GameHorizon Conference 09

 The North’s premier games development conference returned this year with some more insights into the future of the games industry. Technology wise, Andrew Oliver of Blitz Games demonstrated their developments into stereoscopic gaming with a Ninja themed platform game; unfortunately it requires you to wear polarised glasses but worry not 3D TVs should be available in a couple of years.

We were treated to demos of APB from Realtime Worlds and Guillaume de Fondaumiere of Quantic Dream demonstrated the amazing looking Heavy Rain for the PS3. So a lot of great insights into traditional gaming but  the key focus of the conference was the advancements in online/download markets including Facebook and the iPhone – online/download is really allowing smaller developers to break into the games market.

What Comes Next?

Channel 4 Education’s summer conference opening with a fantastic keynote from Zenna Atkins, who you would almost not believe was the Chair of OFSTED. Zenna had an excellent insight into the challenges faced by the UK education system and the need for teachers and people in education to just be brave and innovate. 

Shaun Bailey, Mary Sharpe and Yvonne Roberts gave a great panel, demonstrating the need for more creative and digital solutions to help level the educational playing field especially for those from low income families.

Matt Locke & Alice Tayloralso demonstrated the great projects they have been working on over the past year including BattleFront and Routes. A great conference and no doubt we’ll see some more great projects from Channel 4 next year.

Showcomotion

I returned to the Showcomotion conference for the second year after realising it is about so much more than just TV. Showcomotion is a children’s media conference bringing together people from all sections of children’s media (TV, web, games, etc) and giving them a platform to share ideas. Peter Salmon the newly appointed head of BBC North opened the conference, talking about his passion for the North and excitement about the BBC move to Salford. The conference then continued for 2 days of exciting talks and rather than reinvent the wheel you can check out some great blog posts about on the Showcomotion website.

I believe that is all the conference I will be attending this Summer, so it’s back to the office to begin work on an exciting new project… more news soon.

For the weekend, I hung up my business hat and went along purely as a geek. I ended up working on an idea called Citipedia. Originally submitted by Dundee based designer Lyall Bruce, Citipedia was a platform for giving communities more information and ultimately power over the space around them.

I chose to work on this project because I loved the vision of creating a fun ’simcity like’ interface for people to explore how wasted space could be better used. My contribution to the project was a Flash based editor, that used googlemaps to display an real space which users could then add different terrain and features ontop of and estimate the total development costs and time - in the future we intended to add counters to additional measure the environmental and social impact.  

This editor formed part of a larger social networking platform allowing users to share their ideas and utimately create change. We should hopefully have the full application online at somepoint but until then you can >> Start Planning.

Apply Serious Games 2009

On 7^th May I attended the Apply Serious Games 2009 forum in London. Organised by one of my mentors Martine Parry, it was a one day forum looking at emerging trends in the serious games industry. An excellent keynote by Lord Puttnam and a strong panel on Growth Sectors for 2009 made this an insightful and informative event for anyone working in the serious games industry.

Thinking Digital

From the 13^th – 15^th May I was in my ‘blue-sky’ element at the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle. Great minds from across the World came together to discuss stuff – I saw stuff because it’s the only word I can think of to describe such an eclectic mix, try to find the link between Particle Physics (Tara Shears), Interface Technologies (Johnny Chung Lee) and Perfume (Chandler Burr), to name but a few of the great talks. This diversity was a good thing, multiple perspectives are quintessential for creative thinking, and that is something Thinking Digital brings together. People are now calling it the TED of the North East and tickets are already on sale for 2010.

bTween09

I just got back from Liverpool after bTween09 at FACT on the 11^th and 12^th June. I really enjoyed bTween, a true cross media event bringing together the very best of the UK creative industry. Exciting panels included ‘Where’s the Money?’ with Peter Cowley (Endemol), Angel Gambino, Ellen Marzell (In Game Advertising) and Shahid Ahmad (Sony), exploring new business models and ways of generating revenue; and ‘Making A Difference’ with Adam Gee (Channel 4), Lucy Willis (Raw Television), Andy Gibson (School of Everything) and Andy Bell (Mint Digital), providing real examples of creating products which create positive change.

On the final day I had the opportunity to pitch Throwie.net to an expert panel in the ‘Pitching In’ event with Nicole Yershon (Ogilvy), Ewan McIntosh (4iP), Jake Redford (Orange). It was a fantastic opportunity and was streamed lived across the web. Watch the ‘Pitching In’ event below. (Throwie is pitched first).

Click To Play

Following the last two good years, we’ve signed up to attend the 2009 Games Horizon conference. The two day event brings together ‘great minds’ from across the games industry to discuss the new and exciting.

Last year saw some exciting demonstrations – one of our favourites was Natural Motion’s Euphoria system, for dynamic motion synthesis. This approach to procedural animation will very likely have a major impact on the future of animation in computer games… one to watch. Also the avatar creation engine in Realtime World’s APB looked amazing… probably worth buying the game just to have fun creating characters.

Hopefully this year will be just as interesting. If you are attending and you want to arrange a chat then please get in touch.