I was watching Dr Who on friday and Turbine had a TV ad! A TV ad! for D&Donline
It was pre-rendered cinimatic stuff, not in game. I think they could have made a better ad. The game graphics arent bad.
The problem is that there are too many people making engines and too little people making games. Everyone is reinventing the wheel. Unfortunatly, the people capable of developing such a AAA are too segregated- busy with their own endeavors. This isn’t a Java specific problem, rather, a problem which exists with the development community as a whole. We’d see a lot more games in the indie scene if people stopped trying to make engines. Java games in particular would flourish under this mentality, simply because of quicker development cycles.
I should be one to talk though… I am guilty of this offense. Anyway, gotta go! I’ve got to get back to work on my engine… 
Hey, I keep saying give me a million bucks and I’ll have a AAA title up in no time, but no-one seems to want to lend me the cash
Cas 
I want to give you the cash, but people insist on not giving me enough money to have that much lying about spare.
There is no justice in the world…
Just hire a couple of unemployed writers and cg artists. They will do anything for a couple of bucks. Then sell a game with 10 maps like quake 3 and there you have an instant block buster title.
wow where can i find these cg artists that only charge a ‘couple of bucks’?
Theres plenty of them believe me. Look for moding sites for the most popular games HL2 or on the CG society sites.
Ah sadly my worldly wise experience tells me that this would be unlikely to result in a AAA title…
Cas
The kind of title that has you checking into AA, perhaps?
There is a risk in everything. Even with 1 million bucks you can’t be sure the results will be an instant AAA title.
Methinks you’ll find that AAA refers to the marketing budget and project costs, not the use of fancy technology.
Cas
Fancy technology is good for demos and to sell technology. Don’t overlook the power of a small demo with almost zero gameplay filled with all the latest cg tricks. As for AAA my point is not what AAA stands for but that you can beat any big budget game with a low budget game as long as your game has enough quality.
one of the factors that i think the low budget suffers from as opposed to an AAA title is exposure and getting it to peoples attention that it actually exists, just take an example of say ‘Prince of Persia: Two Thrones’, there were posters all over the trains, buses, tv ads, interactive flash ad’s on popular sites, etc. it was almost impossible to miss that the game existed. Games with small budgets just can’t do that!
[quote=“kapta,post:53,topic:26579”]
Never heard of it.
After several years in the gaming industry fringes, looking, watching, learning, listening and experimenting, I’ve discovered that there’s actually only one thing that sells games, and that’s fun.
Cas
Of course fun, quality, etc… A big studio with a big budget has a huge advantage over a small studio but they also have severe weaknesses small studios can take advantage from.
A big studio can hire hundreds of people for months to create gigabytes of content. They can hire expensive cg studios to create very good movies. They can pay well known writers and composers. Then they can advertise with tons of publicity.
Their weakness is the process they use to create games. See Oblivion for example, theres one guy who works in the main quest who is in a room for himslef and almost never talks with the other guys except the project lead and other writers. The artists and game designers problably never saw the guy which made the songs. The game is assembled like a production line where parts have normalized and boring connections to each other.
Now a small team of people who know each other well and talk to each other daily can create a good game that is well connected and fun. The problem is that they can’t compete with the raw power of big studios to create game content. But they can create a coesive and solid game better than a big studio with their big studio organization problems.
Im not an artist myself but there were times when i needed good quality textures, models and musics so i had to do them myself. I found that some tricks can help. We can use photorealistic images (see mayang site for exampel) and make them tile after some color correction. Allways works good and doesn’t require any a art degree. Same with musics and models. Use realistic models and mix music tracks from other games with a little twist. I may even make a small tutorial sometime to show how this is realy easy for anyone. Even people wihtout any art knowledge.
Got back from San Jose last night. I spent a few days at EclipseCON but did manage to spend a couple of hours wandering round the Expo at GDC. I actually went to GDC with the intention of trying to get a feel for how important the conference is and where the exhibitors efforts were focused. I thought it might be useful to say what I saw:
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Cosmic Birdie looks a hell of a lot better on a nice high res screen - testiment to this was the number of people watching it and asking Shawn and his brother in arms deep and meaningful questions.
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The only people with really nice looking (graphically) demos were the graphics card providers (ATI, NVidia, S3, Intel) and the graphics engine providers. The Sony camp was showing some great looking stuff but nothing so “grab you off the street” as the graphics card providers. Microsoft and Nintendo had great games (as you’d expect) but nothing graphically exciting. Mostly they just got their reps (mmm, reps) to jump out and drag people in
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Most of the technology vendors (AI.Implant for instance who have some great tech) had tech demos. They were showing what their technology was, rather trying to wow with graphics. AI.Implants demo for instance consisted of a city with simply people figures wandering around. Each person had a personaility and an objective. They went on to show how this was dynamic and physics aware. Was very impressive, and yet again drew loads of people in.
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In all honesty, most people at the Expo were basically just milling around taking a look at everything. Absolutely everything in details. The Expo isn’t so big that you couldn’t get a really good look round a in few hours. For me being a techy geek there was a lot to see. I imagine the talks/tutorials/BOF would be far more useful but I couldn’t really believe that the GDC Expo itself was terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
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Wandering around I was really disappointed to see nothing terribly new. There seemed to be a lot of work going on in middleware - basically refactoring the stuff that people have done and repackaging as a generic article. Fine, but I’d really hoped for something innovational.
I saw a great talk at EclipseCON by Joel Spolsky essentially echoing exactly the being “Good vs Great” article posted earlier - only presented in a really “great” way. However, either its ok to only be good when you’re illustrating something else thats great or by far the majority of the exhibitors were way way off the mark (which I suppose its entirely possible :))
Two side notes:
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Sun Booth - putting people in lab coats doesn’t make them seem brighter. Wait for a photo of ChirsM for proof
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Best saying ever from the Spolsky talk - “Proof that looks are more important is Keanu Reeves, pretty but zero acting talent and so stupid he couldn’t pour piss from a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel”.
Kev
[quote=“kevglass,post:57,topic:26579”]
Was it a playable demo or the demo that was posted by ChrisM in this forum?
Jeff
Playable demo, two (odd looking Sun) boxes running next to each other. People were being encouraged to have a play - as I said I was only there for a few hours but when I first got round to the booth I couldn’t play because two guys in suits were busy bashing each other off the sides of the track I came back a bit later and got to play it. Not my cup of tea to be honest (I’m not a high paced race fan) but other people seemed to enjoy. Though I’m not sure how many stopped after playing it to actually talk to anyone
To me it looked a bit different to the video (could just be the recording I guess) - but the textures were more refined and you got much more of a sense of the size of the levels. I guess it was running on great hardware and at super highres of course.
Kev
Hi again,
IMI (Chad and I) are hard back at work to get a beta out there that you guys can play with ASAP.
In fact, we may put up a fairly breakable but playable build quickly just so long time JGO-ers can in fact see it at least running.
Worst case will be a less breakable build by the end of April.
One problem we are dealing with right now is what to do about the networking since it went so well, we’d like to show that, but we’ll need a host server and DarkStar. The Sun guys are trying to set something up as well for that.
Also, for JavaOne (May 16 - 19, 2006) we will do another release as well.