I don’t like the way that so much of the world’s press and politicians are talking about panic — in the US they were even threatened with Martial Law — because to some extent at least, it’s only virtual money that’s been lost so far.  It’s only when the rhetoric scales out of proportion that things get really scary.

Anyway, we know that the boom is over now.  Due to some fortunate econo-political circumstances, it looks like it’s going to roll off reasonably slowly rather than falling off a cliff, whch is great news.  However, don’t be fooled that there is any chance the boom will continue; the credit market pretty much doesn’t exist anymore, which pretty much guarantees that there won’t be any new mine projects that aren’t already funded (and some of the ones that are will stall or fail).  it looks like the Chinese might be able to maintain growth rates roughly half of what they currently are, which is more good news but still means a lot less heat and much harder negotiation.

This is good news!

A soft landing!  It’s more than we could ever hope for and while it’s still a dream, it is still in the future!  We have time to work out what industries we want to promote in Western Australia’s post-boom economy.  I mean, we always knew it would end and there have been previous efforts to broaden the Western Australian economy but clearly they were always focussed on the future, not RIGHT NOW, which makes it hard.  Things have changed now, the date that the boom stopped is in the history books, so let’s get busy working on creating the fundamentals of a solid economy that is properly diversified and will keep our society employed and productive no matter what happens in the global credit markets.

We need to kick this debate into a high gear though; everyone loves to watch a disaster and the ongoing rhetoric of the panic-stricken train-wreck of the US financial markets, replete with toxic bonds and tsunamis of bank failure will make it hard to concentrate on the real issue.  Which is, incidentally, how we diversify our little, geographically isolated, overly focussed economy, making it ready for the next wave of opportunities and improving our economic resiliance.

I’ve got a few ideas as to what we can do here in Perth that I’ll talk about in future posts.  Perhaps surprisingly, they aren’t all focused on games either!

ECU’s Philip Hingston took the stage to tell us about the comp to build a better bot. 2K Australia (previously known as Irrational Games) is offering a $10,000 prize to the programmer who can make a bot that tricks the panel of judges into thinking it’s a human; kinda like a Turing Test for bots. There will be two groups of human players, the judges, a control group of sample players (who are not novices, but who aren’t crack-shot professionals either) and mixed in with them there will be the AI bots created by entrants.

If the judges can’t distinguish between the play of your bot and the humans, then you win $7000 plus a trip to the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (and the 2K Australia Studios) valued at $3000. If no bots pass the test, the best effort will take home $2000 cash and still grab the trip.

This is a great competition from my point of view. Creating a bot that can headshot anything that moves is simple, but it’s not a great idea. On the fun side, it’s like trying to play tennis against a cannon.

Creating a bot that feels like it has a personality, a play style and emotional motivations is something completely different. It not only offers players a challenge, but gives them a real sense of competition, as they square off against a foe that feels like it has skills that are worth competing against, not just a lucky dip bag of queued cheats and cheap tricks.  A lot of AI research and competitions are serious navel-gazing but this has an immediate commercial outcome which is fantastic.  2K is obviously wanting to interview whomever wins but since their studio is in Canberra and there are now some great options (IZ, BC, SF) for working in sunny Perth, I’ll certainly be in there talking to the winners too.

Incidentally, Perth’s own Jason Hutchens won a similar but more complex competition (the Loebner Prize) while a student at UWA and it certainly helped launch his career in the games industry.  He’s back in Perth at Interzone now and apparently won’t be entering this competition, so it’s an ideal chance for aspiring AI programmers.

The platform for this competition is the modding classic Unreal 2004, and a plug-in is available to simplify the interface and present the game as a TCP socket for your application to interrogate and command. You can check the details at www.botprize.org, but if you want to participate you’ll have to move quickly as the competition closes in November.

This year we also decided to have a judges prize, which we awarded to Jack Casey (aka Beetlefeet) for his outstanding game “LadyBug” (video, game). I’m sure his prize — a copy of Maya Unlimited from Autodesk — will be very helpful in crafting next year’s entry!

The music prize was also very close, with fewer entries but all of them very nigh quality. Congratulations and $250 narrowly went to Simon Whitber (Nxus7) for his winning entry, beating out the competition by just 1 point. The final results were:

As I mentioned, the people’s choice voting was the closest it has ever been, with only 3 points (potentially just one vote) separating the top 3 games.

Nullarbor Game Prize Results
Position	Screenshot	Title/Developer	Points	Links
1		Buttons’ Grand Adventures ECU ML Red Team ’08	43	Game Video
2		The War of Art AH,MD,SM	42	Game Video
3		Morning Star Peter Alexander	40	Game Video
4		Ladybug Beetlefeet	38	Game Video
5		Thrust Harder Kransky Bros	24	Game
6		The Things NoTime	20	Game Video
7		Super Jesus Twelve Productions	19	Game Video
8		Space Pirates First Empire	19	Game Video
9		Retrovector Brad Power	18	Game
10		Column Breaker OneTwentyThree	11	Video

There were fourteen all up — many scraping in at the last possible moment. That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider the amount of effort than even the most modest games require. Even more impressing was the fact that several entries were far from modest. We had single-player and multiplayer first-person shooters, a number of interesting space shoot ‘em ups (including “Thrust Harder” which was way cuter than the name suggests), a bunny-based adventure game and even a lady-bug puzzle game with a very nice level editor.

We also had several entries in the music category. Interestingly enough, several of the games didn’t have any sound with their videos … we need to do more to force these two groups get together!

The presentation went smoothly and the crowd seemed to appreciate the effort the developers had put in. You know there’s some quality when people are packed around a tiny laptop to see a new game in action. The voting was thick and fast and we actually had to print out a second an then a third round of ballots to let everyone there vote. We’ll be tallying the results and announcing winners at the next IDGA meeting, so stay tuned.

Keep checking the Nullarbor site for updates on the games, as well as downloads so you can give them a go for yourself. The WA indie game development scene is definitely growing thanks to the computer game courses picking up speed at the universities, and companies like Interzone and Binary Culture helping to bring in some top-tier international developers, as well as helping to keep and skill-up our local talent.

Before the actual presentation we got to see some of that young development talent in action: as we kicked things off on Friday night with a 24-hour LAN event — run with the GameJam — that gathered in developers working on their projects for a final sprint before the close of submissions on Saturday. We managed to get a several teams in and it was a lot of fun with the bar open (selling snacks and coffee along with the traditional beverages), the PS3 on the big screen and free pizza delivered by Dominos at 11pm.  Binary Culture and Qsix set up the network with gigabit to the desktop, local chat servers and a solid SVN repo to ensure no-one lost any data.  Only a few of the most hard-core stuck it out all night but the comeraderie was great and with the infrastructure we provided this time, I’d hope we will have more next year.

After all of the rushing around to get the Bakery LAN-ready everything fell into place just in time, and seemed to go pretty smoothly.  Kudos to Mo at Surrender Events; he did a great job pulling everything together.

We did learn that we have to do a little more promotion leg-work to get everyone motivated and out of their house for something as involved as an all-night demoscene party. Even so, we had a blast. Big thanks to the Bakery crew who were amazing, especially Ainsley.

I know this one has just past (well, almost, past) but I can’t wait to see what we can cook up for next year…

As one of the “Tsars” nominated as someone that might be play some part in developing a sustainable artistic and cultural ecosystem in Perth, I would call on everyone that has any thought to helping on this front to focus on infrastructure. Fast internet access, support services and decent workspaces are difficult in Perth at the moment.  This is a temporary effect caused by the boom–soon fantastic office space with amazing views will be given away again–but it is having a terribly deletorious effect on Cultural activities.

Incidentally, to all those that say that this boom will be different to the last boom, I point you to the first Internet bubble.  Pundits were claiming that due to the friction-reducing effects of the ‘net the business fundamentals were different.  The Internet has changed business dramatically but every boom still has its bust.

It’s just a matter of time, so lets be prepared.

• Rod Humble’s “The Marriage”

• Game Development
  • PC/Console, Handheld, Online, Casual, Phone, MMO…
• Animation
  • Game, TV, Movie, Web, Advertising, Visualisation
  • Flash, 3D, Keyframe, MoCap
• Simulation at various levels of fidelity
  • Entertainment, Familiarisation, Training, Scientific, Visualisation, Military
• Edutainment
  • Entertainment, Training, Teaching
• Interactive Art

First up, I see bringing Interzone to Perth as a tremendous success on all counts. There is no question about that; IZ has attracted an incredibly talented team that is working hard on a very cool game. It has helped put some momentum behind the game industry in Perth and we now have a growing game development community.

Challenges do exist in the path for us to nurture this fledgeling industry in Perth and one of those challenges is the dollar but WA has never competed purely on price in this market.  We don’t compete with China on that basis but we do compete on the quality of our people, the compatibility of our culture with the US & Europe and our unique geopolitical location. The main challenge that I see is to build up the infrastructure here so that we are able to compete with the world on the basis of the quality of our developers and their ability to regularly ship successful games; once that is the case, any fluctuations on the dollar simply don’t matter.

However, we’re not quite there yet and one of the most obvious questions I answered was indeed the issue of the US dollar; has the falling dollar had an impact on the cost of a US company such as Interzone that is developing games in Perth? Of course it has, the cost for every foreign company doing anything in Australia has increased. Is this a problem? Absolutely, it makes it much harder for all Australian industries to compete on price and the game industry is not outside the laws of economics.

Will I be asking for additional government assistance to deal with this issue? No.

Are there skills shortages in Perth in your area? Yes, as was expected when the studio was set up, there are not a lot of highly experienced game developers in Perth. Of course there aren’t, Interzone is the first triple-A MMO studio to set up here. We’re working to build our talent base here and have internal training in place. We are training up graduates as fast as we can but we obviously can’t hire too many of them because we only have a certain number of people that are skilled that can then do the training.

Is Interzone looking to move the studio overseas? No.

What other countries would be competing with Perth for game development opportunities? Canada is always an option, a very equivalent country in a lot of ways and you get the benefit of being a bit closer to the US. The US itself, with the way the currency is working, is becoming more and more attractive to new developers. Then there is Korea, China and all the developing nations are skilling up in this sector, there is a lot of different options from that perspective.

As a result of the declining US dollar, will new projects come to Perth? Before commencing any project of the size that Interzone is undertaking, there is a level of due dilligence that has to be done. Clearly, an important part of that is where the main development is going to be based. An international organisation like Interzone has a number of options on that front and the mix will be appropriate for the title that is greenlit.

What are the greatest challenges that the game industry faces in Perth at the moment? It is still a fledgling industry; Interzone came to town a little more than 12 months ago now and there remains a great deal of work to be done to build up the industry. As Chairman of the IGDA Perth Chapter, I’m working pretty hard to help develop the infrastructure that is needed to build upon the success we are having with Interzone, to help develop a sustainable and resilient industry here in Perth. These things take time but we appear to be making progress on a number of fronts so I’m very optimistic.

I’ll try to post more when I have a moment.

Yesterday I was part of a very interesting panel for LA Tech Week that was held out at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA.  Von Johnson organised a diverse group of technolgists with a remarkably wide range of perspectives into the future of screen-based entertainment,  Our remit was “mobile and broadband” which obviously left us a huge realm for discussion.  I was the only game guy in the room so the discussion did tend a little toward film & television but Von did an excellent job of moderating the panel and mixing things up.  Randy Greenberg also set the scene with a very rich and insightful perspective on the how mobile and broadband technologies have already and will continue to work their way into mainstream entertainment.  His analysis seemed to surprise much of the audience, separating distribution medium, content and business model into separate areas of discussion and weighting distinctions in content more by commercial than traditional weightings.  His analysis was so interesting that I wanted to reproduce it here and Randy kindly agreed.  Courtesy of The Greenberg Group you can click for JPG or PDF versions of his powerpoint.The panel discussion was quite lively and we covered a lot of ground, as might be expected from such a diverse group of people.  Apart from me, there was;

• Christopher Carey – CTO and Chief Marketing Officer, Technicolor by Thomson
• Randy Greenberg – President and CEO, The Greenberg Group
• Douglas Hunter – Vice President of Licensing, Dynamic Digital Depth (3D Technology Company)
• Jeremy Laws – Senior Vice President, Universal Mobile Entertainment, Universal Digital Platforms Group
• Elmo Weber – President, Nutshell Media - Content Summarization Software
• Moderator: Von W. Johnson – President and CEO, Von Johnson & Associates, Inc.

I don’t want to paint a detailed summary of all the topics of discussion here as I would not do it justice.  However, some of the interesting points that I took away;

• There will be increasingly complex content-recycling systems that will allow us to enjoy old TV series’ and movies on all of our various devices.
• Hollywood is learning from the music industry’s failures and although not all of the hierarchy “gets” digital on-demand distribution, there are a lot of folks that do and they are working hard to do interesting deals and repurpose or create content to take advantage of the tech.
• Saturday night football looks incredible in 3D and this likely will be the killer app to drive 3DTV into our homes, although we will have to wait for some of the novelty of HDTV to fade before things really get interesting.
• Blu-ray has an online component.  I wasn’t previously aware of this actually so I must read up on it.
• There was some disent but the majority agreed that HD-DVD has failed and Blu-Ray is victorious, so I really need to do that reading and Sony has finally won a format war!
• Very few projects from any significant motion picture company will rest entirely on the box office receipts; film companies are becoming more like IP exploitation companies and are interested in any distribution method that can turn a profit, especially if it has low cost of entry (repurposing content instead of remaking it).
• The strong communities that we’re so good at creating in the game industry are very highly prized by film marketers, whom are increasingly working to create communities that are pre-sold on a movie prior to release.  They aren’t relying on it yet but that is only a matter of time and the right project, presenting an incredible opportunity to the right collaboration of film-maker and game company.