2/4/2015
12:25 PM - 12:45 PM
Muse
Creative maturity through life experiences How to build engaging open worlds
Tommy Francois
New IP Editorial Director
Ubisoft
In his talk, Tommy will explain how Ubisoft teams are building meaningful open worlds that will immerse players into their very own UNIQUE experience. Thats what the teams call Game System Story.
The goal is to let each player live a unique experience that can then be shared with others from the community. As Tommy points out, the new generation of players yearns for more freedom and for more choices in their experiences
we are invisible developers who want to meet and surpass their expectations.
To do so, the teams are working hard on building engaging worlds. These need to be logical, appealing and surprising to create emergence.
And the key, here, is to use logical systems to build upon: NPCs, animals, enemies, night and day cycle, weather, fauna, flora
are all examples of systems that create something we call the anecdote factory.
Thats where research and tools comes into play: in order to create coherent worlds where players will be able to express themselves, Tommys team provides Ubisoft devs with access to the best experts and locations: historians, scientists, artists, space explorers, underground facilities, sewer networks, Marine training camp and many other edgy experiences so teams understand what is not visible on the web. Feeling, touching, listening, meeting with unique characters that will inspire our worlds
The challenge is to share this across large teams, and this is where Tommy will explain how he launched a unique digital tool to streamline this.
This is a first of many out of the box tools that help foster mature creativity.
2:30 PM - 2:50 PM
Muse
Community and Development without Borders: Star Citizen
Chris Roberts
Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder
Cloud Imperium Games
Chris Roberts Star Citizen has made plenty of crowd funding headlines, but its Roberts development approach and engagement with a global community that have been the ingredients behind Star Citizens successes. What are some of the tools that have been utilized and how has the message galvanized fans of space sims and PC Games and turned traditional development and funding models upside down? Chis will be your pilot in this journey through the Star Citizen universe.
3:10 PM - 3:30 PM
Muse
Player Stories vs. Designer Stories Empowering Players Around The World
Michael de Plater
Creative Director
Monolith Productions
The Nemesis System in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor enables players to create and share gameplay stories in ways that Monolith didnt even imagine when they were designing and developing the game. As Game Makers we love creating and sharing our stories. What Shadow of Mordor taught us was that this is a universal human motivation our players want to create and share stories just as much as we do, and their stories are more important than ours.
- This is a new world and an entirely new type of relationship between creators and consumers of entertainment in which games represent a unique opportunity both to empower players and to enable dialogue between creators and consumers.
- This is something that historical authors or film makers could never have anticipated and are unable to respond to in the way that we can.
- The Presentation will include multiple examples and videos of our favorite Player Stories and emergent moments from our game systems both from End Users and from the Team as well as our lessons learned from players.
- The talk will also provide an overview of the key design influences and inspirations for the Nemesis System, including a bunch of geeky acronyms such as PENS & GNS Theory.
- Finally it will discuss some possible future ideas for narrative systems and the opportunities this can create for new types of collaboration between developers and players.
2/5/2015
10:00 AM - 10:45 AM
Muse
Thursday Opening Keynote
A Conversation with Shu Yoshida
Shuhei Yoshida
President
Sony Worldwide Studios
Lorne Lanning
Creative Director
Oddworld Inhabitants
Shu Yoshida, President of Worldwide Studios Sony Computer Entertainment, will be joined by renowned game developer Lorne Lanning for an intimate conversation about 20 years of Playstation and Yoshidas perspectives on the game industry past, present and future. This dialogue will explore Shus views on fostering game development, 1st party and 3rd party, and how the barriers between Indie and AAA are dissolving as the industry embraces a new phase of openness. Lanning, co-founder of Oddworld Inhabitants who first experienced great success with the original Playstation and Oddworld: Abes Oddyssee, will guide the conversation and share insights with Yoshida and the D.I.C.E. audience as we look back at the last 20 years and look forward to what lies ahead.
3:40 PM - 4:00 PM
Muse
Baby Steps: Returning to our roots is the future of videogames
Sean Murray
Co-Founder and Managing Director
Hello Games
The game industry has grown up too fast. When Sean and the Hello Games team started playing them, games were in their infant phase. People like David Braben made universes, while Jeff Minter made games about camels, and Will Wright created cities. These pioneers were inventing genres in assembler, making mistakes in 8bit and learning what games can be. Then the industry started making blockbusters. It became a business focused on production, on huge teams making million-dollar cut scenes. Justification came from the exorbitant revenues that far exceeded film, yet games still have a long way to reach maturity.
Now developers, especially indies like Hello Games, are returning to gaming's roots. Murray will share why indies are refocusing on the power of the developer, and how indies are going back to quickly exploring new avenues in old-school graphics. He will share his thoughts on why developers want freedom to create more than new art pipelines, and instead want to create new graphical forms, entire procedural worlds, and truly intelligent AI. For Sean, developers are going back to explore everything that makes videogames amazing, with the goal of making them even better.
