Michael Augustin Drops By

Michael Augustin is a former ETC student (and former Apple employee, and former intern at Three Rings) and the CEO of startup company Gendai Games. The name "Gendai Games" is very appropriate to the company's philosophy and business model, because "Games" in an English word meaning "activity engaged in for diversion or amusement." He came to speak with us last week.

Game Salad, Gendai Games' current project, is a tool to help non-programmers create games. Broadly, the toolset gives the user a "salad bar" of video game basics with which to make a game, things like "life meters" and "keyboard navigation" and "croutons." The user puts these elements together however he likes, in a user interface so friendly-looking that you'd swear Michael used to work at Apple like I already said he did.

But the thrust of Michael's presentation wasn't his project per se, but the experience of creating a startup. The first lesson? 99% of startups fail. Aww.

Other lessons include:

-The creation of a values hierarchy - the priorities that detemine your culture, your method, and your product.

-Positioning yourself in the market so that you're not in a footrace with existing, established products.

-Connecting with your audience - "make a blog before you make a business plan" goes the inter-wisdom - in other words, put your idea into the light of day and see if it survives.

-Networking. Except don't call it "networking" while you're doing it. "Aren't we having fun networking, you and me?" No, that doesn't go over well.

-Being on a startup team means being prepared to wear many hats (and, if you're really into the role, many false mustaches). Michael has been, at various times in his startup life, an accountant, a quality assurance tester, an HR rep, a web developer, a programmer, and, currently, a CEO.

-OODA. According to Wikipedia, "OODA" is "Ōda, Shimane (Redirected from Ooda)." But according to Michael (and military strategist John Boyd), it's "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act." What it boils down to is a commitment to a quick work cycles and overall company agility. Apple, he notes, has an eighteen-month develoment cycle, while Windows Vista had a four-year cycle. Windows, you'll notice, is just now mounting a response to the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" ads. Come on, guys.

-It will generally take longer to do anything than you think it will. User experiences, specifically, take longer to polish the more the user will exprience them. In Super Mario Bros., for example, the experience of jumping had to be perfect, while the encounter with the princess, which the player only experienced once, could just go ahead and suck.

-"Income - expenses = profit." I am SO GLAD someone told me this. I was putting a plus sign in there this whole time.

-Various ways to get money for your startup, including venture capital, bootstrapping (using one's own money) and "angel" investors, individuals who provide money for the fledgling business.

And that was Michael's startup lesson in a nutshell. Now YOU know more than eighty percent of startups. Not enough to beat the 100-to-1 odds every time, but it's a good start.

Game Salad drops in early 2009.

Greg Dismond - Technical Artist, Perspectives and Viewpoints

Today, we invited Greg Dismond, a senior Technical Director in Electronic Arts who has been in industry around 20 years, to our elective class. He has given us Perspectives and Viewpoints on being a Technical Artist. Through his talk, he has cleared our understanding of Technical Artist, stimulated our creative thinking, and encouraged our motivation exploring our future career.

Greg started with how different are engineers from artists. Ones are technical, while the other ones are artistic. Enable to let engineers and artists work efficiently together, communication between these two is very important. He pointed out that hybrids are highly needed to connect those two parties with their technical and artistic skills. Also, Greg brought up this fact that lots of hybrids are struggling between being artists and engineers. As a result, technical artist is a perfect fit for people who are struggling with both technical and artistic talents.

With Greg's experience in movie and game industry, he explained to us what does technical artist/technical director do. Generally, technical artists will be dealing with dependency between different departments, for example, tools, workflow, shaders, general problem solving and assets conditioning plus optimization. It is very inspiring Greg reminded us that being a technical artist requires focusing on "HOW" more than "WHAT". Afterward, he asked everyone to speak up, talk about who they are, are they focusing type or variety type. The result was a little bit surprising for him, focus vs. variety is half and half. Some people are struggling in being focus or variety. For this situation, Greg's suggestion is to start doing something meanwhile think about what fits the most.

As an industry veteran, technical director who has been working in both movies and games, Greg shared his experiences when dealing with different people in work. He started this topic with a rendering question, how to solve a seeming impossible rendering task. With unveiling the answer, Greg gave us tips to face different demanding people and tasks. Be positive, proactive, and attaining social perspective to technical problems.

Lastly, Greg mentioned how landscape of economy also affects our career. He explained how out-sourcing is more and more important, and people with bilingual skill are in high demand. Greg's talk about technical artist is really enlightening, he not only told us what does technical artist like, but also encouraged us to how think about and find out what's best for us.

The Eye of Sauron

Steven Dow - Understanding User Engagement in Immersive and Interactive Stories

Steven Dow is a Postdoctoral Scholar working in the HCI Group at Stanford University and currently investigating the cognitive and social effects of media and tools on design thinking. He earned his PhD in 2008 and his MS in 2004 from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Today, Steven talked about his dissertation, Understanding User Engagement in Immersive and Interactive Stories, and shared with us his empirical observations and the psychological concept that he explored of user engagement through an immersive and interactive story experience called AR Façade.

Façade is a desktop-based interactive drama authored by Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas. It's then developed and installed with an augmented reality (AR) interface that allowed for unconstrained body movement and speech communication. Therefore, in the AR Façade experience, players could move freely around, as well as use gesture and speech to interact with an animated married couple. They would find themselves in the middle of a marital conflict and could influence how the social scenario played out through their actions and statements.

To evaluate user experience, Steve intended to examine how a media experience changed when going from traditional desktop interaction to immersive augmented reality. He had 45 participants playtested and being interviewed. To analyze this vast quantity of interview and play data, he conducted four primary analyses: Qualitative interview analysis, player profile analysis, episode analysis, and log analysis. His studies indicated, even though the AR interface increased most guests' sense of *presence* (immersiveness) over the PC version, but this did not necessary lead to fun and engagement.

After the presentation, I chatted with Steven regarding design and analysis of human-computer interaction. Sonology, the prior ETC project that I worked on, also had an interactive device with trackers attached on players so that they could interact with the virtual environment. Yet the team were strongly engaged in tech development, we found ourselves consistently interested in observing human perception, how it affected our guests' movements in the virtual worlds, and how we improved our system based on their reactions. This also reflected what we've seen in Steven's thesis. Sometimes we assumed the high technology would lead us into entertainment or convenience; we assumed we would always appreciate the evolution of technology. Nevertheless, we forgot it's often not *computer* but *human* that we should have had researched on; it's always the humanity that defines and decides the technology.

Jon-Paul, who is a Game Designer in EA Redwood Shores Studio

On November 06, Jon-Paul, who is a Game Designer in EA Redwood Shores Studio, who was also an ETCer, come and gave us a great talk about how to become a game designer in one easy step as well as how to design a game.

The key point he would love to point out is “A designer is a developer whose main job is to create the fun.”

To different projects, even a same designer could be involved in different roles.
He mentioned himself that he has experienced many design stuff such as story design, quest design, AI design, and level design, etc. Jon-Paul told us it might be a good thing if we realized that as a designer, the tip is to always keep in mind to prepare ourselves to face different sorts of design issues, not only focus on one.

Then he talked something about different duties to different roles in a team. Producers must think about the team as develop directors must think about schedule. As a tester, you must think about the bugs. As an engineer, you might concentrate on your code structure and the frame rate. If you were an artist, take care about the look.

To become a designer, you might start with the fundamentals (don’t jump to electronic right away), and then educate yourself (take a class, read a book). Another important thing is a game designer should practice designing anytime and anywhere. After designed in your head, try to design it on paper, and then design it on the engine. The last step is to play it and iterate on it (time to think about the balance).

As designer, everything is a game! A Game Design basically is like a tree: each pillar is a game, as each feature is a game; each branch, leaf and node, are all games!

Game design is modular.

We could get so much of knowledge about Game Design from Jon-Paul at that time. We really appreciated his talks.