Happy Holidays!

I’m just taking this opportunity to wish you all great Holidays of your choice and a lot of success for the coming year. I’ll try and bring even more useful art and freelancing info for this year!

Last Man Standing

My entry for last year, themed “Welcome to the begining of the end.”

360 contenders,4 rounds. 456 new pieces of artwork. 1 winner.

Yep, one winner.

I entered this one, for the second year, my goal is to get to round 2 but I’m up against skillfull contestants so nothing is won…oh no. The first round theme is:”Underneath it all.”

Basically, some of the best illustrators and concept artists and students and amateurs in the world in the same huge art melting pot. No awesome prizes announced so far, we’re only fighting each other off for fame and glory.

The Last Man Standing official site is here.

MIGS (Montreal International Game Summit) part 2

This is the part 2 of this post.

Chris Hecker’s Keynote about Structure vs Style was just dizzying, watching this guy elaborate on his theories makes my head spin. The result is something quite high level and conceptual not necessarily easy to apply to real problems, but they are something to consider and something a more academic approach to games will have to tackle at some point. Basically, according to Chris, the single most influencial achievement in video games is the textured triangle, because it allows us to create highly immersive environments. He then proceeds to describe how the triangle forms the structure and the texture is the style. His current theory is that style vs structure are the real basis of the way games and their content can be analysed and deconstructed.

More from Gamasutra

Darius Kazemi’s talk was titled:”Gameplay metrics for a better future.” The guy is a data analyst who’s main focus is MMO data. However, he was here presenting uses for game metrics collection and analysis for non MMO’s, for the first time. He explained his methodology which basically goes like this:

1. What is the question that you need to answer?
2. What kind of report do you need?
3. What metrics can we collect to answer the question?
4. Implement the collection and do the analysis.

For exemple (this is an exemple he illustrated with screengrabs and charts,) you want to know why your players quick save so much, so you want a map of where the players die, where they reload and where they die. You want it visible in the map editor so you can see the triggers and geometry in conjunction with the collected metrics. Then you implement the whole thing and see if it helps you. We were shown very cool grabs of shooter maps regarding where players dies, where campers hang out and the relationship between the two.
More on Darius’ blog

MIGS photo gallery.

Jason Della Rocca’s coverage of MIGS

MIGS (Montreal International Game Summit) part 1

On the 27th and 28th of November, I had a chance to be at the 4th edition of MIGS at Palais des Congrès de Montréal. I attended as a volunteer, helping set up the venue and giving each guest their proper badge. But in return I got to see some pretty interesting presentations and meet cool people!

So I saw, James Gwertzman of Popcap about casual games, he mostly talked about how casual games have more innovative business models than mainstream retail games. He talked about asian business models, where piracy drives the world of free games with micro-transaction upgrades and goodies.

Sam Rivello of Neopets had a presentation about Flash advergames. I think he might just have misjudged his crowd and quite a few people ended up leaving. The thing is, he was advising on how to convince your clients to get a game done on top of their regular web marketing ploy. Unfortunately, most attendees are game people who couldn’t care less about web marketing stuff like banners. Here is the post Sam did about the presentation on his blog.

Next post will be about Chris Hecker and Darius Kazemi’s presentation.