GDC sessions proposals

[James C. Smith]

GDC sessions proposals

This year I proposed two sessions I could lead at GDC. (The turned me down on both of them). In addition to the “property system”/data driver thing mentioned in another thread, I also proposed this roundtable about making downloadable games smaller. They weren’t interested in this either. My guess is it was too focused. But I was tired of really broad topics like "Indie Games" or "Web Games" that were discussed in previous years. How can you talk about the entire topic is Indie games in one session. To reach any level of detail that is useful you must focus on one specific area. This was my attempt to do that:
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Presentation Title: Squeezing a downloadable game into a few megabytes

Presentation Format: Roundtable [60 minutes]

Audience level: All

Please choose ONE of the following three words that BEST describes your presentation.: Educational

Presentation Abstract:
Downloadable games need to squeeze a whole game into just a couple of megabytes but users expect a lot more rich content than you would find in yesterdays shareware games. Users expect today’s downloadable games to look as polished and console games and have as nearly as much game play content. Game developers need to use every trick in the book and many different modern compression technologies to fit an ample amount of high quality code, art, sound, music and other data into a downloadable game. This roundtable will discus technologies and techniques for compressing many specific types of game data including: images, video, models, animations, sound, music, code, installers, level data and other generic data. With each type of compression we will discus tradeoffs such as size, time, and quality as well as implementation details such as libraries, source code, and licensing issues.

The size of a downloadable game is a large factor in determining how likely a web site visitor is to download the game. The size of your downloadable also affects the hosts bottom line due to bandwidth costs. Many game portals will not include your game on their site if it is more than 10 MB and 3 or 5 MB is usually preferred.

Saving your images as GIFs or JPEGs and your sounds an MP3 is a good start but there is much more you can do to reduce your games size. And there are several hurdles to overcome even with these simple methods. Attendees will be encouraged to share their real work experiences with many different techniques for getting as much content as possible into a very small file size.

Intended Audience and Prerequisites:
This roundtable is intended for programmers who are developing games which will be distributed as downloadable files on the Internet. Attendees should be familiar with the storage requirements of images, sounds, and other game assets.

What is the idea takeaway from this presentation?
Attendees will learn how to store their game content in the most space efficient way that is appropriate for the needs of their game. They will learn about many file formats and algorithms and the tradeoffs of each. They will discover unique ways of fitting the compressed formats into art paths/data paths to automate conversions and control compression ratios while preserving the quality of the source material.


Presentation Syllabus
Participants will be encouraged to discussed the fallow topics:
• Industry standard file formats vs. custom formats
• Automating a data path which maintains lossless source data and compressed data to shipped
• The tradoffs of assets in ready to use game format vs. a small download friendly format
• Brining it all together into one package
• Choosing the right installer to minimize overhead and maximize compression
• Tradeoff of store game assets in compressed file formats vs. letting the installer worry about the compression
• Keeping some assets separate and/or in more accessible formats to make partner re-branding easier when the game is distributed on 8 different portals each with their own branding requirements
•

• Types of Data to be stored/compressed
o Images/Textures
o Video
o Sound
o Music
o 3D Models/Mashes
o Animation
o Fonts
o Code (EXE/DLL)
o Levels/Maps/Missions
o Generic Data
•
• Image Compression
o Lossy compression formats: JPEG, GIF (Licensing issues), PNG, Palletized
o Lossless compression: TIFF, BMP, Customer RLE, Generic data compression
o Extra Information: Alpha channels, hotspots
o Optimizing preview
o Designing art to be more comprisable
• Audio Compression
o MP3 GIF (Licensing issues)
o OGG/Vorbis
o Sequenced Music: MIDI, MOD, S3M, XM

In addition to creating large CD-ROM based retail game, James has experience developing several retail quality downloadable games and preparing them for distribution on a dozen different web sites in very small packages.



Main Speaker
First Name: James C. Last Name: Smith
Email: james@reflexive.net Postal (Zip) Code: 92630

Biography* All bios must be completed, no submissions will be considered without a bio. View a sample bio here. (2000 chars)

James C. Smith been programming games for 9 years and has shipped 8 titles for the PC and/or XBox. He specializes and system architecture for everything from big RPG games such as Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader to smaller downloadable arcade action games such as Ricochet Lost Worlds. James brings his 16 years of experience as a software engineer to game industry where designs and specification are constantly changing and flexible software is the key to success.

Industry Credits Complete game credits should be listed by game title, platform, years worked on game and publisher. The credits are important tools for evaluating your submission. (Limit 150 words.) (1000 chars)

Astrorock – PC
Programmer - 1 year
Atlantean Int.

Defiance - PC
Progrmmer – 2 Year
Visceral Production

Swarm – PC
Programmer – 1 Year
Global Star

Star Trek Away Team - PC
Programmer – 1 Year
Activision

Zax The Alien Hunter – PC
Lead Programmer – 2 years
JoWooD Productions

Lionheart – PC
Lead Programmer – 2 years
BlankIsle / Interplay / Universal

Ricochet Xtreme – PC
Lead Programmer / Producer – 1 year
Reflexive Entertainment

Ricochet Lost Worlds – PC/Web/XBox
Lead Programmer / Producer – 1 year
Reflexive Entertainment

[James C. Smith]

Do you think it's because you're not a "AAA" developer with $10 million budgets? I

There could be a lot of reasons. Maybe I pitched it wrong and made it sound too much like other “data driven design” talks that have been done many times. My title was “A unified approach to data driven design” or something like that. But I also believe it has a lot to do with WHO you are rather than what you have to say. If you shipped a multi million dollar AAA title they pay more attention (may justifiably so). Also, if you have a track record as a speaker at previous GDCs, they easily let you speak again. According to 3rd hand information from people on the inside, if you gave a GDC talk before, and didn’t screw it up completely, you are practically automatically accepted for another talk.

[Ryan Clark]

James, I would certainly love to hear more about the tricks you folks at Reflexive use to keep your download sizes small. I have a few methods that I use, but looking at the list above, I don't doubt that you have far more insight than I do!

I'm sure other folks here would benefit greatly from the knowledge, too. Would you consider writing an article? I'd love to host a copy of it on the game programming wiki. (With full credit and link back to your site, of course!)

[James C. Smith]

Ryan, My idea for the session was to not make it a lecture dominated with just my ideas. I proposed a roundtable where everyone could share their experience with the subject. That is basically what we have here in this forum. There are already several topics here about these issues. Maybe we could update some of them. In this topic I though we could talk about what should be disused at GDC and how to make sure “we” (the Indie and downloadable games developers) are more successful next year at getting our abstracts accepted. Or maybe we could talk about starting an alternative to GDC. But I think the best answer to that would be this forum itself.

[Ryan Clark]

Ah, I understand James.

Unfortunately I've never attended a GDC, so I don't have much insight into the whole thing. My business partner and I plan to attend next year, however.

Hopefully someone who has a GDC or two under their belt will respond here.

[Bmc]

Or maybe we could talk about starting an alternative to GDC

I'd like to see a site targeted towards indie developers. with postmortems, articles etc. something along the lines of gamasutra

[Abscissa]

Or maybe we could talk about starting an alternative to GDC.
There was one for awhile, the XGDC (Later renamed XGDX), but it struggled due to lack of interest/attendance and eventually died. It's a shame too, because it didn't cost an arm and a leg.

[gmcbay]

A trick we're using at Mischief is that all the graphics are vector based. They are actually stored in SWF files, though we just use it as a simple, compact vector graphics storage medium and don't use actionscript, etc (and our games aren't really Flash based, they don't use the Flash player at all, it is a custom C++ engine that uses gameswf for the SWF parsing and AGG for the SWF rendering).

Looking at the graphics in our first game is a bit underwhemling but that is because they are quicky programmer art. The artwork in the second (unreleased) game is immensely improved and includes a lot of nice character animation created by taking 3D models, importing them into Poser, keyframe animating them, exporting to Swift3D and rendering to SWF. Nice, smooth pre-rendered toony animations from a 3D source, and the entire filesize for most animations is about the same as what one frame would be if it were a bitmap image.

The bonus part is that because all the graphics are vector based, the game can be played in 320x240 on up to 1600x1200 and beyond, and the graphics look pretty good at any resolution. No blurry pixels or jaggie artifacts that you'd see with bitmap resizing.

[Abscissa]

A trick we're using at Mischief is that all the graphics are vector based. They are actually stored in SWF files, though we just use it as a simple, compact vector graphics storage medium and don't use actionscript, etc (and our games aren't really Flash based, they don't use the Flash player at all, it is a custom C++ engine that uses gameswf for the SWF parsing and AGG for the SWF rendering).
I really like that idea. (Kinda reminds me of some work-in-progress library I saw somewhere that used Flash to create animations for GBA games. It didn't use it for the actual images though.) Although wouldn't that technique be limited to certain art styles? For instance a game like the original Mortal Kombat would probably still have to have bitmapped images.

How easy it is to parse SWFs?

[gmcbay]

Yeah you pretty much have to buy into the idea that your graphics are going to be toony if you're going to use vector graphics. Trying to get realistic or gritty looks from vector images just doesn't work that well.

Parsing SWFs is a lot of hard work, but I side-stepped the issue by taking Thatcher Ulrich's gameswf (http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html) and replacing the 3D mesh drawing routines with routines that fed the bezier curve lines and fills into AntiGrain Geometry (a 2D drawing API that fills the same basic niche as GDI+ style APIs, though it is heavily C++/templatized, which can take some getting used to), which made things relatively simple.

[James C. Smith]

Designing art to be more comprisable in other worrds make "toony" art

[Chaster]

There was one for awhile, the XGDC (Later renamed XGDX), but it struggled due to lack of interest/attendance and eventually died. It's a shame too, because it didn't cost an arm and a leg.

Well, there's the IGDC - put on by Garage Games. It seems to have been a great success for the past couple years. Sadly, I have yet to go to one (I have about ZERO excuses - I live in Portland, and it costs a pittance compared to GDC)...

Chaster

[illume]

The nextwave thing in Melbourne Australia has an indie game dev part.

Apparently they are trying to do it again this year. Was only about $20 last time :)

Yah! for government funding, and the work of volunteers.

[tentons]

Well, there's the IGDC - put on by Garage Games.
I was going to mention that, too. We should support a common effort rather than fracturing off into divided groups. Oregon may not be the sexiest place to have the conference, but it is kind of symbolic of the "big business" versus the Indies so I like that. :)