NASSCOM Gaming Summit 2009 – Tour Diary

An article by my colleague Arjun Nair about our trip to Hyderabad 2009 GDC

The year 2009 will be remembered in the history books of Indian game developers as NASCCOM finally blessed the gaming industry with its very own “GDC-like” event to be held every year henceforth.
The NASSCOM Gaming Summit 2009 (which I’ll refer to as NGS09 henceforth because life’s too short) aimed to bring game developers across India (and some from abroad) under one roof where they could exchange ideas, stories on game dev, case studies, visiting cards and generally show off their development talents.

Here are the highlights of the event:
•    We got off our plane at 8 in the morning at Hyderabad Airport - a stunning piece of architecture that manages to make Mumbai Airport look like a Dharavi slum. It made for a great first impression at the very least!

•    Ernest Adams, legendary game designer, set the tone and mood of the conference by both being frank and witty. I was surprised to see that his presentation consisted almost entirely of text – so much for the theory that successful people use eye-pleasing presentations to engage the audience! Obviously, Adams hasn’t heard of it.

•    It was refreshing to see developers giving case studies that were both honest and in-depth. This is precisely the kind of exchange that Indian developers need in order to grow and learn. Games like Pahelika, Hanuman and Gajini were covered by their respective developers and its quite interesting to see the different approaches and thinking taken by them in the development of the games.

•    When FX Labs were concluding their presentation on Gajini, which consisted entirely of “Things that went right”, someone asked them, “What about things that went wrong?”. Imran Khan, VP, FX Labs said, “Can’t think of anything that went wrong”. That should be a first in game development! Anyone who’s played the game care to comment? ;)

•    During the BioShock (the 2d and 3d mobile games) presentation, VLC media player managed to crash spectacularly during playback of the video of the 3d game and hung the laptop. A surprising number of people recorded this event on their phone cameras for posterity. Sanity was restored by the combination of the good ol’ “three fingered salute”, Task Manager and Kill Process method.  I suppose that’s one way of grabbing audience attention!

•    The most number of laughs (arguably) in the conference were elicited when Purnima , in the course of her presentation, showed off a video (taken in the IG office) demonstrating developer ignorance about the Game Design Document. She went around the office asking people, “What is a GDD?” and the responses were hilarious! If you haven’t seen the video yet and need a good laugh, do yourself a service and ask Purnima for the video.

•    A note on food and drinks at the venue: The non-veg, esp. lamb gosht was fantastic but I have it on good authority that the vegetarian food wasn’t up to the mark. A good thing I’m non-vegetarian then eh? Also, I had probably the best Tiramisu (a sweet pudding in case you didn’t know – I didn’t!) ever! Apparently there were a beer party in the evening at 6 but unfortunately, I can’t comment on how that went since we had a plane to catch. You could say though that everyone left the event in “high spirits” in more ways than one.

Braid the Game

Braid..super game to play where you can undo your wrong moves and move ahead in the world 

Mobile Game Tester - Real Story

With a sparkle in their eyes and they starring at me, saying "Cool, so you are a game tester".
Me shrugging my shoulder.."yeah"

Smiling back..."dude you know i would kill for this kind of job...play whole day and then get paid"
Me Smiling..."that is for sure but this is not easy as it sounds like"
These are the few lines which i always encounter when I meet someone for the first time and we exchange pleasantries.

Today I am going to say what a game tester has to go thru...I have being doing this for past 3 years and let me tell you it is not fun when you have to play the same level for over 200 times in 1 month. First of all we have to play on mobile phones and the fucking buttons are small. Then the screen is not that big where you have to look all around.....I would say it is a cool job and it is fun if you reach a level where you have to play a new game.

I have got request from a probable PHD that "give me your mail id, i want to get a job in your company"

Dude....you would have to put in long hours and play the same game over and over and over and over again so it looks cool from outside but it has its own story.

Let me tell you a day of a mobile game tester....a game is waiting for him which he downloads it on a mobile phone. Then he starts to play the game...a mobile game can go over from an hour to six hours.
There are casual games, arcade games, action games....similar to the ones in PC but on a smaller screen and lots of things cut off. Tester will play the game once to check if there are any issues which a normal user can detect. Then he has to check the game differently...do something what a normal user wont do with a game. That is where the fun is...when you get some big bug after such sequence...your head is held high...and you show the sequence to the developer. The developer will fix the bug and send it back for testing...the tester has to play the whole game again and check whether the developer has solved all the given bugs and not added any more bugs.

The tester will have to do the same thing for a period of month or more....so when one says cool you are a game tester...I hope, I sit with them and tell them the whole story.