BAF 2011 - Day One

After BAF was so awesome last year i was pretty excited to be going again this year. Even though this year's line up was rather vague and sounded uninteresting we knew it would still be good. We weren't mistaken, here are some of the highlights of day one.


New Stories for New Platforms - Six to Start - Adrian Hon

One of the first talks was given by Adrian Hon from Six to Start, a company that focuses on story in games rather than just saying 'MOAR GRAPHICS!'. His talk was gripping from the start and grabbed my attention immediately, mainly because i loved how much this guy swore. The first line of his talk was something like 'Why are stories in games so shit? I mean seriously, they suck!' This was refreshing as it showed he wasn't just another corporate monkey trying to crank poorly made games out and was actually interested in talking to us and getting decent stories across.

He explained that big title games such as Resident Evil, Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto will always sell well, even without a good story (although i disagree about Resident Evil, awesome story). He also talked about the well known problems with games based on films and books that are ordered by massive corporations and usually turn out to be terrible because no care has been taken with the game's story as it is just rushed through.

His solution was similar to what is recently happening with the Indie Game Sector. There is now less need for a publisher who will very rarely distribute high risk games - high risk meaning anything that isn't a shooter and may not sell well. If they aren't needed anymore, loads more games with great stories will find its way onto our shelves. Funding was previously a major problem - if you can't find someone willing to fund you you can kiss your game goodbye. However, nowadays there are websites such as Indiegogo that let lots of people donate funds to you based solely on your idea. Minecraft is a great example of this. If normal everyday gamers can start making their own games with donated funds and no distributors saying what they can and can't do then games with great stories should be just around the corner.

Kinect Games - Frontier - Matt Stevenson & Nick Rogers


Frontier are a company that have recently specialised in games for Xbox Kinect. Although the Kinect hasn't reached the same popularity as the Nintendo Wii, it has attracted a lot of customers and has sent Xbox in a completely different direction. They were at BAF to talk about their previous release: Kinectimals and their upcoming release Disneyland Adventures.


Kinectimals

Kinectimals was one of the Kinect's launch games and was released in the winter season of 2010 and it received very positive reviews even if it was a very basic idea. The aim of the game is to raise and take care of a group of cats and bears who are all cute as hell and who all live on a deserted island. With their help you uncover the island's wonders and beauty- so it's pretty much a watered down Lost for kids with fluffy animals instead of people. We saw the stages of creation including their original animation research where they had filmed cats. However, Cats are pretty boring animals and don't really do a lot so instead they used dogs and adapted the dog movements to cat animations. As the talk went on we were astounded at the amount of work that went into this seemingly simple game. One of the most interesting statistics was that there were over 3,000 full length animations, each having to have a separate transition animation that all had to be executed perfectly.

SO FLUFFY!

Disneyland Adventures

Although this game looks TERRIBLE to me, a twenty year old, i can see how much children would love this game, mindless hours cuddling an interacting with furry cats and i respect how much work Frontier put into this game, i just hope i don't ever have to work on a game with such little storyline and no real character depth. The guys explained the basic layout of the game - you play as a kid exploring Disneyland and interacting with the famous characters at the park and some of the more popular rides. This game is to bring all the fun of Disneyland to the comfort of your own home which is a good idea, especially in the current economic situation, it costs less money to buy a game than go to Disneyland. Apparently this game has over forty five levels and an impressive one hundred and eighty characters - each individually rigged and fully animated equalling a total of forty hours of animation and another one hundred and two hours of speech. Amazing.

I may not be the biggest fan of the Kinect or either of these games but Frontier is clearly a very impressive company whose projects just keep getting bigger and better. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more of their games appearing on the Kinect in the next couple of years!

Playing With Learning - Carlton Reeve

A bit of a controversial talk was next up as Carlton Reeve made the rather damning statement that nothing educational has ever been learnt from a game. He spoke about how much kids hate learning games and everyone agreed because if you have ever played one, you will know how abysmal they are. He blamed the educational system on not realising the potential of educational games and not taking gaming seriously enough.

He believes that educational games are an untapped mass of potential for the following reasons:

• 77% of the UK population have played a game in the last six months
• The average twenty one year old gamer has spent twenty one thousand hour on games
• Games are played for three billion hours a week by the population of the world
• Games make millions of dollars everyday - Black Ops has made over a billion dollars in the first year of release! 

Sorry Bitesize, but your games were pretty rubbish

 I don't think he made himself particularly clear with his opening statement and i imagine he said it to grab our attention. I think he meant that although you may learn a few things from games, these things are so insignificant in the real world that it isn't worth the effort and you could spend the time you were playing the game more efficiently learning from a book or the Internet.


With day one over, it was time to head home, get some sleep and start fresh again the next day!