AltDevConf is an online community-driven conference that will take place February 11-12, 2012
We aim provide free access to a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts, and to create a space where bright and innovative voices can be heard.
Q: What is #AltDevBlogADay?
#AltDevBlogADay is a group of game developers and otherwise interested people (generally found on Twitter), ranging from experienced devs to students and educators to hobbyists, that want to blog more regularly. An idea inspired by iDevBlogADay.
Q: What do/can the developers post about?
Our peeps will post about anything they think might be interesting. That can vary from the extremely technical to the very high-level. It can be specific to their experience in game development, or simply a marginally related topic of interest. Basically we post what we think is interesting. And hopefully that's interesting to you too!
Q: How can I participate?
If you're a game developer (or related) and want to contribute, contact @mike_acton on twitter or email at macton@gmail.com
Also see: #readme (for Writers)
Q: Can you slow down the rate of posts? I'm having a hard time keeping up!
Nope. It's not live TV. You don't have to read it as it's written. You're welcome to read the posts at any rate you like. It's the nature of the internet that more information is generated than you could possibly consume. I suspect there are Wikipedia pages you haven't read either. ;)
This is a list of useful resources to help you refine, define, execute and possibly reconsider your decision to enter mobile game development this year. The resources are a little more inclined to the business and game design parts of game development, except for a couple of ones linking other lists.
Read more on Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013…
Often posts from a personal perspective are a contrite, self-promotion exercise of polishing the trumpets. They can also be an honest expression sometimes lost in the NDA red tape culture.
It is important to know why you do things, what drives and motivates you, bringing happiness and a sense of satisfaction. Though most importantly to admit when you made a gigantic cock-up and own up to being an idiot.
I’ve recently been doing a major rewrite of one of our core engine systems, the graph that we use for our visual scripting language Flow. Taking it from something that looks like this:
Every week or so, I walk into my local Costco and talk to Meredith, who politely offers me a taste of whatever food she’s providing free samples of that day. Luckily for me, last week was chicken nugget week, and Meredith’s food cart was conveniently standing in front of a huge display of chicken nugget bags. Within 4 feet, I could try the free sample, and if I liked it, grab the bag to purchase.
So, as an indie developer new to the scene, the thought of marketing my game has proven to be a daunting one. There are many avenues for marketing available through third parties, but indies rarely have the money for that sort of thing.
Many excellent blog posts before have gone into the various ways in which an indie can get their product out there on the cheap, but I want to talk about going a little bit deeper, and tell how you can use gamer psychology to your advantage to do a lot of your marketing for you.
I have discovered that I have a passion for helping students and aspiring game developers learn more about the industry. Part of this is because I occasionally feel like I stumbled into this career, and feel compelled to educate young people about game development in hopes of inspiring other people who were like me (potentially saving them 8 years of figuring out what they want to do with their lives). So far, my favorite outlet for student outreach has been Game Mentor Online, an online service that matches up aspiring developers with industry professionals and facilitates one-on-one mentorships.
So I’m in an interesting position. Malevolence, while not my first game by a long shot, is my first RELEASED game, and I’ve been lucky enough to have it gather a lot of attention (for an indie title) early on in its creation. From what people tell me, this does not normally happen. Normally, a developer will hit on gold after they’ve tested the waters with a few titles first, or had a hand in other game development, such as working for a AAA company.
Because of this unique perspective of having a relatively successful title (despite not yet being released) on my first ever attempt, I haven’t yet developed the pessimism that often comes with being an experienced indie game developer. This has led me to want to write this new thought piece, which goes into all of the things that they DON’T tell you about being a game developer. If you want the short and sweet version, feel free to skip to the end.
Read more on What they DON’T tell you about being a game developer…
Lately, I’ve started to think again about the irritating problem that there is no formal language for describing binary data layouts (at least not that I know of). So when people attempt to describe a file format or a network protocol they have to resort to vague and nondescript things like:
A funny thing happened to me smack in the middle of my transition from the brokerage industry to the games industry. People tell you how everything changes when you become a parent. Friends of mine tried to explain the feeling, their eyes taking on a bit of a faraway look as if they were describing an unnatural love of unicorns or some sort of mythical being while I smiled and said “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” I often joked that agents would slip into parent’s houses at night and pump them full of endorphins while they slept because it was the only way to describe the wonder I saw in those faces at the arrival of those little, pooping, screaming, sleep deprivation units. “Everything changes,” they’d tell me and I’d nod without a shred of comprehension. Then after years of difficulties it finally happened to my wife and I and I got it. I understood why so many I knew couldn’t really put the experience into words aside from the fact that everything changes and that it’s wonderful. I don’t even bother to describe the experience to people without children now, other than to offer a genuine smile and say “Hopefully, you’ll understand one day.”
Read more on Playing with my kids helps me make better games…
This article explains why it’s important to have your own patching system, and describes how to implement a simple patching system modeled after the Quake3 file-based patching process.
Since the rise of PC games in the early 90s, game developers have needed ways to quickly issue fixes, updated builds, and new content to existing users – hence the rise of ‘game patch’ systems. Over time, this method of updating games has made its ways from PCs to consoles, and is now trickling into mobile development. It may take some effort to build and use a patching system for your game content, but once you’ve got such a system up and running, it’s a very powerful tool for your development studio.
We have a change to our session schedule – “What is a Player Champion” by Romana Ramzan will be replaced by
Our last speaker highlight is here, and the conference is only two days away, which is very exciting! Lastly, we’d like to introduce you to Anne Toole, and her session “Fitting Writers into the Development Process”: Click through for more info!
We have all been there. You wanted to start a new game project, and possibly have been dreaming of the possibilities for a long time, crafting stories, drawing sketches, imagining the dazzling effects on that particular epic moment of the game… then you start to talk to some friends about it, they give you feedback, and even might join you in the crazy journey of actually doing something about it.
Fast forward some weeks or months, and you’ve been pulling too many all-nighters, having lots of junk food and heated discussions. You might even have a playable prototype, several character models, animations, a carefully crafted storyline, a website with a logo and everything but… it just doesn’t feel right. It’s not coming together and everyone involved with the project is afraid to say something. What happened? What went wrong? How such an awesome idea became this huge mess?
Read more on Starting a new game project? Ask the hard questions first…
For readers of AltDevBlogADay, Ted Spence should be a familiar face. He joins the line up for the AltDev Student Summit with a session called “What Software Developers Should Expect From the Games Industry”. Read on for more info.
We’ve announced the finalists for the AltDev Student Showcase already, but we keep talking about the expert judges who are going to be giving their feedback and deciding who will be going home with the Grand Prizes that Unity Technologies have put up. So, it’s time to introduce the judges!
We offered speakers the opportunity to do some shorter sessions, following more of a microtalk format, and here they are.
George Kokoris – The Cutting Room Floor
Session – Game design schools usually spend a little time teaching students about scope, but it’s not always given the importance it really deserves. Scope can make or break any project, from the smallest 48-hour game jam entry to the most opulently funded AAA blockbuster. Scoping mistakes are one of the most common reasons that game projects fail, but they are also avoidable with a little perspective and determination.
UK developer Mitu Khandaker is our next speaker highlight, in a session she has titled “A Day in the Life of a Solo Developer”. Click through for more info.
Knowing how to get your start in the industry can be tough. There’s no one fixed route to ensure that you get hired – if getting hired is even your aim. In this panel session, we’ve assembled some recent entrants into the world of professional video game development who have various points of view. Click through for more information.
Next up is Brandii Grace with a session called “The Intern’s Secret Survival Guide”:
I hear the same tragic story over and over: You finally landed an internship at a major game company! You just know this is your “big break” and can’t wait to get to work! Problem is… no one has given you any work to do. In fact, no one seems to know what to do with you or have time to figure it out. Before you know it, the internship is over and all you’ve done is sit around catching-up on webcomics. Learn the secret tricks my students used to transform internships into full time positions!
Today I want to talk a bit about the Bitsquid Foundation Library that we recently released on Bitbucket (under the permissive MIT license).
It’s a minimalistic “foundation” library with things like memory management and collection classes. The idea is to have something that can be used as a reasonable starting-off point for other open source projects.
Today’s Speaker Highlight is Tim Stobo of Kennedy Miller Mitchell Interactive Productions. Click through for more information.
Next up in our ongoing speaker highlights is Rebecca Fernandez, from Australia. Rebecca and a group of friends set up her own company, and she’ll be talking about that process in a session titled “Starting and running a company, from a programmer’s perspective.”
I want to respond to the AltDevBlogADay post Negative Developers and Team Stability, which hit home. It’s not that I think the advice was particularly interesting (all good, standard stuff), it’s that it reminded be that I’ve been a negative developer.
Our range of speakers runs the gamut from indie right through to AAA, and today’s highlight is drawn from the AAA end of the spectrum – Bobby Anguelov. Read on for more information on Bobby’s session.
The AltDev Student Showcase, sponsored by Unity Technologies, is shaping up to be an excellent part of the AltDev Student Summit. In this post, we announce the 6 finalists that will be presenting live as part of the showcase. Click through for the full list!
We are absolutely delighted to announce our second keynote speaker for the AltDev Student Summit – Jen MacLean. Jen’s session promises to be an excellent recap of her career to date, and is titled “From Playtester to CEO”. Click through for more information.
One of the things we wanted to do with the AltDev Student Summit was to shine a light into some of the less rockstar-ish roles that rarely get attention – the roadies of the industry. In that vein, Alex Crouzen will be speaking about “A ‘typical’ day in the life of a Tools Programmer/Build Master”
Our next featured speaker for the AltDev Student Summit is Benjamin Cavallari, with a session titled “Not all Fun and Games: Using What You’ve Created to Get Your First Gig in the Interactive Entertainment Industry”. Read on for more info.
Today’s game developers have a wide choice of digital distribution platforms from which to sell their products. When a game is very large it’s often necessary to deliver some of its content from another source, separate from the distribution service. This can be new territory for those of you who are unfamiliar with web development. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the concepts and strategies that will help you decide how to distribute your content on the web. It is well worth the effort to distribute your digital assets yourself because it gives you the chance to make your users happier.
Read more on Cover your Assets: The Cost of Distributing Your Game’s Digital Content…
Good programming stories don’t quite grow on trees, but it’s quite fun to take random bits of advice and make them apply to technology. One of my favorite witty aphorisms came from – if you can believe it – an inspirational saying on a tabletop.
