AGDC Update – Saturday Night

Its Saturday Night and the last AGDC is over.

I’m not attending the Awards dinner, preferring instead to sit back and write on my website while events are fresh in my mind.

Some excellent talks today. “Narrowing the Gap Between Animation for Film and Games” by Stephen Gray, Act3Animation, “Expanding the Audience” by Dr Jeff Pobst from Microsoft, “Extending the Game to the Web” by Aaron Lieberman, Bungie and finally, in my mind the best talk of the conference: “Sound Practices of Game Business and Design” by Brian Jacobson from Valve.

Brian’s talk detailed the iterative development methodology used by Valve on Half Life and Half Life 2, and I was extremely impressed by his approach. Basically he applies the scientific method to games: specifying goals, trying out solutions, gathering data, judging the outcome then feeding this data back into the decision making process.

These techniques are applied to virtually every process in development, from hiring employees, to measuring success of games and content releases to the fans over steam, to driving programming, art, level building and design.

The key to their whole approach is measurement. Rather than sitting around and coming up with designs and arguing over the coolness of design features when making decisions, features are actually tried out and rapidly iterated over a period of two weeks and playtested. The entire development is driven by the result of these playtests. A feature or section of the game is considered “done” when it is no longer painful to sit through the playtest – and ALL those involved in the design and implementation of that feature attend the playtest and cannot say a word throughout. This process then repeats again for another two weeks.

I cannot stress just how impressed I am with this whole approach and really you simply cannot argue with the results.

Talking with Brian afterwards I mentioned that I had worked on “Freedom Force” and he said he loved the game and played it heaps when it came out.

I just had to reply, well Half Life 2 aint too bad either man…

Respect.