GDTW 2008 – Guest Speakers
Tony Ambrus
Software Development Engineer
Rare Studios / Microsoft
Bio:
After completing his Masters in Computer Science at the University of Southampton, Tony Ambrus joined Rare as a Software Development
Engineer in 2007. Specialising in graphics, he started in Rare’s Shared Technology Group (STG) before moving over to develop for the
newly released Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Since then, he has moved to one of the other in-house game teams to take up the role
of resident graphics programmer.
Title:
Realistic Water Rendering in Stylized Environments
Synopsis:
The lecture first gives an overview of the unique water rendering in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and introduces its main components. It then explains the authoring process used to give artists a fine grain and interactive control over the look of the water. Key innovations are presented, including maintaining a consistent density of vertices near the camera, and reducing texture repeating artifacts. We go on to examine some of the practical problems uncovered during development, and in closing present implementation details, and discuss key lessons learned.
David Barton
Technical Supervisor
Image Metrics
Bio:
Since joining Image Metrics in 2001, David Barton has delivered many video game and feature film projects for clients such as Rockstar Games,
Sony Computer Entertainment and Digital Domain. In January 2006 he opened Image Metrics Inc. in Santa Monica, CA and was responsible for all
production based in the US. He is now the Technical Supervisor based in the company's Manchester, UK office and is responsible for ensuring
the implementation of Image Metrics' solutions in the European market. He is the leading expert in the application of Image Metrics'
proprietary animation solutions in the entertainment industries. Before joining Image Metrics he completed a BSc in Physics at Leeds
University and a two year Graduate Management program with a FTSE 100 company.
Title:
Using Facial Subtleties to Convey a Digital Character's Personality
Synopsis:
The subtle complexities of emotion remain one of the most difficult things to capture and convey through a computer-generated character. While we can achieve photo-realistic results in still images, once those characters begin to move and interact, the fantasy is often shattered. For these reasons, an understanding of the fine nuances of emotion and how to add these to the faces of your characters is one of the most critical tasks for creating the illusion of life in games.
This session will examine how the structure of the human face impacts our emotional expressions, key emotional signals and nuances, what is currently still challenging to overcome given current console technology, finally concluding with how developers can use this information to create more emotionally believable characters in their games.
Dave Burrows
Technical Director and Lead Programmer
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe,
Liverpool
Bio:
Dave Burrows is the Technical Director of the WipEout brand and was the Lead programmer on WipEout Fusion and WipEout Pure.
After spending far too long as a student, he moved from VLSI design to writing 3D graphics engines and has been in the industry
for around 18 years, the last 8 of which have been with Studio Liverpool.
Title:
tbc
Synopsis:
tbc
Fengyun Lu
Physics Programmer,Bizarre Creations.
Bio:
Fengyun Lu holds MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of
Newcastly-upon-Tyne. She conducted research into improving scalability
in massively-multiplayer online games. Since graduation, she has worked
on the physics in The Club and has worked on a new in-house physics
engine for Bizarre Creations which will power their future titles.
Title:
Real-time Games Physics Engines
Chris Orton
Software Solutions
Bio:
Chris currently splits his time between software development and consulting on project management and system architecture.
His career has spanned companies and computers large and small.
In 1986 armed with a computer science degree Chris started his career at GEC. Six months later he'd discovered he didn't fit into the corporate structure and left for the computer games world of the mid 80's, pausing only to leave behind some nuclear power station monitoring code.
Having found himself accidentally involved in Falcon, the first major flight simulator hit of the era, he decided to stay with 3D games working first at Rowan Software and then at Digital Image Design where he worked on EF2000 and subsequent projects. He spent a number of years developing 3D engines, landscape systems and really cool explosions. In the late 90's sniffing the advance of a large corporation he fled Digital Image Design to ride the tail of the dot-com boom.
The noughties have involved interesting little start ups, handheld devices, and various projects They won't let him talk about. Along the way he's worked on projects with the likes of Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Microsoft and others involving systems as diverse as the N-Gage, PS2, PC and some stuff that never made it to the consumer.
When not trying to kick start an independent games industry Chris enjoys talking about himself in the 3rd person. Email to chris@co-solutions.ac.uk usually gets past his spam bin.
Title:
Making Young People Central to the Design of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Synopsis:
Young people make up the majority of MMO Game Players but most of the designers and makers of these games are in their 20s or 30s. Onteca have been running a project funded by Mediabox which allows young people to be central to the design of a Massively Multiplayer Game.
This session will examine the how the creative process of game design can be expanded and improved to encompass young peoples opinions, how those opinions can sometimes be different from those of professionals and we will look at the results that can be achieved.
This session will also cover general design, technology and artistic issues common to all MMOs.
Prof. Zhigeng Pan
Zhejiang University, PRC
Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Virtual Reality
Editor-in-Chief of Springer Verlag Transactions on Edutainment
Bio:
Zhigeng Pan was born in 1965 in Jaingsu Province, and he received his Bachelor Degree and Master Degree from the Computer Science Department in
1987 and 1990 from Nanjing University respectively and Ph.D Degree in 1993 from Zhejiang University. Since 1993, he has been working at the State
Key Lab of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University.
He has published more than 100 papers on international journals, national journals and international conferences. His research interests include distributed graphics, virtual reality, multimedia, digital entertainment.
Prof. Pan is a member of SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, IEEE, a senior member of the China Image and Graphics Association. He is on the director board of the International Society of VSMM (Virtual System and Multimedia), a member of IFIP Technical Committee on Entertainment Computing (acting as representative from China). Currently, he is the Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Virtual Reality, Co-EiC of LNCS Transactions on Edutainment. He is on the editorial board of International Journal of Image and Graphics, International Journal of CAD/CAM, Journal of Image and Graphics, Journal of CAD/CG, et al. He is the Director of the Virtual Reality Committee, China Society of Image and Graphics; He is on the Steering Committee member of VRCAI series conference. He is the organizing committee chair of VRAI'2002, ICIG'2004. He is the program co-chair of EGMM'2004(Eurographics workshop on Multimedia), the program co-chair of Edutainment'2006, conference co-chair of ICAT'2006 and Edutainment'2008.
Title:
Digital Olympic and Sport-oriented Game
Dr Edmond Prakash
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Games Technology
Bio:
Dr. Edmond Prakash joined the Department of Computing and Mathematics as a Senior Lecturer in 2006. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. After receiving his PhD, he joined the State University of New York-Stony Brook, USA and subsequently at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as a visiting scientist. Prior to joining MMU, Dr Edmond Prakash was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and he was also the Research Director for the gameLAB at the school of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Edmond's research focus is on exploring the applications of virtual reality in engineering, business, science, medicine as well as in entertainment computing. He has worked on the design and implementation of walkthroughs of proposed structures, such as buildings, automobiles, and humans. In the process he has developed new algorithms for automatically generating object hierarchies, cinematic quality rendering, volume rendering, parallel computation, human modelling and animation for virtual environments. He has also consulted and collaborated with the industry including IBM, Silicon Graphics and JP Morgan. Dr. Edmond Prakash is currently working on various issues in the context of entertainment computing, such as how to accommodate highest-quality dynamic graphics programming through inherent support for natural user interaction.
Dr. Edmond has published in every top journal in Computer Graphics including (IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Computers & Graphics, Computer Graphics Forum, Shape Modelling, Journal of Visualization, Imaging Science and Technology and Machine Graphics and Vision). His publications are mainly devoted to top class software prototypes, research papers and books. A major interest in teaching and research in recent years has been the future of gaming, animation, graphics, visualization and virtual reality.
Dr. Edmond is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Games Technology.
His web site is at www.docm.mmu.ac.uk/STAFF/E.Prakash
Title:
Can Game Engines help in Game Development?
Synopsis:
This talk will look at the state-of-art Game Engines for game development.
The objective is to look at some of the functions available in recent game
engines. Programmability and portability of games on to various platforms
will be looked at. Programmer requirements in cutting-edge game environments
will also be explored. Game usability is a perennial topic but often
ignored by developers. The talk concludes by addressing some of the bigger
challenge we face today, to develop games with novel interfaces such as the
Wii, Haptic devices and for hand-held gaming devices.
Jon Snoddy
Chief Technology Officer
Big Stage Entertainment, Los Angeles, USA
Bio:
Jon Snoddy is a seasoned entertainment executive with uniquely broad experience in entertainment technology. He has held senior positions with industry leaders like GameWorks, Disney and Lucasfilm, merging art and science into successful entertainment experiences.
At GameWorks, he worked directly for Steven Spielberg directing all aspects of product development, content and engineering. Built and led a 50 person design team that produced dozens of projects valued at over $250M. He led in-house and 3rd party game developers to build games and interactive attractions. He pioneered game environments with internet linked cameras so people could see their opponents, linked games and motion bases with architecture, built unique UI devices and systems.
He set up sponsorship relationships with Samsung, Microsoft, Seiko Epson, and developer relationships with Angel Studios, Sega Japan, Interplay Productions, DreamWorks Records and with JPL for content development. At Disney, he founded VR Studio, a new design studio within Imagineering that had its own staff, budgets and facilities. The group continues its work today, producing the ToonTown MMORPG for the Disney Internet Group.
He Produced the world’s first complete, high quality virtual reality video game Aladdin VR. It is in operation at Disney’s Disneyquest in Orlando. He recruited and led a large team of artists, animators, programmers, hardware and software engineers to develop the game, game engine, production pipeline and custom hardware (partnership with SGI inc) to play it. He brought together Disney R & D, Imagineering and Feature Animation resources. The project pushed the state of the art on all possible fronts: interactive story telling, branching animation, artificial intelligence, display design, computer hardware and software.
He now provides conceptual consulting services to the interactive entertainment industry throughout the world. His website is: www.snoddy.net
Title:
The Big Idea
Synopsis:
Great games, products, records, films etc. spring from a single, clear, well understood, defining idea and are championed by a tenacious believer in that idea. During the course of a long project with many ups, downs, late deliveries, scope changes, personnel changes and budget cuts it is critical that the team have a standard for decision making that tells them what is sacred and what is nice to have. The talk will explore a number of successful projects as well as a few less than successful ones, to see how a strong conceptual framework, a big idea, can determine the outcome.
Kier Storey
Physics Programmer,Bizarre Creations.
Bio:
Kier Storey holds BSc (Hons) and PhD in Computer Science from the
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He researched into techniques for
parallelising/distributing collision detection workloads across multiple
computers in networked simulations. Since then, he has written physics
engines for a wide range of games, including The Fast and the Furious
and The Club. Kier currently works as a physics programmer at Bizarre
Creations, helping to write the company's in-house physics engine which
will power their future games.
Title:
Real-time Games Physics Engines
Chris Viggers
Development Director, Blitz Games Studios
Bio:
Chris Viggers has been on the front line of game development since 1998. Entering the industry as Producer at Interactive Entertainment Ltd and following that success as an External Producer at Midas Interactive gave Chris a crucial grounding in developing games from both the developer and publisher perspectives. After joining Blitz Games Studios he successfully completed several large scale, high profile projects before being promoted to Studio Development Director in recognition of his success and skill set.
Chris is now responsible for overall game development at Blitz Games Studios, ensuring that the studio as a whole is leading from the front in regards to production processes, management methodologies and development opportunities and to help ensure that Blitz Games Studios forges ahead as a leading global player in the ever expanding and exciting computer games industry.
Title:
The Dichotomy of Game Production for External Clients
Synopsis:
How to manage your internal development teams to meet both your studio’s and your clients’ needs from an independent’s perspective.
For an independent game developer, managing multiple high profile projects in your studio alongside your own and your clients’ ever-changing needs in this fast-paced industry has always been a challenge. As the risks of game development are spiralling, you need to ensure that you remain flexible and structured with all of your internal projects, but at the same time managing client expectation, while also ensuring that your overarching goal of delivering a killer game remains intact.
This talk aims to present a number of different and unique practical studio management strategies based on over 10 years of game development experience to ensure that you can always balance your studio’s and clients’ needs for any project.
Jon Wetherall
Managing Director, Onteca
Bio:
Jon is currently Development Director at Onteca where he has worked at the intersection of Arts, Technology and Training. Recently Jon worked on ‘Another Green World’, a collaboration between Disabled Artists and Computer Game Developers funded by the Arts Council and the ‘Game Plan’ at Media Training North West.
Jon was one of the founders of the award winning International Centre for Digital Content where he co-developed the first Digital Games Masters programme in the UK. His experience as a senior computer game programmer at Sony taught him that the most interesting work occurs when Artists and Technologist collaborate.
Onteca are committed to Independent Game Development and the discovery of original Game and Narrative mechanisms.
Title:
Making Young People Central to the Design of a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
Synopsis:
Young people make up the majority of MMO Game Players but most of the designers and makers of these games are in their 20s or 30s. Onteca have been running a project funded by Mediabox which allows young people to be central to the design of a Massively Multiplayer Game.
This session will examine the how the creative process of game design can be expanded and improved to encompass young peoples opinions, how those opinions can sometimes be different from those of professionals and we will look at the results that can be achieved.
This session will also cover general design, technology and artistic issues common to all MMOs.
