NEoN Digital Arts Festival 09 - Day 1

[kj]

After a lot of hype and promotion and a lot of excitement over announced speakers NEoN fest finally got underway today. The festival is taking part over various venues in Dundee but the main talks are based at the new Dalhousie building at the University of Dundee. This was the first time I'd visited the building.

Chris van der Kuyl got the ball rolling and introduced the speakers throughout the day as well as delivering the Welcome introduction. It was the first time I've seen Chris talk, indeed today was the first time I've had the opportunity to meet him.

Dave Jones was scheduled to deliver the opening talk, however unfortunately had to pull out due to the passing of his father. To fill in NEoN managed to get Colin McDonald and EJ Moreland to fill in and deliver Dave's talk. I thought they were great. Colin spoke about the games industry including some of the myths and some facts and figures; the world wide games market totaled around $60 billion last year, Grand Theft Auto IV recently held the record for opening day sales - $310 million only surpassed this Tuesday by Modern Warfare 2 which grossed a whopping $420 million in a single day.

Colin also spoke about Dave's career in the gaming industry highlighting some of his early works and concepts that he developed into some of the genre defining games of the last two decades. Games such as Menace, Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, Uniracers and Body Harvest to name but a few. It was also interesting to hear about what Dave thought about Lemmings 3. A game many regard to have fallen short of expectation. Interesting in that it was a game that was born more out of necessity than anything else... for the franchise, and potentially a regretful decision on the part of Dave to develop and release the game. Dave found it creatively tough to develop the game sufficiently enough.

It was this though that spurred Dave to pursue two areas of gaming that really interested him; open world gaming and online multiplayer. Body Harvest and GTA were two open ended games. Taking this concept further Dave brought out Crackdown which included online co-op modes and again was an open ended game set in a world where people could do whatever they wanted with the things that they were given in the gaming world. Players could throw cars at civilians. Throw civilians at cars, throw civilians at bad guys, throw cars off the top of buildings, scale the tallest skyscrapers.

EJ Moreland then stepped in to talk about APB, the new online MMO game being developed by Realtime Worlds. I wish I recorded this as what I saw was mighty impressive. EJ talked about the design principles that Dave incorporates in his games including detail, simple blocks, humour and innovation. Dave has aimed to forge new genres and has done so successfully twice. And of course it was Crackdown which earned the team their first BAFTA award in 2008. Another fantastic achievement.

What was surprising though was the figures behind Crackdown. A game that sold some 1.5million units only helped the team break even which just goes to show how expensive and time consuming game development has become these days. No longer are two or three people coming together to develop games with testing done the day prior to release. Teams are not made up of tens if not hundreds of people, costing millions to fund. And Colin pointed out that this starts to have an effect. The budget restrictions start to have an effect on the risk that people are willing to take to create that genre defining game.

EJ then showed some footage from the forth coming title APB... presumably due for release in 2009 but you never know these days. I was blown away by what I saw. Cities made up of hundreds of computer controlled civilians and 100 human players per city. Hundreds of cities per world and hundreds of Worlds. There are three prinicples behind ABP. Conflict, Creativity and Celebrity. Conflict being the war between the enforcers and the law breakers. The Creativity in how one develops their character in the game and Celebrity in how people playing the game come to be percieved by others through developing their skills in the game. For example the body generation tool that enables the player to create their in game character. Think about the customisation at the start of Oblivion merged with the custom livery generator in Forza 2 and multiply that by, say, 1000. The level of customisation on display was astounding to say the least. You can literally create an ingame character that looks scarily similar to yourself. To prove this EJ showed off one character created by the team which looked like Barack Obama. In fact, it didn't just look like him I swear it was him. EJ also showed off a time-lapse of one of the designers using the illustration tool to create graphic design in the game to use as tattoos, gang signs and other forms of illustration. I'm not using the term 'graphic design' loosely. This was truly impressive.

EJ also let slip that the music you hear in game is delivered from Last.fm. Which means if you are driving a car in the game and you want to listen to music the game chooses music from Last.fm based on what you like to listen to and plays that to you. And when you drive your car past someone with the windows down and the volume up the other players can here what you are listening to. How cool is that?!

The fantastic talk was rounded off with some questions from the audience... most of whom I'm sure were impressed.

The next talk was by Pablo Barone. Pablo works with Microsoft in their academic team helping schools and universities use new technologies to improve the way they teach their students. Pablo spoke a lot about user experience including the progression of the earliest versions of Windows through to the new Windows 7 operating system. Pablo spoke about how user experience had changed over the last 10 years and continued to change and illustrated this by showing the Manchester United home page from then and compared it with how it looks today. How websites had changed to deliver better user experiences. No longer are sites just tools for relaying information but they also provide memorable experiences which keep the user coming back for more.

Pablo went on to introduce some of the new technologies that Microsoft have been developing, including their new Expression Encoder technology for streaming HD video content, Photosynth for stitching photographic imagery together to create 3D worlds, Sky Player for the XBOX 36 0 and also a little bit about Project Natal. Project Natal reinforced Pablos ideas of removing the interface completely and making things obvious to the user. He showed how the Windows Media Center interface differs on a PC to how it looks on the XBOX Console because of how its used on the two different platforms. I have to say that Windows 7 does look really impressive. All day I was hearing from people how happy they were and how surprised they were that Microsoft had managed to bring out a new operating system that was faster and more efficient than XP.

One of the other technologies that I was interested in was Surface. Pablo spoke a little bit about that too including possible applications and, most notable, the cost... a whopping 8500. Not cheap.

Some links from Pablos talk.

memorabilia.hardrock.com
www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming
Hard Rock Touch Wall

After the break we were treated to an informal chat with Bud Lucky. Bud is an American cartoonist, animator, singer, musician and composer. He is best known for his work at Pixar as a character designer for Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo, Cars, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Bud spoke about where he grew up (Billings Montana), his career in the military (Bud served in the US Air Force during the Korean war), his early animation career and some of the people that he worked with. He also spoke about his time working on Sesame Street and in advertising. I really enjoyed listening to what he had to say. I wasn't so keen on the format though. The people on the left side of the auditorium couldn't see him because they has seated him on a 1ft high couch behind the podium and the people at the back couldn't hear him because his mic was turned down.

His advice to budding animators? "Develop a built in crap detector". Bud spoke about how they work at Pixar. Animators were regularly ripping each others work apart and then coming together to make it better. Kind of like code reviews but for animators.

After lunch Al Mooney from Adobe spoke about their work in media generation. While interesting I couldn't help but feel that it was more a product pitch than anything else. Al outlined the workflow processes that CS4 Production Premium offers content creators. Pretty impressive, especially the Premier Pro.

Once Al had finished his talk we then had the choice to attend two of 5 workshops. Each lasting around 1 hour. I attended Aeon Pritchard's workshop and the Autodesk/Midgibyte workshop.

Eaon is a London based creative-director and strategic thinker with around 15 years experience in Interactive media. His talk was about branding and marketing. Not the most popular topic on this forum but nonetheless quite interesting. The Autodesk workshop showed how quickly it was to use Mudbox and 3DS Max to develop realistic characters.

The day was rounded off by Mark Daniels. Mark works for New Media Scotland and is a curator. He trained as an architect at Kingston University before going on to gain an MA in Art as Environment at Manchester Met University. Mark spoke about some of the art and new media projects he had been working on with an off-shoot project called Alt-W.

Some links from Marks talk

mediascot.com
mediascot.org/alt-w
mediascot.org/alt-w/distancelab
www.mutsugoto.com - Mutsugoto is an interactive installation that invites couples to experience an intimate communication over a distance.
www.cybraphon.com -Cybraphon is the latest project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman).
INSPACE - Inspace is a new public engagement gallery facility on the ground floor of the Informatics Forum, where we explore the cultural significance of informatics.

Looking forward to tomorrow!