Avalix Studios - Games Programming Blog/Portfolio - Chris Butler

Hey All!

So last weekend I went back home to Derby to jump across to Nottingham to attend GameCityThree. Its a videogame festival that’s in its 3rd year. So far I’ve been to everyone as our lectures arrange for use to show up for at lease one of the days. The last two have been really good so i wasn’t going to miss this one. The last two years i have been to talks done by many great people such as Lorne Lanning (creator of the Oddworld series) and Keita Takahashi (creator of the Katamari series)

So since I’m not bound by lectures at Uni and some holiday at work i could take, I came back for the full weekend. The festival was spread over 3 days, Thursday to Saturday with various events and talks scattered throughout the days.

Read about my adventures over the 3 days after the break!

So the Thursday kicked off with me meting up with some of the first and second years from my course along with my lectures. Its fun seeing the first years all peppy and with spirit… I give them a year XD. Anyway the first talk of the day was about the eye toy. There was a presentation on how it was developed and the research that went into making it. It really showed me how much potential there really is for device like the eye toy. One of my main idea for my research project next year is to look into ways of bringing gaming into the real world through items like augmented reality and getting some ideas for the potential and ways of doing it really got me thinking ^_^. They also showed one of there new games - EyeToy Play: Pom Pom Party - which uses the eye toy to track two different colour pom poms and you cheer along. It generally look like fun (and also seemed a lot like Quenden/Osu so was making me want to play it even more =D) and its going to sell loads at Christmas.

The afternoon was quite quiet after that. We spent some time checking out the Indiecade (link to the games there promoting) which was be held there and took to playing some quite nice indie games. I’m a big fan of the indie games and there were definitely a few good ones like Where is my Heart, The Misadventures Of Pb Winterbottom and ibb and obb. Some nice targets to aim for (well you know… whenever my projects get out of the planning stage… -_-). Derby University also has a stall set up advertising some of out work and had a few demos from the second years. I got to say…They look very polished… I was quite impressed with them. I looking forward to seeing what they produce in the main AGD module this year (well… so long as its not better then Exosphere ^_~ )

A couple more talks happened in the late afternoon. One from Paul Wedgwood from Splash Damage who showed us how he and his company made it into the big leagues. It was quite a laugh (Especially at the point of him showing us that he went bankrupt twice and had a criminal record before starting… Gave me hope for getting my name in the industry! xD) and got some good advice about getting yourself known. Following that was a design workshop held by Midway Newcastle about the idea of “Strike teams”, small groups of mixed disciplines all working together and in constant communication to quickly make features of a game. To this end we were split into small “Strike teams” and had to develop a new vehicle design for a game out of a mixed bag of k’nex we got given. To be honest I was in heaven playing with all that k’nex… We built a massive behemoth tank, complete with in-game advertising (read: a business card stuck on the back). It was a work of art and panic and did really well in the tests. It only lost one wheel on the drop test… ^_^’

And so the night settled in and most of the little lower years on my course went home. However me and Loki and the lectures will still up for more so we went to the Curry Night/Live radio show. It was a amzing night! The radio show was One Life Left and it was f**king hilarious! A Few highlights of the night been trying to break various Guinness would records like “Lowest profit on a game based film” - Beaten at £10.40 and “Game character with the most real life lookalikes” - Ann off the show was in a game for 0.8 seconds so we manged to gather about 9 lookalikes (of which i am one of them =D ) and Wikipedia sabotaging which was already counter-sabotage by the time the host manged to get there lies up on the article O_o.  Along with the curry and a drink or two it was a great night.

Onto Friday, back into Nottingham with a slightly sore head the first talk I went to was a Directors commentary of Goldeneye by David Doak and Martin Hollis. It was very interesting learning about how they made the game and what they did/didn’t do and also seeing how they achieve various features (and how a few of the features were actually bugs xD). The talk was been recorded for the National Video Game Archive, a project to help save video game history. If your interested in this then go sign up at Save The VideoGame.

After this talk I’m afraid i manged to take a bit of a wrong turn and end up..well.. a bit undead.. xD. The market square was getting everyone painted up ready for the massive zombiefest in the evening, which i will come back to later… After getting all Zombiefied I headed on over to the Harmonix talk on there history and the games they made. Unfortunately i got in the room quite towards the back and so couldn’t heard much of the talk -_-. However it was cool to see some of there old game, especially Frequency as i loved playing that one ^_^. This was shortly followed by a talk by the creators of Geometry Wars. They showed how it developed from a test app for testing duel analoge sticks to the full blown game that it is now. It also got quite in depth about the design and graphical style of the game.

But this was all building up to the main event of the day…. The Zombiefest! The plan was to try and break the world record for the most number of zombies in one place. I got there about 30 minuets after the start and the market square was already heaving at the number of people there! I finished off my makeshift zombie costume with the help of Boots. I have manage to find one picture of my from the festival that someone got as i was applying more…er.. blood…

Zombie Avalix

Once everyone was arranged and the counting started we were able to do a massive live performance of thriller! It was mostly just people jumping and trying there best to copy the people from the stage but it was great fun. During this me, Loki and the others decided to start a “Zombie rights movement” demanding equal rights for zombies… We even created signs… unfortunately they wouldn’t let us show them on the TV Cameras ¬_¬. Next we were treated to a performance from Jonathan Coulton with his song “RE: Your Brains”. Hearing over a thousand zombies sing the corus was something you just had to hear! Finally after the sing-along the counting was done and we got to know the result….

WE HAD BEATEN IT! 1227 Zombies! =D. Somewhere on some small corner of a page ill get my name in the record books =P

And for the nights entertainment we went to the Harmonix’s After Party! The party started with Rock Band live on stage! We went up a couple of times and rocked out XD. Along side this was the attempt at the record for the fasted speedrun of Resident Evil 4. This was beaten in the time of 02:00:04 live in front of anyone who wanted to watch…. It was sickeningly fast! Afterwards we were treated to live music. First up was the opening band of Paul and Storm. Seriously, these are some of the funniest guys ive seen. There songs are hilarious! After there set i ended up spending my food budget for the week on there albums and a shirt… (Worth it though, there keeping me highly amused at work =D). This act was followed up by the main performance of Jonathan Coluton! I’m so happy to have seen him live! =D. He even manged to get a rick-roll in halfway during his set! XD.

I mange to somehow get up the next morning… Not only was i completely sugar crashing and exsusted from no sleep, I believe i might have caught Jonathan’s cold… O_O.. I think I’m honoured to get a famous person’s cold but man, did I feel bad that morning… I lucky got back into Nottingham in time for the main talk of the whole event, the BAFTA Vision Statement Keynote given by Media Molecule. I was actually quite excited about this talk as ive been stoked about there new game, LittleBigPlanet for months now and Its one of the places i would truly love to get the chance to work at =D. They gave a really good insight into the development of the game and i really picked up a few good points from them. They also brought a copy of the game for everyone to try out on the big projection screen. Loki got a go first and proceeded to play about on some of the levels. Some of the stuff that been made with this game is truly epic. One Level we caught was the Final Fantasy theme recreated, note for note, in game. There’s no way to import music into the game so this person has had to calibrate a object for each not and get them to trigger via a vehicle driving past O_O. I got to have a go after Loki so i tried a few of the in game levels. Much to the amusement of the crowd i also played with the arms/head motions and presided to make the sackboy do some Saturday Night Fever! =D. I also got a large awwww from the crowd when my sackboy cried after failing the level… xD

I am completely in love with this game…. As soon as i can, im getting a PS3 purely for that. I want to get in there and start making stuff and see how far it can be pushed, my first idea is to see if its possible to created some sort of Turn based battle mechanics….

And that’s it for GameCity this year. I had a awesome time and picked up lots of good advice and inspiration. Hopefully it will continue to grow and back bigger for next year =D.

Avalix X