New Game Confernece 2011

[barry munsterteiger]

New Game was a 2 day event CoHosted by Google and Bocoup aimed at spreading knowledge in regards to how HTML5/CSS3 and other open web technologies are being used in existing games and how it can be best used in future games. Yesterday was not part of the conference but the W3C held an event hosted by Zynga to further discuss deeper the APIs and components needed in all browsers. 

There were 2 distinct camps of how games are being developed.
1. HTML/CSS/JavaScript... are the best things to use and can deliver games to any screen, mobile or desktop,
2. WebGL and Canvas are the best things to use and can closely mimic what gamers have been use to with consoles and PC native.

There weren't really any presentations that showed how the above two camps could work together holistically in new games moving forward.  There is going to be a lot of conflict between those that are solely focused on mobile and those that are solely focused on desktop browsers.  The conflict is ok, but the umbrella of HTML5 as the silver bullet to work everywhere on every device is going to get confusing to users.

Much of the conference focus was on a specific tech, either WebGL or Canvas, with a couple presentations on mobile.  The Keynote speakers were both excellent and made it very clear that the evolution of gaming on the web requires a LOT of work and will need collaboration between all the major players in the development space as well as the content creation world.

Rich Hilleman (Keynote Tuesday) from Electronic Arts made a few key points that are key to a true in browser experience.
    - make it instant on. not the PS3 model of buy a game, go home, install system update, install game update, wait, install update, wait, then actually play the game 2 hours later.
    - filter for hardware so performance is throttled based on users machine EA was targeting a PlayStation2 level of performance
    - most $ is made/spent from in app purchases upgrades and add ons
    - contextual ads are better than banner or "spray and pray" ads
    - games are a LIVE experience now, not a drop ship, pre-canned,
    - the time spent in the game is what makes it magic and the users share only tiny moments from in the game to help promote it to their friends
    - how do you get paid in chickens - with many markets not having a way to pay with a credit card how is it possible to accept chickens or some other form of currency in emerging mobile markets

A couple other Speakers of note were:

Justing Quimby from Moblyng 
    - discussing many different payment options needed to get users to buy games (more than just paypal)
    - using app wrappers where needed to deliver the "native" feel on mobile
    - KNOW the device context and be appropriate for the
    - Android is a nightmare
    - Portrait games are considered best for those that want to "play at work" or when they should be doing something other than playing games based on perceived usage of device in landscape mode.
    - absolute positioning is the devil and screen ui should be liquid to accommodate the wide variety of screen sizes and aspect ratios.
   
Darius Kazemi from Bocoup
    - walked through all the experiments and processes to get Fieldrunners into WebGL
    - talked about having usage metrics embedded in the first prototypes that were made available for the public to play with and how it allowed them to get a base standard of what machines could handle what level of detail and complexity and how it was tracked through google analytics

Paul Bakaus (Keynote Wednesday) from Zynga:
    - truly understands what web games need to be
    - small pipe (3G/4G) delivering rich experiences on small devices/screens
    - WebGL and Canvas are the new Flash and could get just as out of control
    - Authoring tools need to be developed for all aspects
    - showed Viewporter, an open source tool to help with various screen sizes of devices.
     
Grant Skinner from http://gskinner.com/
    - showed a couple different games that were developed in HMTL/CSS not needing WebGL
    - showed a bunch of optimization processes on how to use canvas
    - huge files that are not optimized will not be a great experience for the users
    - talked through hardware accelerated tags and what is/not supported on various platforms
    - showed their device stress test to get a baseline of what new devices were capable of doing
    - showed an authoring path from flash to html5/css/javascript that could be then viewed in canvas, webgl or not.

Google had a couple different presentations about their tools and where they are pushing chrome and android.  Discussions that were picked up with the W3C meeting on Thursday.

Mozilla was also involved in the conference with the work that is being done in Paladin.  Bobby Richter and Alan Kligman demoed Flight of the Navigator, Rescue Fox, and discussed how Paladin and Galdius were coming along. They also showed the work being done with joysticks and demoed a PS3 controller moving a character through a simulated FPS environment.    Ben Moskowitz and Dan Mosedale were in attendance to help Bobby and Alan with their presentation.

Overall the conference was really well put together. Google's events team has thing dialed. 
- Wifi was perfect, there were enough seats with and with out power for the attendees.
- Food and beverage was better than traditional conference
- Swag consisted of a ton of stickers, a long sleeved zip up sweatshirt (SF summer) and they will be mailing out Chrome books to all US attendees, the international attendees picked theirs up at the show.   
- After show party on tuesday night was sponsored by Microsoft.

The best thing, in my mind, NewGame was a single track conference.  There weren't a lot of break out sessions or multiple rooms giving presentations that have attendees trying to pick and choose which talks to see.  Keeping things in a single room and focused was awesome.  Hopefully they can continue the conference and next year the presentations will be just as focused yet more evolved.

I will be following up with many of the speakers and managed to chat with more than half of them on a one/one basis.    This is definitely a conference to keep an eye on and see where things go for next year.  Let me know if you need more info about any bits above.

[barry munsterteiger]

and some follow on notes/ slides and relevant material

Here are notes from a previous gaming workshop  ( I did not attend)
http://www.w3.org/2011/09/games/

Slides and notes from the NewGame Conf  (this looks to be an organic doc that will expand over time)
http://confswag.com/2011/newgame/

This is from the W3C gaming breakout session that happened on Thursday (Dan Mosedale and I were at this)
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1fs1hpZvP05ViEWtaLSmNQUV_PW2jCWS5Oe2GAdBKgl0