Demo Night 2
Posted on 4 Mar 2005 by Ben Serviss
DN2: The Main Event
Though perhaps not the conference or expo giant of certain 'other' industry gatherings, New York's recent return presentation foray Demo Night 2
does exactly what it says on the tin. We sent our resident man in the field, Benjamin 'slave for the cause' Serviss,
over to investigate
Psychonauts, ZamBeeZee and Moleculous - Oh My!
Say "E3" out loud and anyone who's ever picked up a controller most likely knows what you're talking about. Mutter "GDC," and there's a good chance someone will recognize the acronym of the Game Developer's Conference. Lesser-known trade shows and events such as CES, Philly Classic, and PAX are not yet on the radar of the mainstream gaming public, and they enjoy a somewhat less manic atmosphere, but even these events are fast becoming massive extravaganzas. That's where
Demo Night comes in - a toned down meeting for videogame developers to demonstrate their works in progress, unspoiled by frenzied masses of trade people or excessive media hype.
For one night, the New York City office of host developer Large Animal became the hot spot to be for industry players. Coordinated through the New York and New Jersey chapters of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA),
Demo Night was created by Large Animal to foster growth in the community of east coast developers, with out of State guests welcomed as well.
As the projector was readied to showcase the games in the Large Animal workspace on 29th Street, professionals chatted with IGDA members over drinks, discussing everything from recent releases to the upcoming GDC in San Francisco. Noting the casual atmosphere typical of IGDA gatherings, it was hard to believe that even more attendees were on the way. 150 guests had observed RSVP for the invitation-only event - an increase from the first
Demo Night's 120 attendees - and the spacious loft office was already bulging.
Robert Wisbeski, a programmer for the mobile games market, expressed his anticipation concerning the evening's upcoming presentations. "The first Demo Night showcased some impressive technology," Wisbeski commented, "but this time, everything's looking to be bigger and better." With 2 Xbox games, 1 Mobile game and 3 web/downloadable games on the menu, there was something for every kind of gaming taste.
As proceedings began, IGDA Executive Director, Jason Della Rocca, stepped up to the microphone. Coming from Canada to New York City for the first time just for the event, Della Rocca spoke for a few minutes on the IGDA's objectives, namely protecting game developers' rights to free speech, promoting workplace diversity, addressing the ‘quality of life' issue for game workers, and supporting women in the workplace. "The members are my boss," Della Rocca added, reaffirming the IGDA's casual atmosphere and commitment to the community before handing the microphone over to the evening's first presenter.
The Presentations:
Each developer was allotted 10 minutes to present their game, with 5 further minutes to address questions from the audience. The three web-based games were demonstrated first, followed by the Mobile game and the two Xbox presentations.
Title: Moleculous
Developer: SMERC
Platform: Downloadable (PC)
Release: March 2005
Official Site: www.smerc.com
Moleculous is SMERC's first independent downloadable game, as opposed to the previous web-based and advert games they've developed so far. The game is set in a turn-of-the-century Victorian laboratory, as the player assists Dr. Von Leakentube in his quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe by performing experiments with its building blocks - molecules. The game's premise is perhaps a little heavy-handed for a downloadable puzzle game, but fits nicely with the pensive, almost scientific gameplay.
Moleculous' playing field is a large peg board, with slots for players to insert molecule pieces into. As a molecular substance is dripped from a beaker, the player must plug molecules into the slots to deflect the falling droplets into another beaker at the bottom of the screen to earn points - similar to the parlor game
Pachinko. For each level or ‘experiment', diagrams of different elements are superimposed over some of the slots, incorporating actual molecular configurations into the level's objectives. There is a slight educational bent to it, as presenter Brian Wane confirmed "If an element is in the periodic table, it's probably in the game," but later acknowledged that the gameplay is
Moleculous' first main priority.
Each level is timed, signified by the amount of smoke left in the ‘Time' test-tube on the right-hand side, and obstacles appear in peg slots to make things interesting. For a small downloadable game, the graphics look quite sharp, and obviously great pains were taken to ensure an authentic look for the game's laboratory setting.
Wane, the creator of
Moleculous, emphasized the freedom of independent development and the support of publisher Gametrust in bringing the game to market, allowing SMERC to focus directly on production and less on bureaucratic concerns. The results of such unprecedented freedom look intriguing, especially for an emerging developer.
Aside from creating independent properties for the Internet, a next-generation console title was revealed to be in the works, but no details were disclosed. When quizzed about SMERC's views on the industry in general, Wane replied, "Gaming is the most important art form out there," giving credence to the limitless possibilities of interactive media. With such core beliefs and a sincere mind for developing quality games, SMERC may be a developer to watch as the next generation of consoles begins to emerge.
Title: ZamBeeZee
Developer: Blackburst Media
Platform: Downloadable (PC)
Release: March 2005 (public beta available)
Official Site: www.blackburstmedia.com
Mark Leibowitz of Blackburst Media took the stage to present the word-puzzle game
ZamBeeZee. The game is set on a honeycomb-shaped playing field (hence ‘bee' in the title) with randomly generated letter tiles laid out across the board. The object is to connect letters in any direction, as long as they are in direct contact, to form words. Each tile is assigned a point value similar to
Scrabble, and like that classic board game, the longer the word is, the more points it's worth. Special tiles offer double or triple word and letter scores, and ‘wild' tiles can be used as any letter the player chooses. As the player completes words and racks up points, a honey meter fills up around the border of the screen, terminating in a honey barrel that must be filled to capacity to complete each level.
ZamBeeZee has four modes of play available from the main menu: Original, Bombing Run, Timeless, and Ultimate. In Original, the player must meet a points requirement and beat the 3-minute timer to advance; in Bombing Run a selection of tiles are replaced by bombs, and by using them in words they detonate every tile touching them to accumulate points. Timeless mode cuts out the timer for a more deliberate approach, "for people who can't handle the pressure," Leibowitz joked, while Ultimate mode throws elements from Original and Bombing Run into the mix, with decidedly more difficult requirements for beating each level.
Blackburst set out to make a word-puzzle game after researching deeply into the casual game market, deciding that such a game would offer the best possibility for a sizable impact. With
ZamBeeZee's flawless presentation, graphical strength and catchy audio, it seems they've made the right choice. The crowd watching the presentation was overwhelmed with the desire to shout out possible words as Leibowitz demonstrated the game, enthralled with the concept but still puzzled by the whole ‘bee' motif.
"We originally thought of a spelling bee," Leibowitz revealed, relating how later brainstorming sessions led them to choose
ZamBeeZee as the game's distinctive moniker. The history of its development is quite remarkable, as Blackburst Media's staff of four industry veterans created the game in a year during their spare time, and independent of their full-time jobs.
As for what's next from Blackburst, Leibowitz spoke about narrowing the company's initial broad focus for providing web design and other production services down to pure game development, adding, "with business plans, things take longer than you think."
With possible PDA and cell phone ports to consider,
ZamBeeZee certainly seems to have the potential to become the casual game market's next
Bejeweled.
Title: Diner Dash
Developer: gameLAB
Platform: Downloadable (PC)
Release: Out Now
Official Site: www.gamelab.com
The next game demoed was gameLab‘s
Diner Dash, presented by designer Nick Fortugno. In
Diner Dash, the player assumes the role of Flo, a stockbroker so sick of the financial world that she quits her job to realize her dream of running a restaurant. The game's playing field is Flo's brand new eatery, and as customers enter and are seated, the player has to direct Flo to take each order, bring the food out, deliver the check, and bus the dishes. Naturally, this gets complicated when dealing with 4 or more tables, and slow service will result in angry customers storming out. Upset 3 customers, and it's game over.
Treat your guests right and Flo's restaurant will rake in the money, giving players the chance to purchase upgrades for Flo's establishment, ranging from more tables and fancier décor to stereos and even live music for ambience. Play is timed cleverly through an ‘hours of operation' clock - play starts as the restaurant opens, and ends when it closes. The trick is in getting as many customers in, out, and satisfied as you can in one level, or day.
Diner Dash has two modes of play, Flo's Career and Endless Shift. In Flo's Career, the game's story is told through comic book-like panels between each level as Flo rises to prominence in the entrepreneurial restaurant world. The comic, cartoony feel helps to build
Diner Dash's fun atmosphere, as the game's thick lines and bright colors echo comic book aesthetics. Endless Shift is just what it sounds like, a 24/7 shift that keeps the player going until 3 patrons eventually leave in a huff. Described as "a wait staff's worst nightmare," Fortugno points out that testers found the mode to be remarkably authentic to the real-life experience (whether that's a good or bad thing depends on the player).
Color comes into play as a game element in the later levels. In the more complex restaurants/levels, seats are colored differently, and by matching similarly adorned customers into corresponding colored seats, you earn bonuses. Repeatedly seat same-colored guests in like-colored seats and the bonuses increase, earning big points. This simple and intuitive gameplay mechanic is something of a recurring theme in gameLab's games and overall design philosophy.
To appeal to the web/casual game demographic,
Diner Dash was designed to be easily accessible, easy to understand, and addictive to play. The underlying game mechanic, of managing Flo's restaurant duties, immerses the player into the game world. The exact science, as Fortugno expressed, is to get the player into the game's "speed rhythm" of management, merging the game and real worlds together.
gameLab certainly has experience in this melding of worlds. At the annual GDC in California, the company has consistently put on interactive game experiences for conference attendees, ranging from viral card-trading games to full-out competitions involving an intimidating amount of participants. This year's GDC should be no different, with an ambitious RPG-styled game titled
Conf. Quest in the works.
gameLab's roots in card and board games seem to shine through their digital experiences, keeping a certain experimental spirit alive. Of course, with such an experimental M.O. funding is hard to maintain, but gameLab isn't going anywhere soon. Fortugno affirmed that innovation is the key to making big hits, and that it takes something wildly new to draw upon the imagination of the gaming public, citing
Katamari Damacy's surprise success as an example. It'll be interesting to see further offerings from gameLab as they continue to strive towards innovative and entertaining gaming experiences.
Title: Might & Magic
Developer: Gameloft
Platform: Mobile
Release: Out Now
Official Site: www.gameloft.com
Up next was Gameloft's
Might & Magic for the Mobile platform, presented by lead programmer Nick Smolney. Positioned as a "Zelda-lite,"
Might & Magic finds the player as Ewan the warrior in the battle-ravaged land of Erathia. The goal of this action-RPG is to find the King, captured by invading demons.
Might & Magic caught the attendees' attention immediately, but not for the melee or ranged combat, stat leveling, or unusually intriguing story for a mobile game - everyone on the floor gaped at the graphics, which looked as though they'd be more at home on a Super Nintendo than a cell phone. The isometric perspective, aside from giving a large view of the game world, works well for the mobile control scheme. Pressing ‘5' attacks, ‘1' jumps, and ‘7' and ‘9' cycle through available powers, with ‘3' switching between powers at the ready. However, the biggest concern was the movement scheme, as the d-pad setup of ‘2', ‘4', ‘6' and ‘8' for directional controls is quite unintuitive, given the game's diagonal corner isometric design.
Control issues aside,
Might & Magic looks quite accessible, with scalable settings to get the best performance on a wide variety of phones. Of course, with the sheer amount of phones capable of running the game, the logistics of making sure each and every platform can run
Might & Magic bug-free makes the head spin, as Smolney remarked on the industry's need for a cell phone standard down the line.
After their introduction to
Might & Magic, attendees were curious as to how Gameloft acquired the license to produce the game. Smolney related the chain of events leading up to the game's origins, from Ubisoft's acquisition of the license from 3DO to their agreement with Gameloft, and the game's subsequent development in Gameloft's China studio. After creating
Might & Magic for the Chinese market, the property was handed to the New York studio for localization and porting to American phones. While ports will always be a reality of the mobile games business, Smolney said, "Gameloft's year-old New York studio is preparing to start producing its own original games."
Might & Magic, released in September of 2004, has gone on to receive Editor's Choice awards from IGN and Gamespot, as well as winning Best Mobile Game at Spike TV's 2nd Annual Video Game Awards. The game certainly embodies Gameloft's commitment to quality titles, and also shows that the company can correctly handle a license. Though a relatively new presence in the US, Gameloft's treatment of mobile games as a serious matter is going a long way in establishing their credibility with the gaming public.
Title: Outlaw Golf 2
Developer: Hypnotix
Platform: Xbox, PS2
Release: Out Now
Official Site: www.hypnotix.com
After a short break to set up the demonstration Xbox, Hypnotix producer Nick Laing picked up the microphone to present
Outlaw Golf 2. Lead programmer Josh Hunter, animator Greg Rinaldi, and programmer Chris Haire rounded out Hypnotix's presence, playing the game and adding comments during the presentation. The game was the only sequel present at the event, with Laing emphasizing the second game's commitment to building upon the established
Outlaw Golf experience.
New and expanded courses, an improved weather system, and new mini-games such as ‘Cart Challenge' where you mow down as many golf enthusiasts in your cart as you can were highlights of the presentation. Laing even remarked that the cart engine was good enough to base an entire game around, saying "if Mario did it, why can't we?" Imagining the game's raunchy cast of characters zipping around in go-karts is amusing by itself; here's hoping that the idea might become a reality.
The composure meter from the first game makes a return, with the player's performance governing the character's state of mind. The better you do, the better your character's composure is, while the poorer you do, the harder it is to focus your character to play efficiently. In keeping with the ‘outlaw' theme, the best way to regain your composure is to beat the tar out of your caddy or indulge in some of the more destructive mini-games like Cart Challenge. Another similar mode shown was a driving range on a field complete with grazing cattle, where each ball detonates upon impact, turning hapless cows into instant hamburger.
The game's ‘M' rating reflects the increase in bawdy content and the
Outlaw franchise's new direction after being picked up by publishers Take2 and Globalstar. While admitting that
Outlaw Golf 2's target audience is "anyone who's ever belonged to a fraternity," (there was even a full-time animator working an entire year solely on breast animation), Laing took a moment to clarify the series' changed direction. With
Outlaw Tennis on the horizon and a remixed
Outlaw Volleyball planned for North American PS2s, the brand shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
Tennis looks poised to be the biggest
Outlaw game yet, aside from a mysterious next-gen game in the works of which Laing simply said "it's going to be awesome."
Even though the crowd was slightly disappointed in viewing the already released
Outlaw Golf 2 and not
Outlaw Tennis, the presented game gave the attendees a fair idea of what to expect with the next release. Like
Outlaw Golf,
Tennis will be fueled by a mix of proprietary technology and RenderWare support. It will also be populated with an eccentric cast of characters, feature commentary by a yet-to-be-disclosed top name in comedy, and the same solid sports game mechanics running under the hood of every
Outlaw title.
Title: Psychonauts
Publisher: Majesco
Platform: Xbox, PS2, PC
Release: April 2005
Official Site: www.majescogames.com
Majesco closed out the evening with a demonstration of the famed
Psychonauts, the innovative action-adventure title that Microsoft foolishly dropped from its games division. Producers Sean Scott and Michael Tatro barely spoke a word as they played through the opening cinematics and tutorial level, letting the surreal art aesthetic, superbly realized visuals, and genuinely funny humor speak for the game.
As many exhaustive previews have said before,
Psychonauts plops the player in control of Raz (short for Rasputin), a youngster with extraordinary psychic abilities. However, his parents have forbidden him to develop his powers, so he runs away to join a psychic training camp that hones telepathic wannabes into elite mental warriors known as Psychonauts. The game's controls are typical of third-person action games, but seem to have an added smoothness that makes every movement feel more organic than most titles. No psychic powers per se were demonstrated in the displayed training level, but even without added abilities the standard control set seemed exceptionally well crafted.
After tooling around the woods where the camp is set up, Raz takes his first trip into a human mind, the battlefield of the ‘psychic age', and the setting for the game's surreally twisted levels. Inside the head of the drill instructor, a completely different set of rules governs play. Realistic enemies and obstacles are nowhere to be found, since the pure chaos of one's mind overpowers any notion of normality. The beautifully-realized environments appear to reflect the philosophy behind
Psychonauts - to give developer Double Fine free license in creating never-before seen imagery and gameplay mechanics, and to even subvert existing conventions.
One such twist was the collection aspect. Collecting in most action games becomes a repetitious, annoying task if not correctly realized, but that isn't the case here. Once inside a foreign mind, Raz can collect figments of that person's imagination, sometimes towering, sometimes miniscule, but always phosphorescent, strangely-shaped creatures and monstrosities. The creative humor behind
Psychonauts' premise is completely integrated into play, as Raz comes across ‘emotional baggage' in various minds and must find the corresponding luggage tag to complete the set. Energy is recovered by finding ‘mental health' power-ups, your drill instructor threatens to kick your "ass-tral projection" right out of his mind; in short, the puns may incite giggles or groans, but at least the humorous aspect isn't tacked on.
After the tutorial level, Scott and Tatro demonstrated a later stage where Raz stumbles across a lungfish city, and finds himself to be a giant among the small organisms. What could have been a trite
Godzilla homage turned out to be genuinely funny, with lungfish panicking amusingly in the sight of "Goggle-or." Raz's ensuing tantrum of destruction upon the town fits the setting well, with a proper sense of scale and chaos communicated to the player.
There are great expectations for
Psychonauts and much hype surrounding its April release; and with Majesco's recent surging into the realm of high-quality titles, the game might find itself embodying the company's commitment to giving good projects a fighting chance.
Attendee Impressions
Large Animal's crowded offices were immediately abuzz after the last demo concluded. While admittedly a small-scale event, many of the New York and New Jersey-based developers in attendance were extremely impressed with the scope of
Demo Night 2, and the unique opportunity it afforded for east coast developers to congregate.
Veteran game designer, programmer and producer Roger Pederson found the event to be a great addition to the standard expo and conference offerings, admiring the many inventive games that were presented. Pederson especially appreciated
Demo Night 2's capacity to draw in the mobile and web game developers in the New York area, creating a real sense of community.
New Jersey programmer Robert Brisata, fresh from studying computer science in the United Kingdom for four years, was also impressed with the sizable turnout and game presentations. Brisata's pick of the show was gameLab's
Diner Dash, though he readily admitted a fondness for "weird games.".
Other show favorites included SMERC's
Moleculous, for its novel approach to gameplay, and of course the impending blockbuster
Psychonauts, for its innovative premise and inspired artistic style. Perhaps the evening's overall favorite was the show itself, and with further
Demo Nights on the horizon, it has the potential to become quite a hot event for eastside industry players.
When asked about the inevitable
Demo Night 3, Large Animal producer and
DN2 event organizer Coray Seifert remarked, "We're psyched! Organizing and running the first two Demo Nights has been incredibly challenging, but well worth the effort. There's no doubt that we'll be putting together a third Demo Night…probably in late summer of this year.".
Stay tuned to MyGamer for further upcoming
Demo Night coverage.
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