Posted: 17th Feb 2010 10:59
Start-up game development studios face several challenges such as funding, developing, publishing, marketing and selling their games. But before all that comes the development. For a start-up game development studio the main hurdle is the communication and collaboration of various teams as one sole team. This is especially true in video games where teams ranging from artists to engineers, sound artists to game designers etc. differ in their culture, vision and goals for the project. Each team has a consolidated process defined with Technology/Middleware/Tools or related to art and design, but they prone to have different visions of the same product in production. This forces us to build a bridge that enables communication between the teams about their intentions, suggestions and/or opinions and therefore clearing the cultural gap between the people as well as within the production process. Irrespective of the genre and game platform, content-rich entertainment software products are achieved only when the end-user feels the gaming experience that the creators intended to share. It is therefore essential for the team to have a unified vision of the product, and work together to achieve it. At India's first and independent annual summit for the game development ecosystem - India Game Developer Summit, Jitin Rao addresses this issue saying a good practice is to have a Core Team that manage the cultural differences with the various teams of experts. His talk answers the questions: why do we need a Core Team, what does the Core Team do, and how does the Core Team do it?
Moving on to more development, Torque from Garage Games is the engine of choice for Indie game developers. It offers the best range of tools and options when it comes to rapid game development. Most of the commercial successes for Torque are in the casual game genre. Imran Khan steps trough a case study explaining the changes tha can be made to the 3D gaming engine for it to scale up and support the game design expected of a commercial AAA game engine. He outlines the production issues, pipeline details and approach to be adopted in making a 3D game, and touches on optimising a 3D game for integrated graphics, which is the platform of choice for the default game machines in India. He ends his talk demonstrating a game that was developed this way and became a critically acclaimed success in terms of unit sales.
Jithin Rao is a producer at Ubisoft Pune, and was producer for Ubisoft Pune’s first in-house new IP, “100 All Time Favorites” for the Nintendo DS, which was released in October 2009. He started his career as a PC game engine programmer at Indian studios before taking on the role of Game Producer at mobile game development giant, Gameloft and then at Ubisoft. Imran Khan, VP Technology at FXLabs, heads the gaming division at FXLabs and manages a team of developers, artists and QA engineers working on PC and Console game development. At FXLabs he plays various roles ranging from game producer and game designer to technical lead. Imran has worked on PC games like NetherWorld (English, Russian, Polish) and Archies using 3D engines like Unreal and Torque(TGEA). He was game producer and designer for India's first 3D PC game title based on Bollywood movie - Ghajini.
Featuring top-notch keynotes from luminaries, visionaries and gaming gurus IGDS has announced the line-up of speakers and stellar sessions covering everything from GPU Computing for games, open source for your game development, bootstrapping for mobile game development, high fidelity dynamics in games, leveraging flash for your games, lessons from the trenches on becoming an Indie game developer to much more.
Attend IGDS to get inspired, learn from the gurus who have gamed their way to success, and join a club that seeks competence to grab a share in the $43 billion global gaming development pie. View complete details of experts and topics covered at IGDS here: gamedevelopersummit dot com
