Category Archives: Develop 2009

Media Molecule’s about to kick off its art keynote at Develop in Brighton. We’re covering it live after the break.

It’s co-founders Kareem and Mark in a talk titled “The Art of LittleBigPlanet”. Watch for hints on the franchise’s future. We hope.

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Here you go. Get the last 20 minutes from Dave Jones’ keynote from Develop this morning, in which he talked exclusively about APB, after the break.

There’s tons of new game footage in there, a look at the title’s ridiculous music system, everything he showed on character customisation and the new three-minute trailer. The one that made our hair stand on end.

Must-watch. It’s out early next year.

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PSP and PSP Go are to get an App Store, as previously rumoured, Sony confirmed at Develop today.

“We’re introducing new initiatives for the PSP which take it beyond traditional gaming, but still includes elements from gaming, and also includes new developers,” SCEE’s head of developer relations, Zeno Colaço, told Develop.

He said Sony has over 50 studios already working on games and apps for the new initiative.

These are to be sold via a new, “specially branded” area of the PS Store.

“It is still a professional environment, you still need a development kit and you still need to have investment and a team,” he told the site. “But it can be a small team. We don’t see any of the restrictions on the disc-based space being in this space.”

Via CVG.

Sony’s Peter Edwards said at Develop today that as little as 25-30 percent of the 7 million people that have downloaded Home ever return after the first visit.

Edwards, European director for the service, said that the total amount of users includes 3 million Europeans.

There’s more on GI.

Speaking to VG247 at Develop today, Endwar dev boss Michael de Plater has suggested that Natal could breathe new life into the difficult world of console RTS.

“Natal doesn’t only have the camera, but the microphone as well,” he said. “The combination of voice and gesture could be really powerful and immersive.

“You could definitely drag selection boxes, and you could definitely point with enough precision to tell people where to go.”

He added: “You’d absolutely have that Minority Report-type feeling.”

The Ubisoft chief – now moved from heading up the company’s Shanghai studio to Montpelier in France – cited the appearance of upcoming RTS RUSE working on Microsoft’s touch-screen Surface table at E3 this year as an example of how Natal may affect console strategy.

“One of the coolest things I saw at E3 this year was RUSE being played on a Surface table,” he said.

“Obviously, not everyone’s going to have a Surface table, but on the Surface you’re playing with gestures. You’re moving your hands to select, and you’re pointing. They’re really intuitive natural gestures.

“If the technology works, so you could translate the interface they’ve already got working really well on RUSE into Natal, it could work very, very well.”

There’s no date on Natal’s release as yet.

We’re coming to you live from Realtime Worlds boss Dave Jones’ keynote at Develop in Brighton. Hit the break for all the updates, pics included. The event kicks off at 9.30am BST.

Watch carefully for news on APB, and hopefully a first look at gameplay. If it happens, we’ll snap it.

We’re interviewing Dave later this morning, so we should have plenty more news on the upcoming MMO later.

Let’s do this thing, sucka.

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Team 17 boss Martyn Brown’s told VG247 that downloadable actioner Alien Breed Evolution should appeal to Xbox 360 fans’ traditional loves in Halo and Gears of War.

The UK studio manager said the title, the first of a trilogy that’s cost $2.5 million to develop so far, could replicate the company’s significant online console success with Worms.

“It’s a very different game,” he said. “What Worms has allowed us to do is make Evolution in the first place. To be able to do that and remind people where we’re from has been a fantastic opportunity.

“I’d like to think it’s going to appeal to the Gears of War crowd, the Halo crowd, and all the rest of it.

“It’s a very casual, pick-up-and-play title, but it’s shit-hot, really.”

Brown said the game was a significant venture for the developer.

“It’s a big risk for us. We’ve piled a lot of cash into it, but we’ve made a game that we believe in [for the] first time in a few years.”

There’s a seven-minute video interview with Martyn after the break, shot at Develop in Brighton yesterday. You can see first footage of the game – the first part of which releases later this year as a timed 360 exclusive before heading to PS3 and PC – here.

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Bethesda bossman Pete Hines has said that id will not be creating a new IP for the firm any time soon, as it has its own projects in the fryer for the moment.

The fact that id has hired a third team has more to do with current titles in development and nothing to do with creating something for Bethesda.

“id has plenty of their own IP to keep themselves busy,” said Hines told GI.biz. “It was their desire to build to three teams and bring the development of their IP in-house. So we’ll help them build up to the three full teams a little faster, now that they have additional resources, and they’ll work on Rage and Doom 4 and whatever else it is they’d like to do.

“But with Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein, and Rage, they already have more IP than they have teams to work on them. So right now creating new IP or having them work on our Bethesda IP isn’t even being considered.

“We do have a strong portfolio with games like Oblivion and Fallout, and the folks at Bethesda Game Studios will continue to work on those, but these games aren’t the same kinds of games that id makes. So there’s room for them all.”

More through the link.

There’s a five-minute, off-screen movie of Team 17′s Alien Breed Evolution after the break. We saw the frankly awesome-looking shooter today at Develop in Brighton.

The detail really doesn’t come over in this video, but it’s a joy to behold in the flesh. You’ll get a good idea of what’s going on in the footage.

Team17 boss Martyn Brown’s playing here. The game’s out later this year, on XBLA first, with a PSN version to follow.

We interviewed Martyn on camera, so we’ll get that up for you later on.

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Cloud gaming service Gaikai is aiming for launch in early 2010 after a closed beta, creator David Perry told VG247 at Develop in Brighton today.

“If it all goes to plan we’re looking at the first quarter of 2010, and there’ll be a closed beta before that,” he said.

“As of last night we have 20,000 people signed up for our closed beta, with not a single dollar spent on marketing.”

Perry added: “I already have enough players for closed beta. What we’re actually going to do is set up the servers in California and we’re going to keep delivering players until we cripple the servers.

“Then we’re going to make some configuration changeswhen we see the data, then we’re going to invite more players.”

When he gets the “final server configuration” he’ll “launch across the US”.

Perry keynoted Develop this morning on the subject of Gaikai, MMOs and Acclaim.

Hit the break for 17 minutes of video of Perry talking solely about Gaikai. For ease, we’ve paraphrased our questions below so you can jump to the bits you fancy.

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Buzz producer Dan Croucher has told Develop attendee that player have contributed over 218,750 quizzes containing over 1.7 million questions to the game.

He said that the content could fill 350 standard-sized Buzz games on disc.

Croucher also believe that the recent Michael Jackson themed content appearing on the MyBuzz website proves that UGC is invaluable when creating personalized experiences. Thus, the company plans to release a smaller version Buzz on PlayStation Home this week, which will stream player-created questions from the website for PSN users.

More over on GI.biz.

David Perry says that gaming should be more convenient for players and the limitless power of cloud computing could help consumers get games easier and eventually lead to less clutter on shelves at home.

“Facebook is a really good example of how data ownership is changing,” Perry told attendees at Develop. “People don’t really care if they own a version of Texas Hold’em or Yoville as long as they can access it easily.

“YouTube didn’t try and drive everyone to their portal. Instead, they allowed videos to be distributed across the web. How many videos would you watch if you had to register with every video maker? How many videos would you watch if you had to download the entire video first? And yet that’s something we ask our consumers to do.”

To demonstrate this, he used World of Warcraft as an example. While commending Blizzard for the realively small download, he took the audience through the thirty-one clicks it takes to start playing the game.

“I get twenty clicks in before I see a play button; but then I still get another legal agreement.” he said.

Perry then stated that Gaikai would allow users to start playing with just one click which he says is absolutely critical and gaming companies need to get behind it.

“If Eidos wanted to do this, they couldn’t cover the world in game servers,” he said. “But if all our companies worked together, we could.”

We have a video interview with Big Dave which will be posted later.

Meanwhile, get more regarding his streaming games philosophy via Gamasutra.

Martyn Brown, studio director for Team 17, told Develop attendees that it cost the firm $2.5 million to create the Alien Breed trilogy for Xbox Live Arcade.

“It makes it one of the most expensive digital titles to-date,” he told the crowd while  stating that Team 17 employed around 30 people for 14-15 months to create the title.

Alien Breed is to be released in three parts starting in October and is expected to take a total of 15 hours to finish.

Thanks, GI.biz.

David Perry told the Develop Conference in Brighton this morning that western MMO devs are “kissing goodbye” to extensive opps by ignoring Asian markets.

“Western developers just aren’t exploiting this anything like as much as they should,” Perry said.

“That’s a bit of a scary trend. A lot of developers rushed off to make an MMO but what’s happening is they’re forgetting all about Asia. They immediately start thinking ‘we’ll charge for a subscription, we’ll put it in retail,’ and what they do is kiss goodbye to China and Korea, and India – which is the new China. So they’re leaving tons of money on the table.”

We’re speaking to Big Dave in half an hour. Get the rest of the news from his speech from GI.

Develop 2009 takes place in Brighton, UK, this week, and we’ll be on-hand to bring you all the news at it happens. Well, as much news as we can put on the internet, anyway. Here’s what we’re covering live and stuff you should look out for over the next three days.

All times are BST.

Wednesday, July 15, 9.30-10.30am – Dave Jones keynote The Realtime Worlds boss’s talk is titled “Online functionality for your next game? Why not go 100% online”. Hopefully it’ll throw up gameplay footage of APB, but even if it doesn’t there’s bound to be good news from this. We’ll be liveblogging it (pictures included, God willing) so make sure you tune in.

Wednesday, July 15, 4.30-5.30pm – Media Molecule keynote Media Molecule co-founders Kareem Ettouney and Mark Healey are talking about “The Art of LittleBigPlanet – A Big Medley”. Again, we’ll do a liveblog with images, so watch closely for word on what’s coming next in the world of sack boys and girls.

Thursday, July 16, 11.00am-12.00pm – Sony motion control keynote Don’t miss this. It’s SCEE’s Kish Hirani and Colin Hughes showing “a lot more about the new PS3 controller shown at E3″. Sony’s promising to show the system working with existing and upcoming games, so pay close attention. We’ll be posting live images, and we’ll have video up as soon as we humanly can. Assuming we’re allowed to shoot it, obviously.

Other stuff – Check out Develop’s site for information on all the keynotes and other sessions. We’ve got tons of interviews scheduled for the show, so fingers crossed this should be a big news week for the development “world”. Check out our pre-show thoughts in last week’s podcast.

If you find any stuff on the site you think might be good for us to cover, give us a shout in the comments and we’ll see what we can do. If you’re a developer, and you’re angry that we’re marginalising you by focusing on the above, do the same.

The Develop Conference takes place in Brighton, UK next week, so we thought we’d use it as an excuse to kick off our podcast. Listen to the first episode after the break.

We talk through what to expect from the show in terms of news, the developer names making the trip down south, and Martin’s plans to draw flaming cars driven by skeletons for our podcast art. He’s so excitable. Like a little rabbit.

We’re going to be putting these live every Friday from now on. We may even have guests in future. It’s a brave new world.

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SCEE’s Kish Hirani coding keynote at next month’s Develop conference is to include “much more detail” on Sony’s new motion controller, according to this Develop report.

Apparently, he’ll “also be talking about new vision processing and advanced graphical techniques in the PS3 libraries, using real-world examples from recent and soon-to-be-released PS3 and PSP titles.”

We’ll be there. Develop takes place in Brighton, UK, from July 14-16.

A Develop survey’s reported that 30 percent of 9,000 game developers polled said that Nintendo’s Miyamoto is their “ultimate development hero”.

Will Wright came second, followed by Dave Jones in third.

The Develop Conference runs from July 14-16 in Brighton. Jone is to keynote the event this year.

Full thing after the break.

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The line-up of keynote speakers has been confirmed for this year’s Develop Conference.

David Jones, Realtime Worlds founder and GTA creator, will provide the main address. Other speakers of note include representatives from Hansoft, Media Molecule, Microsoft Studios, Nokia, Traveller’s Tales, Mythic, and Ubisoft.

Here’s the list so far:

• Evolve Keynotes
  Resetting the Game
  David Perry, creative director, Acclaim Games

• The Long Tail and Games: How digital distribution changes everything. Maybe
  David Edery, Independent Consultant

• Art Keynote
  The Art of LittleBigPlanet – A Big Medley
  Kareem Ettouney and Mark Healey, Co-founders, Media Molecule

• Audio Keynote
  The Runtime Studio in your Console: The Inevitable Directionality of Game Audio
  Guy Whitmore, Director of Audio, Microsoft Game Studios

• Business Keynote
  Out of the Box(ed Product): Thinking for an Online Age
  Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer, Mythic Entertainment

• Design Keynote
  Building LEGO Worlds – online, offline, and everything in between
  Jonathan Smith, Development Director, Traveller’s Tales

• Mobile Keynote
  Moving games to a new beat: The development of Nokia’s Dance Fabulous
  Mark Ollila, Director of Technology & Strategy and Head, Nokia

• Production Keynote
  Bridging The Gap Experiences Learned with Agile Project Management across Multisite, Multicultural and Multilingual Project
  Lisa Charman, Associate Producer, Ubisoft and Patric Palm, CEO and Co-founder Hansoft

Develop 2009 takes place in Brighton from July 14-16.

Realtime Worlds boss David Jones it to keynote UK conference Develop this summer, as confirmed on the official site.

Jones created GTA and Lemmings, and is currently overseeing APB’s development. As far as cheeses go, he’s pretty big.

“Develop is the most prestigious development conference in the UK, and I’m looking forward to coming to Brighton as it’s a great opportunity to share some of my experiences of making games – both good and not so good – plus tell a few of the Realtime World’s stories to my fellow developers,” commented Jones.

More through the link. Develop runs from July 14-16 this year, and is well worth the trip.