I'm down in Brighton at the Develop Conference - where the European game development community gathers to discuss shaders, sound and salary. Beards, black t-shirts and vastly outnumbered women? Yes, the stereotype is still accurate but less so than expected - pretty essential for an industry attempting to widen its market. And the challenges of creating these next-gen game have been the theme of the event. There have been numerous seminars with snappy titles like, "Leveraging the Ageia PhysX SDK for multi-core simulation." As you can imagine, the vast majority were of interest only to those who own, or will soon own, an ironic C++ t-shirt. Fair enough, considering the focus of the event, but luckily there were some more accessible keynotes, with Peter Molynuex's effort predictably entertaining.
Since the sale of Lionhead to Microsoft Molyneux has given the impression of a man with a huge weight off his shoulders. "How you can have me up here talking about design after the mistakes I made with Black and White is beyond me", he said. Self depreciation aside Molyneux's keynote focussed on the importance of having a clear design vision as well as a longing for the good ol' days of pizza and coke. He also stressed the importance of creating a community buzz while attempting to control some of the more extreme feature requests that can gather pace, such as the call for giant fruit in Black and White. And perhaps with a nod to his predominantly developer audience, he was gently rude towards marketing people. His conclusions? Democracy out, inspiration in, with design being holistic - it's the whole experience that matters.
Away from the serious stuff there was an awards ceremony that offered the chance for the development industry to pat itself on the back. Sony, Criterion (Burnout) and Bizarre Creations (Project Gotham Racing) received the biggest congratulations, with the latter's award for Geometry Wars 2 a welcome recognition of that game's minimalist genius.
Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil won the development legend award - and he deserved it - but you have to wonder who will be winning this award in 2010. The growing size of teams, at least for console and PC, makes it much harder for new talent to gain recognition. My guess is Live Arcade - or maybe, gulp, mobile - will throw up a new Molyneux or Cecil. Of course, you could argue that the "name" of the developer simply doesn't matter anymore. Would you buy a game just because it was part created by Molyneux or Meier? In the future I'm not sure you will.
The 18 categories and winners in full were:
NEW UK/EUROPEAN STUDIO
BIGBIG STUDIOS
MOST IMPROVED STUDIO
REBELLION
MOBILE GAMES STUDIO
GAMELOFT
HANDHELD GAMES STUDIO
ROCKSTAR LEEDS
NEW CONSOLE IP
BUZZ (SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE EXTERNAL DEVELOPMENT/RELENTLESS)
NEW PC IP
FAHRENHEIT (QUANTIC DREAM)
BEST USE OF A LICENCE
KING KONG (UBISOFT)
BEST USE OF ONLINE
BIZARRE CREATIONS (GEOMETRY WARS: RETRO EVOLVED)
ART & SOUND
CRITERION (BURNOUT REVENGE/BLACK)
INNOVATION
SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE EXTERNAL DEVELOPMENT/RELENTLESS (BUZZ CONTROLLERS)
TOOLS PROVIDER
NATURALMOTION
SERVICES & OUTSOURCING
SIDE UK
RECRUITMENT COMPANY
OPM RESPONSE
PUBLISHING HERO
SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE
IN-HOUSE DEVELOPMENT TEAM
CRITERION
INDEPENDENT DEVELOPER
TRAVELLER'S TALES
DEVELOPMENT LEGEND
CHARLES CECIL
THE GRAND PRIX AWARD
BIZARRE CREATIONS
