Animex 2014, Booty, Iphone Development!
As always, I was super excited about attending my favourite gaming event of the year, Animex (10th – 14th Feb), the sheer level of games development talent is just astronomical AND it was my first Animex where I am also a legitimate member of the games industry!
In summary there were so many great development stories, industry tricks and advice on offer. I wrote down particular quotes which I thought were really important and are useful for finding inspiration/the right choice. I even did a presentation at work outlining how awesome it was! 😀
“Design on Limitations” – Rex Crowle (Media Molecule)
Ask why not, Provide valid reasons, Figure out the problems it poses, Solve through the problems.
“Games are not about ideas” – Barry Mead (Fireproof Games)
Its about how it feels, Find ‘Fun’, Properly execute it and you should have a great game.
“Commit and fully embrace the risk” – Austin Wintory
I thought this was very rhetorical as well, sometimes you have to make the jump to make something great.
“Think narrative, build an rich environment which drives the story (think about juxtaposition) and ground with reality” – Mark Davies (Naughty Dog)
I particularly liked the ground with reality part, I think engineering great moments which things feel real is super important to enhance immersion.
“6 Steps to kickstarter success – Team, Plan, Page, Video, Research, Belief” – Gemma Harris (22 Cans)
Interesting and applicable to any industry to, sometimes belief is such an important factor and if you can make other people believe in something, then you should be onto a winner!
“Take the good, leave the bad. Own the feature set / Your vision of the gameplay” – Ashrat Ismail (Ubisoft)
Fantastic demonstration about why the likes of unity are so great, Iteration is the key for weeding out the weaknesses. Ubisoft even design and develop on main gameplay pillars, which dictate mechanics and how it should feel/play.
“No Excuses” – Max Howard
This surely has to be a personal life ethos. Get it done, to the best it can be without any regrets.
Cannot wait till next year already!
In addition to this! I finally took the jump and bought a macbook to drive some iphone development. I took a sneaky brief look/read into xcode and dev, I’m particularly looking forward to integrating the games centre, I looks really powerful and easy to step up (achievements etc…).
Finally, I had some success with getting booty running locally on the Android emulator. I completely refactored all the remaining code and intend to do some hardcore javadocing on it. I’ve also contemplated actually putting the code on my GitHub, but I’m unsure whether to do this and wait till its actually finished in its first form.
