense of fun with plenty of imagery, without bogging the site down by using Flash or Silverlight–though it does, at first glance, look like one of those game sites done entirely in Flash.
Guild Wars
NCSoft is interesting in that its game sites are a subsection of the corporate site, not separate entities as most other game sites tend to be. In the Guild Wars design, NCSoft artfully combines corporate branding with Guild Wars artwork without making either component seem out of place.
Diablo III
Blizzard’s much-anticipated Diablo III boasts a teaser website that is mostly driven by artwork, both in the interface and as the main form of content on the site. The site tastefully gives fans a sneak peak at the game–neither disclosing too much nor appearing visually boring by not disclosing enough.
The Rise of the Argonauts
This 2008 game didn’t do too well at the checkout counter, and by now most of you have probably forgotten all about it. Credit goes to the developers for keeping the site online, at least, which is one of the more tasteful Flash websites I came across while I put together this list.
Champions Online
Cryptic’s Champions Online site is information rich, but doesn’t let managing all that text get in the way of a good show. The site uses fonts and elements from comic books to give it that clichéd superhero cartoon feel that’s probably intended to fill the target market with a good dose of nostalgia.
Fallout
Fallout’s website is a great exemplar of retro-meets-grunge design, using mid-century motifs in much of the artwork and then giving it an aged appearance. The design very much signals the post-apocalyptic nature of the game.
Bully
In Rockstar’s typical style, the Bully splash page combines entertaining cartoons with private school motifs to give you a sense of the point of the game… which, of course, is causing trouble for your teachers.
L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire is another Rockstar game, and this site features a more serious tone. The logo and fonts scream retro gangster, compounded by Monroe-esque figure in the background. Unfortunately, the lack of any space between the top of the window and the logo just makes the rest of the page look off to me.
Forza
Minimalism isn’t often seen in the game world, but Forza makes full use of the style. The site is built around clean lines and white space, where the content and pictures do all of the talking.
Star Defense
I’ve never played Star Defense, but the site is quite easily one of my favorites. Star Defense’s designers have taken the game site to a whole new level with a perfect marriage of game art and usability.
Star Trek Online
Star Trek Online takes the well-known computer interface of the Star Trek television shows and tones the color scheme down and makes the lines more angular. A beautiful job of keeping the feel of an established intellectual property, while updating it for a new iteration.
One of the best technology demos at the Game Developers Conference last week came from Epic Games, which created an incredible-looking futuristic fight scene that pushed the boundaries of 3D graphics.
Nvidia executives also showed off the technology today at their analyst meeting and we’ve captured video of it below. The 3D graphics represents a new peak in realistic graphics and it represents Epic’s proposal for what the next-generation of console games — whenever they come — should look like.
The scene depicted resembles the futuristic, gritty city in the film Blade Runner. You can see cool effects in the glowing blow torch, the smoke rising from the cigarette, the detailed facial hair and wrinkles, and the morphing of the man’s skin. The guy takes out a bunch of cops beating up an old woman. As he does so, the screen freezes to slow motion and you can see all of the details that would otherwise be a blur.
Video game ad network 
Grossen, dressed in a dark grey, wool, shawl collar sweater, jeans and black leather shoes, explained the basic steps of any design process at frog. One board, measuring about three feet by six feet, is an “ecosystem map.” This is the first step and is essentially structured brainstorming. On it are references, ideas, inspirations and goals for the project. “Tell us everything,” Grossen says, “What space will the idea live in?”
