Those of you who know me know that I’ve always been a huge advocate for lowering the barrier to entry for game development. I want games easier to make, less expensive and time-consuming to create, and simpler to distribute. These are goals that may never be completely achieved, but by continually striving for them we learn what needs to be done to encourage more voices, and to accelerate the growth of the art form.

I’ve always felt that Google thinks of web developers the way I think of game developers. Aside from being extremely committed to open source, Google creates many of its products with open APIs, so they can be easily extended by developers to add functionality. And the company really does encourage its internal developers to spend 20% of their time working on their own ideas. Some great products have come out of the passions of developers working during their 20% time! The idea of Google leveraging its strengths in web technology, bringing tools and services to massive numbers of people around the world, plus its over-arching friendliness toward developers – that gets me extremely excited about what it can do with the game developer community.

Over the years I’ve seen Google ship products that seemed very useful for game developers, like Google SketchUp and 3D Warehouse. I always wondered why they didn’t dive into games further – or, perhaps they were, and they were doing it in secret! Google Lively was probably the closest thing to a game that they produced. When I started hearing about their work on O3D, I began to get very curious about what Google was planning.

Clearly there are a number of initiatives going on at Google that can relate to games in some way. Those of you who attended GDC for example saw a massive push for games for Android, with Google giving away perhaps thousands of Android devices. Now seemed like the perfect time to join Google!

My first day today was filled with meetings, something I don’t expect will change for a few weeks at least. I don’t have too much to say about what I’m working on… yet. But I’m awfully excited about the direction we’ll be going, and am looking forward to sharing it with you all when the time is right.

But then DICE came around, and GDC, and I started thinking – wow, if I’d written that post in January I’d look like I was really prescient now. Dang it! Seeing the games industry move in some unusual ways this past year has been fascinating, and there were some marked changes at GDC this year that I’d like to call attention to for those of you watching the game industry. Here are a few things that have caught my eye lately. I’ll keep it to six.

Disruption! Or, the diversification of platforms, distribution mechanisms, and business models. Dean Takahashi really nailed this at GamesBeat this year. We used to only have to think about a couple consoles, the PC, and maybe Gameboy, with all games delivered as boxed products. Now when planning a game we have so many more choices! Of course there is PC/Mac/Linux. And then PS3/X360. PSN/XBLA. Wii or WiiWare. PSP or DSi? PSP Mini? DSiWare? iPhone/Android/WinPhone7/Palm/Blackberry. Facebook and other social networks (Flash games largely). Oh wait, distribution? Well, aside from boxes, about a zillion digital distribution channels, including Steam and Direct2Drive, as well as social networks and mobile app stores. Ultimately the question for a business person is: if I have N dollars to spend creating a game, what platforms, business models, and distribution systems are going to maximize my likelihood of making N+M dollars in revenue? Will I make a free-to-play game selling virtual goods, or stick a disc in a box and sell it at a brick-and-mortar store? Or, oh yeah, OnLive? Gaikai? So many questions. It didn’t used to seem like the world was a simpler place. But it was. (A corollary to this is that platform providers will need to work harder to attract developers, since there are so many platforms.)

Broadening of the mobile space. At GDC this year I sat in on a Blackberry technical session. Later in the week I visited the Palm booth. Google was giving out Android phones. Microsoft was talking up Windows Phone 7 in a series of talks. And almost everyone in San Francisco seemed to be sporting an iPhone (God knows why, the AT&T signal in San Francisco stinks!) Now, as a developer, how am I going to make an app that works on all these devices? Yikes! Two years ago, I only needed to worry about targeting the iPhone. Now, at the least, I’m thinking about iPhone and Android, and planning to be ready for Windows Phone 7. And I’d really like to support Blackberry. And Palm. If you’re a game engine developer or providing cross-platform libraries or tools, now is your time to shine! I was surprised not to see many cross-mobile-platform tools at GDC. Unity is coming to Android… ShiVa is coming to Android. There aren’t too many others! There’s a huge opportunity for cross-platform mobile game engine technology.

Increasing interest in “serious games” and “game-ification”. I’ve been incredibly excited to see the White House engage with the videogame industry on several game education initiatives recently. The question “can games really affect learning?” is almost as common as “are games art?” and just about as useless a question, in my opinion. The answer to both questions is, “Of course!” Now let’s stop talking about it and go make some good-quality and effective learning games. At the same time, “game-ification” (thanks to Tim Chang for that term) is also growing. The increasing use of game design techniques in the “real world” is fascinating to watch. Using games to encourage people to lose weight is low-hanging fruit here (weight is an awfully easy “scoring” system). The new Ford Fusion has a game-like interface designed to encourage you to conserve energy. And leveling up at your local coffee shop by buying 12 lattes to receive a free one is a simple form of game. Game techniques are spreading out into the culture, and this is understandable – the language of games is one that more and more people grok, as kids who have grown up immersed in games become adults and continue to seek out ways to improve their lives. Game techniques (leveling up, reward systems, design loops, etc) make more and more sense.

Production quality rising in social games. The rise of social games was not something many people saw coming. The number of players playing Farmville itself each week strikes both fear and awe into many a videogame developer. How does one go about trying to compete with that? A way to compete which many have turned to in previous generations is not to build a better mousetrap, but to build a more beautiful mousetrap. We’ve already seen games evolve from Mafia Wars style spreadsheets of numbers to 2D Flash games. Some of the latest Flash games include a bit of 3D (Café World). What will come next? Full 3D games of course! Games made using Unity, Torque, or ShiVa (or Java) all allow for a full 3D gameplay experience but require the player to install custom plugins. Unfortunately, without installing a custom plugin, players are stuck with the simple 3D experience that can be created using modern-day Flash. There are a few Flash 3D engines out there (Yogurt, Papervision3D, PushButton Engine), highlighting the growing demand for 3D on the web. There are also a handful of native 3D technologies for the browser under development currently. Which will break through? O3D? WebGL? ANGLE? NaCl? Over the next 12-18 months it seems certain that we will finally get hardware-accelerated 3D on the web.

As the production quality of social games rises, budgets go up, making it riskier for companies trying to make money in the space. Smaller companies get squeezed out, and larger established companies find accelerated success via branding and co-marketing opportunities. It’ll be interesting to watch the space to see who survives!

The increasing use of external technology. Whether it’s the use of licensed game engines or the use of freely-available open source tech, it seems that many people are overcoming their fear of using other people’s code. I still remember the arguments years ago about the idea of licensing someone else’s game engine. And the original idea for Game Programming Gems was to give people code and algorithms they could use to jumpstart their development. These days open source and licensed tech is all over the place. No longer are people rolling their own game servers, for example, they’re using LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Small game developers are looking for every advantage they can, and turning to the vast environment of open source software such as free engines (OGRE, Irrlicht, PushButton Engine), tools (Blender, Gimp, VirtualDub), and physics libraries (Bullet, ODE, Box2D). New students coming into the game industry recognize that they can more quickly bring their game to life if they start with someone else’s code, so using an engine and toolset like Unity is a smart solution. Traditional games companies have had issues in the past with the use of open source code in a game they are boxing up and selling – too many potential legal issues – so what will they do with the flood of open source use from the indy community?

Increasing viability of game schools. I remember when the first few schools started teaching game development – at the time most people got into game development by dropping out of school and creating their own game, or perhaps they got in by spending time in the QA department. People going to school to learn game development? That was just a crazy idea! Thankfully, that was awhile ago now, and it has been a long road. But just in the past year, it seems a tipping point has been reached, and more people tell me about the GREAT students they’re getting out of schools now as opposed to the inept ones. The new graduates may not be able to code in assembler (and probably won’t need to), but they think about software engineering, engine architecture, and are creative in their use of data structures. They may not know how STL works and how to use it (or not use it) efficiently, but they can code up some really useful tools for your game, quickly. And those programmers you just hired also have design backgrounds, and have worked with other disciplines before, and shipped indy games, or iPhone games. Certainly there are good schools and bad schools, and good students and bad students. But this year I’ve been really pleased to hear about so much GOODNESS.

–

The past few years in the game industry have been tumultuous. But it always heartens me to see so many great games, and so many people playing them!

The key part of the announcement is that the system will enable 3D viewing without glasses. Fantastic! Mobile devices are the sweet spot for stereo 3D, as far as I’m concerned. You know where the player’s eyes are probably at, so you can do glasses-less 3D using a lenticular display. This can be accomplished with a horizontally-interlaced stereo pair and a film over the screen which directs each of the player’s eyes to the appropriate image. Here’s an image (and link) that demonstrates what I’m talking about:

I don’t have any insider knowledge that this is what Nintendo has done, but it certainly seems like an inexpensive way to do it!

A curious question now is whether Nintendo will stick with a dual screen configuration. It has been very successful for Nintendo, they’ve managed to use it in many interesting ways, so I imagine they’ll continue forward with it. And today’s modern graphics chipsets are very capable of generating the images for two screens. Let’s say the new screens are 480×270 – the system would need to generate 2 screens of that size, but divided into four distinct camera views each of 240×270. This is definitely achievable by platforms such as the impressive Nvidia Tegra 2.

It’ll be a lot of fun seeing what Nintendo comes up with. One thing is certain – there’ll be some magic in there that none of us expect. That’s the genius of Miyamoto… I’ll look forward to seeing what it is!

Since that time I’ve been thinking about engines a lot, and talking to engine developers, but haven’t spent much time writing about the space apart from a presentation I did for GDC China.

Doing the survey again this year didn’t seem like a good idea, since frankly a mere one year gap is rather short for this space. I’m not sure the results would be particularly different or interesting compared to last year’s. So instead I decided to write each of the game engine manufacturers and get an update from them, to share with you in this blog post. How have their engines evolved in the past year? What titles came out that highlight their engines the best? And what are they showing off at GDC 2010?

Unfortunately not all of these engines are showing publicly at GDC. But I hope that this summary article helps you in your quest to find a game engine. You may notice that both Epic’s Unreal Engine and Valve’s Source Engine are missing from this list – they both are behind closed doors at the show, and making some significant press releases over the next few days, so I felt comfortable letting them speak for themselves. In this piece, the engines are ordered roughly by the size of their GDC presence. In this post I will cover:

• Crytek’s CryENGINE 3
• Unity Technologies’ Unity
• Trinigy’s Vision Engine
• GarageGames’ Torque
• Emergent Game Technologies’ Gamebryo LightSpeed
• Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine
• Ready at Dawn Engine
• Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine
• Vicious Cycle Software’s Vicious Engine 2
• Blitz Games Studios’ BlitzTech
• Id Software’s idTech 4/5

Crytek’s CryENGINE 3

Website: http://mycryengine.com

Booth: 1414

Contact: cryengine@crytek.com

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

Last year at GDC 2009, Crytek showed CryENGINE 3 to the public for the first time. The introduction of a viable version of CryENGINE (used for games such as Crysis and Crysis Warhead) for the next-gen consoles was met with enthusiasm, and the booth presentation focused heavily on the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox world building tool as well as the ability to rapidly preview CryENGINE content on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The level of graphics fidelity for this cross-platform engine was clearly extraordinarily high.

Since that time, Crytek hasn’t been resting on its laurels. In August 2009 at GDC Europe, the company showed off its LiveCreate technology, improving that same live-preview technology for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 by allowing level preview for all platforms to be driven simultaneously from a single development PC.

The full version of CryENGINE 3 was released from development to partners in September 2009. Crysis 2is planned to be the first console game that will ship on CryENGINE 3; it is currently expected in late 2010.

In November 2009, Crytek announced that they were making CryENGINE 3 available to educational institutions free of charge. The CryENGINE 3 Education SDK is designed to enable educators to more easily teach their students about state-of-the-art game development tools and production practices.

This year at GDC 2010, Crytek is planning to highlight the addition of stereoscopic 3D capability to their engine. They have the largest open booth of all the engine providers and will be showing the new engine running on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 using LiveCreate. They’ll be hosting a series of public presentations in their booth during the duration of the conference.

Presentations:

Ongoing presentations in Crytek booth #1414

Thursday 4:30-5:30, North 131, “Perfecting the Pixel: Refining the Art of Visual Styling”

      Michael Endres, Frank Kitson

Saturday 12:30-1:00, Nvidia booth #1702, “CryENGINE 3″

      Carl Jones

Unity Technologies’ Unity

Website: http://unity3d.com/

Booth: 1112

Contact: info@unity3d.com

Current platforms: PC, Mac, Web, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, iPad, iPhone, Android

Last year at GDC 2009, Unity Technologies launched Unity 2.5, the first version of Unity for Windows. Up until this point the engine and tool had been available purely on the Mac. The Windows version suddenly opened up Unity to a much wider development community.

In October 2009, at Unity’s annual “Unite” conference, the company announced Unity 2.6, which improved background loading, added a profiling tool, included an animation editor, and added support for external version control. In addition, Unity announced Xbox 360 support, and declared that the indie version of Unity would now be free.

Just before GDC 2010 kicked off, Unity announced Unity iPhone 1.6, which adds .NET 2.1 support for the iPhone version, reduces the binary size of applications by up to 25%, and adds in the core networking features of other versions of Unity, allowing the developer to offer multiplayer gameplay over Wi-Fi or 3G.

At the time of this writing, over 100,000 people have downloaded and installed Unity, and more than 600 applications have been published to the iPhone app store using the iPhone version of Unity.

At GDC 2010, we can expect to see a preview of Unity 3.0 (summer availability) in their booth, which includes a unified editor, source-level debugging, and a deferred rendering system. Unity is also announcing availability of Unity for Android, iPad and PlayStation 3! We’ll certainly see highlights of the content produced in the past year for the web, Xbox 360, Wii, and iPhone in their booth as well.

Perhaps the marquee title for Unity this past year has been EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online. Pushing the Tiger Woods console/PC experience to the web was no small task, and seeing EA adopt Unity for the title adds even more credibility to the use of Unity for a modern 3D gameplay experience on the web. On the iPhone side, games such as Tumbledrop (written by an artist with no prior programming experience) and Star Wars: Trench Run show off the capabilities and ease of use of the platform, while Max and the Magic Marker really shows off its cross-platform nature, shipping for PC, Mac, WiiWare, and web.

Presentations:

Ongoing presentations in Unity booth #1112

Presence at Autodesk booth #912

Tuesday 12:30-1:00, South 306, “Fastest Path from Concept to Top Paid”

      Tom Higgins

Wednesday 10:30-11:00, South 300, “Myspace Tutorial Day: Unity on Myspace”

      Tom Higgins

Friday 9:00-10:00, North 121, “Intro to Unity for People Who Know What They’re Doing”

      Joachim Ante, Aras Pranckevicius, Lucas Meijer, Joe Robins

Friday 12:00-1:00, Nvidia booth #1702, “Unity for Engineers”

      Lucas Meijer, Joachim Ante, Aras Pranckevicius

Trinigy’s Vision Engine

Website: http://www.trinigy.net/

Booth: 1334

Contact: sales@trinigy.net

Current platforms: PC, Web, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii

Last year at GDC 2009, what was most remarkable for me about Trinigy’s engine was its use in the Autodesk booth for some of the Autodesk middleware demos. It seemed a quiet yet powerful nod of the head to the capabilities of the Vision Engine to see a large company using it publicly on the show floor.

Since then, Trinigy has been quite busy, announcing a raft of partnerships with middleware technology and service providers such as Morpheme, Havok, Fork Particle and Mixamo. In September 2009, Trinigy announced Vision Engine 7.6, which added DirectX 11 support, a new PS3 renderer, optimized deferred rendering and extended LUA integration.

In February 2010, Trinigy announced Vision Engine 8, adding the “WebVision” downloadable plug-in to enable Trinigy-based web games. The core of the engine also added enhanced multithreading support, extended physics integration for both Havok and PhysX, a new post-processing framework, and a new audio system. Updates to the toolset include a new Lua debugger and Perforce integration, among other things.

At GDC, expect to see Trinigy highlighting Vision Engine 8 and WebVision games, as well as two retail titles coming out in the next few months: Settlers 7 from Ubisoft, and Arcania from Spellbound. Many of Trinigy’s partners will also be appearing in Trinigy’s booth over the course of the conference.

Presentations:

Ongoing presentations in Trinigy booth #1334

Friday 4:30-5:30, South 302, “Using the Vision Engine to Create the Online Shooter, DIZZEL”

      Sung Hoon Ko, Neowiz Games

Friday 4:00-5:00, Nvidia booth #1702, “Vision Engine 8″

      Dag Frommhold

Additional presence in partner booths: Autodesk #912, Intel #1212, Nvidia #1702

GarageGames’ Torque

Website: http://www.torquepowered.com

Booth: 2002

Contact: Via website

Current platforms: Various engines. PC, Mac, Web, Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone

At GDC 2009, I personally found myself a little unclear about what products GarageGames was offering. There seemed to be a handful of engines available for various platforms, and for varying purposes. This past year has seen a change in leadership in the company, with Louis Castle coming in as CEO and Eric Preisz as division leader for Torque. With these new additions has come a renewed focus, and the company seems to be moving with velocity again, refining their engines and clarifying their marketing message.

This past year has seen the release of Torque 3D in September 2009 (as well as a 1.1 beta update which added whiteboxing capabilities, the Bullet physics library, and prefab stamping), iTorque 2D and 3D updates, Torque 2D previews, and updates to the Xbox 360 version. Of course GarageGames was one of the first to bring 3D to the web with InstantAction.com, and this past year has seen a renewed focus on this product as well, reducing download time and adding improved support for game persistence in the cloud.

At GDC 2010 you can expect to see many demos in the Torque booth. They’ll be showing off the full capabilities of Torque 3D, previews of Torque 2D, examples of iPhone games that have shipped with iTorque, and of course InstantAction.com. Also expect to see demos of the full development environment so you can see how easy it is to put a game together using Torque. They’ll also be highlighting their high-quality graphics capabilities through a deferred rendering pipeline.

It has been a busy year for Torque, with management changes and a move to Las Vegas. But that hasn’t slowed down the number of games using their engines. For a full list visit their website, but notable titles this past year have included Mass Effect Galaxy for iPhone, and the Penny Arcade Adventures series.

Emergent Game Technologies’ Gamebryo LightSpeed

Website: http://www.emergent.net/

Booth: Business Suite 234, Business Meeting Rooms 343-344

Contact: info@emergent.net

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii

Gamebryo LightSpeed (3.0) was launched at GDC 2009, bringing greater real-time feedback and rapid prototyping capabilities to Gamebryo 2.6. Since GDC 2009, Emergent has been working on a significant number of enhancements focusing around rapid development. Working tightly with external developers has enabled Emergent to focus on what is most important to developers, and has also given them some improved prototypes and demos as part of their development kit.

The latest version of Gamebryo LightSpeed, version 3.1.1, includes the capability to do whiteboxing inside the Toolbench tool. By sketching out the level with rough shapes, the designer can test out level designs without the need to create complex art. When satisfied, the designer can export these rough shapes out to the DCC tool in FBX format to make creating the final art easier. Lua debugger integration and enhancements to the entity modeling tool make it easier to create new objects, or customize existing ones for your game’s unique needs.

One of Gamebryo’s strong features has always been its close partnerships with middleware companies. Over the past year, increased partnership with Audiokinetic, Xaitment, Pixelux, and Fork Particle (among others) has increased the capabilities of Gamebryo LightSpeed, allowing developers to use tools they are already familiar with.

Emergent has also made changes to the way it provides its SDK to developers this past year. Previously they shipped just two heavily-tested releases each year. Now developers will have access via Subversion to a monthly drop of the development build, allowing them to update more frequently if they like, or at the least have greater clarity over the direction of the engine so they can plan their title development appropriately.

Emergent has seen significant growth in Korea and China this past year, but few of these titles have come over to the U.S. In the U.S., games like the fantasy-themed MMO Freaky Creatures, free-to-play Dragonica Online from THQ-ICE, and Project Runway on the Wii have all used Gamebryo.

For more information on Gamebryo LightSpeed, check out their Direct3D 11 demo and video in the Nvidia booth, the tech talk in the Nvidia theater, or drop by the Emergent meeting room to arrange a meeting.

Presentations:

Friday 11:00-11:30, Nvidia booth #1702, “Practical Triangle Tessellation”

      Dan Amerson

Terminal Reality’s Infernal Engine

Website: http://www.infernalengine.com/

Booth: Business Meeting Room 101

Contact: enginesales@terminalreality.com

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, PSP

Terminal Reality launched their Infernal Engine just before GDC 2009. The past year seems to have been quite good for the company, with well-known studios committing to use their technology, and strong games coming out on the Infernal Engine.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game shipped for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in June 2009, providing a high-profile example of what the engine is capable of. These high-end versions of the game were joined by versions for PlayStation 2, Wii, PSP, and DS, adding strong credibility to the claim that the engine is exceptionally capable of handling highly cross-platform titles.

The Infernal Engine is entirely custom code, requiring no other middleware – it includes its own rendering system, physics, audio, and AI. The latest version of Infernal has significant upgrades in both animation and lighting systems. The animation system includes hierarchical animation state graphs, partial hierarchy blending, animation source re-targeting, and an integrated character runtime with physics, events, and posing. The updated lighting system has added screen space ambient occlusion, realistic global illumination, and per-pixel motion blur, greatly enhancing the quality of the visuals.

Recently, Terminal Reality announced support for Intel’s new Core i7 980X, a six-core, 12-thread CPU, showing the flexibility of the engine and its capability to be easily ported forward to future highly-parallel platforms. Observant readers may have noticed frequent articles from Intel covering Terminal Reality and the Infernal Engine, highlighting the strong partnership between Intel and Terminal Reality, which can only serve to benefit Infernal licensees working on PC-based SKUs.

In August 2009, High Voltage Software announced a long-term agreement for a lifetime license of the Infernal Engine. At GDC 2010, we may see the first results of this partnership, with High Voltage’s The Grinder expected to be showcased in the engine’s booth and talks, highlighting the new rendering system.

For more information on the Infernal Engine, be sure to attend the Infernal Engine presentation below.

Presentations:

Thursday 4:30-5:30, South 302, “Infernal Engine: Physics in a Multiprocessor World”

      Ryan Monday, Chris Bream, Joe Kreiner

Ready at Dawn Engine

Website: http://engine.readyatdawn.com

Booth: Business Meeting Room 500

Contact: engine@readyatdawn.com

Current platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP

Last year at GDC 2009 there were some rumors flying around that perhaps Ready at Dawn was getting serious about licensing its engine. The developer of Daxter and God of War: Chains of Olympus for PSP certainly had some hits under its belt, as well as a strong team and a lot of credibility. In October 2009, they jumped into the engine market with an offering for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PSP.

The Ready at Dawn engine is tightly bound to Autodesk’s Maya, and also integrated with Perforce, but apart from those two packages the engine is designed completely as an all-in-one solution, giving the developer a tight suite of tools that does not rely on any other middleware.

The engine is modular, task-driven, and data-driven, yet does not rely on scripting languages as many engines do. Having open scripting languages for non-programmers to use in the production workflow can be a source of headaches and bugs, so Ready at Dawn’s engine instead focuses around the use of programmer-created modules which can then be combined inside of the engine’s editing environment by the designers.

Complete access to the source code of both engine and tools is provided to licensees, and updates are distributed via Perforce in both stable and unstable branches so the developer can choose their tech based on their own comfort level, and also more easily plan out the development of their title based on engine dependencies.

The Ready at Dawn engine hasn’t been shown much publicly, which makes GDC 2010 all the more valuable. Check out their presentations at the Autodesk booth during the show.

Presentations:

Daily 1:00-2:00, Autodesk booth #912 pods

Thursday 3:00-3:30, Autodesk booth #912 main stage

Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine

Website: http://www.digitalextremes.com/evolution/

Booth: Private suite

Contact: peter.alau@digitalextremes.com

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3

Digital Extremes’ Evolution Engine launched at GDC 2009, with a series of private showings in a suite. Clearly Digital Extremes has a long history of technology excellence, having been involved in the development of many versions of the Unreal franchise as well as the gorgeous BioShock, so there was excitement about the availability of their engine for licensing. Aside from the great look of the engine and toolset at the conference, Digital Extremes focused highly on their software engineering expertise, emphasizing test-driven development and automated build processes.

In the past year, Digital Extremes has been working on improving the engine’s performance, making the engine more relevant to a greater variety of games, and improving the tool chain. For example, moving level and texture decompression to the SPUs on PS3 has improved run-time performance; on the other hand, a project to accelerate skinning by using the SPUs proved less useful – however, source code to even their research projects is available to licensees, so if a technology proves more useful for your particular game, you can benefit greatly from work they’ve done which hasn’t been incorporated into the core.

Another graphics research project this past year involved deferred lighting and deferred rending. While creating an impressive look for some types of games, other games are suited more toward traditional forward rendering. As a result the forward-rendering pipeline will primarily be supported going forward, but the deferred rendering code, again, is available in their latest source-code drop and could prove useful for some titles.

In the tool chain, updates to the Lua integration and user interface systems this year have resulted in efficiency improvements. The most significant addition to their Lua system is a fully-functioning script debugger with breakpoints, variable inspection and crash handling. For in-game user interface, the Evolution engine now incorporates Flash playback and ActionScript (negating the need to purchase other middleware for this purpose). All the Lua functionality is exposed to ActionScript and vice versa, allowing the developer to implement game logic in Lua and UI code in Flash/ActionScript, without having to worry too much about compartmentalization.

Aside from the engine technology itself, the Evolution engine continues to have a heavy focus on software engineering and reliability. This year there has been a renewed focus on build times, one of the banes of many a game. Digital Extremes claims incremental build link times under 20 seconds on all platforms, which is almost unheard of. Be sure to get in touch with to see it at the show!

Vicious Cycle Software’s Vicious Engine 2

Website: http://www.viciousengine.com/

Booth: Private suite

Contact: licensing@viciousengine.com

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, PSP

Vicious Engine 2 (VE2) launched at GDC 2009, initially for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Over the course of this past year, Vicious Cycle has broadened support of VE2 to include PlayStation 2, Wii, and PSP, making it one of the more highly cross-platform engines available.

Vicious Cycle, creators of Vicious Engine 2, were acquired by D3Publisher in June 2007, and D3Publisher was acquired by Namco Bandai in March 2009, so there has been some concern about the continued availability of Vicious Engine. But the team assures me it is still available and being actively licensed, so be sure to get in touch with them at the show!

VE2 is designed as an all-in-one game engine, requiring no use of external middleware. The engine is mostly designed for third-person action games and platformers, as evidenced by this year’s title Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond for XBLA. In trailers for this game, the developers’ work on their lighting system and physics are quite apparent. Their latest titles include ambient occlusion (added to the engine this past year), and the new physics and ragdoll effects of Matt Hazard are very over-the-top.

Several areas the engine team is particularly proud of are the improved LOD and occlusion systems and the configurable, data-driven rendering, which allows game teams to create very unique art styles for their games entirely inside of the VE2 toolset. Vicious Cycle is also focusing quite heavily on streamlining and enhancing the networking code in VE2, allowing for more active enemies in multiplayer titles as well as the addition of online multiplayer co-op.

While Vicious Cycle doesn’t have an open booth at GDC 2010, their presence will be seen at the show with sponsorships and banners. If you’d like to take a closer look at VE2, be sure to email them to set up a meeting!

Blitz Game Studios’ BlitzTech

Website: http://www.blitzgamesstudios.com/blitztech/

Booth: Private suite

Contact: blitztech@blitztech.com

Current platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PSP

Last year, prior to GDC 2009, I was unaware that Blitz Game Studios was licensing its game engine, so I failed to include them in the game engine survey. But in the year since, I’ve met with them numerous times, and have been impressed with the engine’s graphical fidelity and cross-platform ability. Blitz consistently pushes their engine to cover new technologies, starting last year at GDC 2009 as the first game engine to include support for stereoscopic 3D.

One of their key focuses this year is driven by the innovations from Sony and Microsoft, both of whom are pushing new control technologies. While the two new control technologies (Project Natal and the PlayStation Motion Controller) are not terribly similar in terms of player experience, a lot of the underlying technology is, centering around image and motion analysis. BlitzTech supports both Project Natal and the PlayStation Motion Controller as standard, including a toolkit so developers can get moving right away.

BlitzTech is a very cross-platform game engine, and this past year Blitz has been seeking to extend games beyond the consoles, to web and mobile. Saying that your game engine supports “online” means more these days than it used to, and having an engine that is capable of supporting web and mobile clients and the sharing of data between all of these clients will be increasingly important. We’ll look forward to seeing more from Blitz on this front in the near future.

Of course the core engine technology is also under continuous improvement, and over the past year BlitzTech has implemented refinements to real-time lighting, and improved multi-core support. They’ve also improved their animation pipeline, enhancing real-time animation authoring and retargeting.

A game that highlights the use of BlitzTech is the upcoming Dead to Rights: Retribution from Namco Bandai. For more information about BlitzTech or to have a look at it behind the scenes during GDC 2010, be sure to contact the team using the email address above.

Id Software’s idTech 4/5

Website: http://www.idsoftware.com/business/technology/

Booth: Private suite

Contact: licensing@idsoftware.com

Current platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Xbox

It’s been a quiet year for idTech. Their big news this past year was the shot heard around the world, when ZeniMax acquired id Software in June 2009. While the strength of id’s technology is legendary, their engine has had no publicized updates since the acquisition. If you’re interested in talking with them further about how you might license it, they recommend you visit their website for further information, and be sure to drop them a line at the contact address above.

I decided to spend the night with my parents just south of Tacoma before heading back to SF, and since I was in my old neighborhood, I drove around a bit to see how the area has changed. It was a weird experience.

Spanaway, Washington is an area that has evolved a lot since I grew up. A rural area about 15 minutes south of Tacoma – or at least, it was rural then – most of the area during my childhood was made up of forest. Quite a few families in the area lived in houses on five acres of trees, and there were people raising horses next door, raising cows around the corner, and my parents raised chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys… and motorcycles. There was plenty of room for everything.

Now, visiting the area, my parents’ place seems like a park in the middle of a small town. Their house sits on one of the few plots of land left which hasn’t been razed and converted to inexpensive houses. The area where the cows were around the corner? It’s now an elementary school and high school.

So it was a strange feeling remembering a place which doesn’t really exist anymore. I know this is not a unique experience, it happens to many of us as we progress through our life, but it doesn’t make it feel any more normal.

What I really didn’t expect was the WAY that I would remember the area. My first thought was to stop in at the bowling alley where I - yes, learned to bowl - but what I remember more is when the Space Invaders machine showed up in the arcade there, and then the Star Castle, and the handful of pinballs that I used to play incessantly. Happily, visiting it now, the floor was sticky, there were pull-tab machines everywhere – pretty much how I remembered it – but unfortunately I was the only person in the arcade, and most of the machines were dated.

Driving further along I was compelled to see if the Laundromat was still there, I remember playing Major Havoc over and over while waiting for my clothes to dry. Laundromat yes, Major Havoc no. I always sucked at that game anyway.

And much closer to my parents’ house was the first convenience store which opened in the area - a mere 2.5 miles from our house at the time. It’s where I met Defender, and Robotron, and Super Mario Bros. Now it’s a sports bar, and the neighborhood baseball fields next door are overgrown with brush.

Mulling over it now, when we had driven to their house from Seattle on Thanksgiving day I had taken a different road, with memories passing through my brain including Southcenter Mall, where I first met Dragon’s Lair and Crystal Castles; the Fred Meyer in Puyallup, where there had stood an arcade with several Mario Bros games; and the shopping plaza where Cosmos once existed, a fantastic arcade which had one of my all time favorites, Crazy Climber.

On this trip I came to the realization that I remember my childhood through videogames. I feel lucky to have been born at a time when I could grow up along with personal computers and the game industry. I spent my time playing games and then trying to write my own on the computers of the time, usually staying late after school so I could program uninterrupted. If I had been born earlier I probably would have been really into cars, or radios, or whatever the most techy thing was during that time that I could have fiddled around with, tuned up, and personalized. When I was growing up I didn’t really understand the appeal of those other things, but now, older, I recognize that the same passion which drove me to computers and videogames would have driven me to those. They are all very engineering-focused things that I could have taken apart, learned about, played with, and customized.

What will the next generation of kids, or their kids, be passionate about in this way? What will be the hot technology in their time that is accessible enough that they can get their hands on it and personalize it? It’s hard for me to think of at the moment. Computers have become commoditized, just as cars have, and the cutting edge games are big-budget blockbusters that I may have felt demoralized trying to create on my own. If I were born today would I go into games or would I explore a different path?

Videogames are on a cusp, turning from a technology focus to a design focus. For the industry, this is likely a good thing. But it will attract different minds. What will the game industry of the future look like? I find it exciting, and intriguing, to think about.

For me, videogames will always be about cutting edge technology and personal expression. The technology will become more and more sophisticated, but I will always be pushing to make it simpler to create games, easier to personalize your own experiences, and less difficult to share your visions with others. Taking a trip down memory lane made me realize how important games were to shaping my childhood; I want to preserve that path for others to follow for as long as possible.