Polish Game Developers Meeting 2012 – Coverage 1/2

April 29, 2013 | Posted in Events | No comments

Contents
  1. ZTG Saturday
  2. PGA Saturday

This is a collection of tweets I wrote after attending V ZTG. I wanted to preserve them on my blog.

Back in 27-28 October 2012 there was a general gaming convention Poznan Game Arena in Poznan city in Poland. Inside there was a sub-meeting fifth annual Zjazd Twórców Gier which I attended.

Unpleaseant surprise at the very beginning – tickets I bought via the Internet and printed myself weren’t working (and not only for me). I went to a long queue to customer service where people received new tickets.

 

Lighting was rather low and I didn’t have a tripod so my photos are blurry.

Event took place in a large building which had several pavilions. ZTG was in one of those. First day of PGA was crowded.

 

ZTG Saturday

Looking something like this:

Sunday plan

Sunday plan

Fourth block was dedicated to the Indie Game: The Movie screenings. I’ve already seen that film so I didn’t go there.
 
I’m not a fan of such configurations because you’re conflicted to which lecture / panel go and afterwards if you didn’t like it then you’ll regret for picking that and not the other.

 

Speakers were recommending methods like *A algorithm, AIML chatbot, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithm. It was mentioned in description that they wouldn’t go into technical stuff but they did.

 

Speaker presented a couple of graphs showing how many copies of his app games he sold on different platforms. I’m not exactly interested in this kind of stuff.

 

Eoin O’Doherty was predicting trends for 2013. The next big thing won’t be interface TV, motion controls or virtual reality but mobile devices because they are accessible multi-purpose devices, relatively cheap with increasing power. Facebook provides a common ground for applications and connects with other players. In summary elements of success are:

  • canvas / mobile compatibility
  • free-to-play model
  • major social connectivity

 
When it comes to monetisation you can trust Rovio / Zynga because they’re experts.

 

For example physics in most of the games is supplemental and not part of the main course like in Red Remover, rocket simulation in Kerbal Space Program. Supreme Commander is simulating path for projectiles. Biology inspired games like Flow or Osmos. As for psychology Stalker visualizes fear and units panic in Total War. Slideshow is available here.

 

 

Speaker talked about space (as in reality) and how it all relates to games.

Philosophy loves to play with words.  

 

  Which is something like Game Maker.

 

This one about optimizing terrain rendering in order to use less processing power. Stage fright happens to us all but I didn’t like that he was talking in a specialized language.

 

PGA Saturday

Between talks I went down to PGA to see what was going there. Stands with games with long queues, tournaments, presentations, contests, cosplay. I stopped for a while at retro section.

All sorts of older machines: NES, SNES, Jaguar, Commodore 64, Sega Dreamcast etc.

Guy behind this stand explained to me that fruits contain water which is a conductor. When you touch them you change voltage and that’s why they can be used as a controller.

 

As you can imagine joypad-fruits were wearing off rather quickly so I jokingly told the guy to borrow a couple of apples from the FS stand.

 

Substituting brawls with technology.

 

I already had enough waste paper.

 

I’ve never been to a big gaming convention before so it pretty much confirmed what I already saw on YouTube.

 

Racing games excluded. Sniper Challenge was more a demo rather than a full game. What was particularly perplexing to me is that I saw some kids playing older games (Fallout 3, NFS: Most Wanted).

 

And that concludes my first day on PGA/ZTG 2012. Second part of the coverage you’ll find here.

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