Develop Brighton 2010 Round-up

The Develop Conference in Brighton finished yesterday. Sadly, we were unable to attend but here’s what’s happening in videogames, from around the web:

Doublefine has managed to achieve a 100% being dropped by publishers, going through four of them – though, as Schafer notes, since they still exist, so maybe there’s a business plan there after all.

Rock Paper Shotgun: Develop 10: Schafer on Future & New Games

Vaizey spoke about the industry as a viable asset in Britain private sector but said that smaller measures were better suited than tax relief, despite him strongly backing relief before the election and being a strong pro-videogame voice within the Conservative party.

Nukezilla: Ed Vaizey: Industry “Hasn’t Made The Case For Game Tax Breaks”

Apparently I am the Barry Manilow of game development, and a mug to spend £75 on jeans. And the topic then came up of how indies can respond directly to gamers on stuff like messageboards. Basically I started making the point, and mark was also agreeing about how someone can email you as an indie dev, and you can reply personally back to that potential customer, and hopefully, that way you have converted that guy to buying the game.

At this point, there was this derisive snort from this guy in the front row, who said something to the effect of ‘one guy? who cares, that’s a waste of time’.

Cliffski.com: Epic Opinions (Cliffski developed life sim game Kudos 2)

Bioware talked culture. Not minister for culture, but company culture – a culture that is not a national issue; Bioware did a great talk on what culture within a developer, within a studio and even within a team was – how they got it and how they kept it.

A Great Becoming: Develop Day 2: Culture

And you have this terrible phase, which we all know, where the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and it slowly transitions into something less beautiful with less gameplay features, because you’ve got so many bugs. And on Fable II at one point we had about 67,000 bugs. The Microsoft test team rated us ‘super black’. No-one had even been black before – they’d had red and orange and green.

Guardian Games Blog: Peter Molyneux on Fable II: “there were huge design flaws.”

The developers found that asking players to actively run around a field while also managing and tracking the movement of their teammates and opponents quickly became to unwieldy, no matter how they tweaked the controls.

Joystiq: Rare discusses new challenges of Kinect development

Were you at Develop Brighton this year? What else happened? Tell us in the comments.

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