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Casual Connect Seattle talks up

Mark DeLoura — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:18:07 +0000

At Casual Connect Seattle this year Mike Mahemoff and I did a talk on the Chrome Web Store (similar to the one we did at GDC Europe), and also spoke on a panel called “Browser Tech Smackdown” (with Jim Greer of Kongregate, David Helgason from Unity, Danielle Deibler of Adobe, and Paul Cutsinger from Microsoft). The good folks at Casual Connect just posted them up on their site, so I thought I’d link them in here!

Games and the Chrome Web Store

Browser Tech Smackdown

Gamescom 2010 30second circles

Mark DeLoura — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:22:51 +0000

One of the things I really like doing at places that seem unusual to me is to take quick 30 second video circles of them. It’s hard to capture the complete feel of a place with simple pictures, or a straight video shot. These circles help a bit. They still aren’t the perfect thing, but they’re closer. At Gamescom in Cologne, Germany this past week, I took three 30 second circles in different places inside of the expo halls. That show is SO massive. It’s a multiplier on top of E3, that’s for sure, and having the games fans from the public attending makes it so much more energized. I had a great time checking out the show and seeing my friends show off their games.

Here are my three 30 second circles from Gamescom.

The demise of the term “social game”

Mark DeLoura — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:18:26 +0000

Paul Hyman’s article on Gamasutra this morning was timely, as I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “social game” lately and what it actually means. Increasingly its usefulness as a descriptor is over.

Five or ten years ago we all talked about “online games”. When I ran developer relations at Sony I remember giving a lot of talks about the PS2 network adaptor, talking to our middleware partners about supporting online features, and working with developers to implement multiplayer online gameplay. Nowadays, we don’t talk about “online games” at all – that’s because ALL games have online features. The term “online game” has been deprecated, by and large.

The same thing is happening now with the term “social game”. Right now in the popular consicousness “social game” really means “Facebook casual game with social graph features”. But there are a lot of social graphs available now from other social network platforms such as Hi5 and RenRen. Apple (Game Center), ngmoco (Plus+) and Aurora Feint (OpenFeint) are examples of just a few of the social graphs available to developers on iOS. Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network of course have had social graphs inside their walled gardens for quite some time. So are games on mobile and core (console) game platforms that use social graphs “social games”? No one uses that term at the moment – so why do people use the term for casual titles?

As the game industry continues to evolve, “social game” will die out as well. Why? Because ALL games will connect to a social graph. That’s practically true already! It’s only a question of which social graph they will connect with, and how you will manage that as a player. And then, as a developer, finding an easy way to give the player control over that access.

At the moment, most developers I talk with seem to be abstracting away social graph API calls, in a similar way that one might abstract away rendering calls so that your game can run successfully using either DirectX or OpenGL. These kind of abstractions are never optimal, there’s always some slop involved when you try to determine the minimal set among multiple platforms and yet still allow your game code access to platform-specific features. But the time for arguing about whether or not to include social network access in your game is over: the answer is yes. Now, how to do it?

Rockin’ some web tech

Mark DeLoura — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:59:30 +0000

Lately I seem to refer to myself a lot as “old-school” when it comes to talking about tech. I don’t feel too old-school in the game industry, but when it comes to web tech I definitely am. I can rock some PHP and MySQL, sure, but when it comes to web apps what I really want to use is C++. Because it’s the language I know best.

At Casual Connect this week I went out on a limb and asserted that C++ would be the next great language for the web. And why not? There are so many people out there who know C++, and have code they’ve written in it over the years – why shouldn’t these folks be able to leverage their expertise? I don’t think HTML5, Flash or Java are going anywhere, but enabling C++ on the web is a really interesting thing.

Of course, we’re going down that road with the development of Native Client for Chrome. The idea is that you recompile your code using a GCC-based compiler that produced sanitized executables, and then the code runs in a multi-layer sandbox that provides high performance and access to hardware acceleration through libraries like OpenGL ES 2.0. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities… and I’m looking forward to hooking it into all sorts of “new-school” JavaScript APIs to take advantage of what the web has to offer.

I think the combination may be hard to beat – hardware acceleration and access to web APIs. FTW!

Now I better get back to work – lots to do.

Google at Casual Connect Seattle

Mark DeLoura — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:33:27 +0000

I’m heading to Casual Connect Seattle next week with a group of fellow Googlers and we’re looking forward to meeting lots of casual and social game developers. We’re setting up meetings now. We’ll largely be talking about things related to the Chrome Web Store (although admittedly, that’s an awful lot of things ). Love to hear from you if you’re interested in a chat while we’re there.

We’ll also be in two presentations: One with our friends at Kongregate, Unity, and Adobe… okay, it’s called “Browser Tech Smackdown” so we may not all be friends afterward! Browser Tech Smackdown is Tuesday at 2pm.

Our second presentation is Thursday at 5pm, just before we all go get beers to celebrate the end of a successful conference. In “Games and the Google Chrome Web Store”, we’ll talk about how you can get your game into the store for launch, using Flash, HTML5, or C++-based technologies.

We’re really looking forward to the conference. Hope to see you there!