Watch the Game Developer Choice Awards streaming live TONIGHT
After the first full day of main conference sessions, many of us—and I think all the Dogs at GDC—will head to attend the Independent Games Festival Awards and Game Developer Choice Awards. We’re especially excited for the GDCA as UNCHARTED 2 is nominated in seven categories:
Game of the Year
Best Writing
Best Game Design
Best Technology
Best Visual Arts
Innovation Award
Best Audio
The IGF Awards are significant and you shouldn’t miss them either—they recognize the best entries into the Independent Games Festival and can give a great glimpse into some of the awesome things that come from being small and passionate—showcasing interesting game play innovations and game developers to watch.
Best of all, both awards ceremonies will be streamed back-to-back LIVE from GameSpot’s GDC hub at http://gdc.gamespot.com/. Be sure to head over there at 6:30 PM PST (what time is that in my city?) to watch the awards events—and hopefully cheer us on. Our fingers are crossed that we pick up a few wins!
Today, Thursday, March 11, is the first day of the GDC10 main conference and Naughty Dog figures prominently in three sessions today. If you’re at GDC10 this week (and reading this instead of attending sessions), we’d love to see you come by.
Naughty Dog faced many entirely new challenges in the creation of UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves - in expanding our gameplay through the use of new traversal, combat and AI technologies, introducing characters that shed new light on our hero Nathan Drake, and tackling our first foray into multiplayer in four years.
Co-Lead Game Designer Richard Lemarchand will candidly describe how we tackled the problems that we faced, and how the studio’s philosophy of collaboration, open communication and investment of responsibility in the people who create the game allowed Naughty Dog to surpass the accomplishment of our first PlayStation 3 hit.
He will also discuss how our small studio of around one hundred people tackled the issues we faced in executing our most complex production yet, giving practical examples and telling interesting stories of crisis points overcome and valuable lessons learned.
The development and production process behind the acclaimed characters and cinematics in UNCHARTED 2 is labor-intensive and demands both time and flexibility. But there’s a method to our madness, and in this session, we’ll be sharing what’s different and unique about our approach, covering both the how, and more importantly, the why behind that process. Topics we’ll cover include casting, motion capture production, writing, our animation pipeline, and how we adapted our process for an ambitious production scope and demanding schedule.
Thursday (March 11, 2010) 4:30pm - 5:30pm Micro or Massive: It’s Fricking Tough to Achieve a Vision
Baiyon Tomohisa Kuramitsu (Artist/Musician, PixelJunk/Q-Games), Richard Lemarchand (Game Designer, Naughty Dog)
Room 135, North Hall
In this session, Baiyon, graphic artist and composer on PixelJunk Eden, and Richard Lemarchand, lead designer on UNCHARTED 2, will lead a lively discussion on the inherent similarities of artistic endeavor, even on two projects as different in style and scope as Uncharted and PixelJunk Eden. This is a talk about artistry as much as it is about the speakers’ specific games, and should prove to be a vital cross-cultural look into the nature of creativity and process in games.
Later on tonight, after the sessions close, we’ll be headed over to attend the Game Develop Choice Awards. Check back later today to learn more about what’s in store for us there.
Naughty Dog has its own booth at the GDC Career Pavilion this year—you can see our concept for our booth in the image above. It won’t look exactly like that, but it’s still pretty sweet looking.
If you’re at GDC this year and you’re curious about what it’s like to work at Naughty Dog, or you’re seeking employment and Naughty Dog is a place you think you may be a good fit for, please stop by our booth to say hello and ask questions.We’ll be glad to answer your questions and tell you about nearly everything there is to know about Naughty Dog. You can stop by even if we don’t have the position best suited for your skills currently posted on our Careers page—so don’t let that stop you. If you’re an artist, we will take a look and give feedback on artists portfolios BUT bring flat books ONLY if you’re going to come by.
If you want to apply for a job, the best place is to contact us via our job opportunities e-mail address: jobs@naughtydog.com
We typically ask for your resume and, if applicable, an online portfolio or reel. You can get an idea of the materials we usually request from other positions on our Careers page or you can stop by the booth to ask. Please note that we are NOT accepting resumes or applications at our Career Pavilion booth—the e-mail address above is where you’ll be directed to apply.
If you stop by, you may have a shot at winning some great Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 prizes we brought \with us.
Drop off your business card and we’ll be drawing them randomly in our raffle. Prizes include signed games, signed posters, t-shirts, a signed copy of Jason Gregory’s book, Game Engine Architecture, and more!
Naughty Dog is at booth #2415 in the GDC Career Pavilion.
Many of us at Naughty Dog are up in San Francisco to attend GDC10 this week. The Dogs are participating in ten sessions this week, covering just about every aspect of the development of UNCHARTED 2, along with some hiring advice and the continuing run of the GDC Microtalks session.
Naughty Dog is also going have its own booth at the Career Pavilion—more on that and why you would want to swing by tomorrow.
We’ve got the full list of sessions we’re participating in, along with links to descriptions below. Visit our Facebook events page or the GDC Schedule builder if you want to add these sessions to your calendar, export them or print them out.
Keep checking back via the GDC10 tag to stay up to date on GDC and what the Dogs are up to throughout the week!
Thursday (March 11, 2010) 4:30pm - 5:30pm Micro or Massive: It’s Fricking Tough to Achieve a Vision
Baiyon Tomohisa Kuramitsu (Artist/Musician, PixelJunk/Q-Games), Richard Lemarchand (Game Designer, Naughty Dog)
Room 135, North Hall
Friday (March 12, 2010) 9:00am - 10:00am GDC Microtalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!
Richard Lemarchand (Game Designer, Naughty Dog), Ian Bogost (Associate Professor, The Georgia Institute of Technology), Chaim Gingold (levity lab), Gary Penn (Guru, Denki), Sam Roberts (Festival Director, indiecade.com), Margaret Robertson (Consultant and writer, Lookspring), Kellee Santiago (President and Co Founder, thatgamecompany), Suzanne Seggerman (President, Games for Change), Jesse Schell (ETC Carnegie Mellon, Schell Games), Jane Pinckard (Business Development, Foundation 9 Entertainment)
Room 134, North Hall
Just one more quick reminder—if you’re local to Los Angeles, drop by the “Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog” opening reception on Saturday, March 6, at the Gnomon Gallery. I’ll definitely be there and I have it on good authority that a good number of other Dogs will be there. Feel free to come by and mingle—it’s open to the public and (I believe) it’s free.
Full details, including the address can be found on our first reminder post from earlier this week.
(Yes, the bee-like creature makes yet another appearance!)
Title Update 1.06 will be released on Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 10:00 AM PST (what time is that in my city?). After that time, you will be prompted to download and install Title Update 1.06 when you connect online to UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer.
Title Update 1.06 includes a couple under-the-hood fixes we needed to make that don’t affect gameplay. Beyond that, we’ve also made the following updates:
Removed automatic shoulder selection when players click the L1 shoulder button to aim
Delayed the appearance of the scoreboard to allow time for players to view any medals received simultaneously with player death
At the same time the Title Update is released, we’ll also be pushing live updates to other aspects of our multiplayer. These updates include:
Adjusted hitbox attributes so that players will take less damage to the character’s legs
Decreased kill radius of grenades by 1 meter
Decreased accuracy of Down the Irons by 15%
Reduced rate of fire of the FAL by 10%
Reduced rate of fire for the Dragon Sniper by 10%
Collision and geometry changes to “The Fort” to prevent intentional glitching by players
We’ll be keeping an eye on how these changes work out in-game and, as usual, through your comments, forum posts and Twitter. See you online!
REMINDER - Naughty Dog art show at the Gnomon Gallery opens this weekend
About a month ago we let you know that a bunch of artists at Naughty Dog will be showing their art at the Gnomon Gallery as part of a group show. The date for the opening reception is drawing near and we just wanted to remind you in case you live nearby or will happen to be visiting the Los Angeles area.
So, if you happen to be near the Los Angeles area for any reason on Saturday, March 6, 2010, feel free to drop by the Gnomon Gallery from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM to attend the opening reception of “Unleashed: The Art of Naughty Dog.”
You can find out more about our gallery show and other events at the Gnomon Gallery on their website www.gnomongallery.com.
Earlier this week, we blogged about how we are listening to the conversations in our player community about our recent Title Update 1.05. To close out the week we wanted to share some of the things we’ve been looking at and testing internally within UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer—all based on feedback from our community.
Just to be clear – these are some of the adjustments and refinements we’ve been talking about and we’ve been testing internally to date.
By no means does this mean any of this is guaranteed to happen.
And now the list…
Auto-shoulder switching
We’re thinking about removing this entirely and/or adding a toggle to your online profile.
Medals being obscured when you have been killed
If you happen to get medals right as you’re killed, the scoreboard comes up and you can’t see the medal and cash award. I think it’s safe to assume we’ll address this.
Limb damage
We’ve been testing out changing the hitboxes so that shots to the limb require require damage than torso hits or headshots to dispatch your opponent.
Grenades
We’ve been looking at different adjustments to grenade damage and radius to see how those adjustments fare.
Boosters
We’ve been playing around with balance adjustments to some boosters.
Glitches and exploits
This is a little bit of an on-going process, but addressing these are definitely things we’re working on and have been updating consistently over time.
When we’ve made more solid decisions regarding any adjustments or refinements to multiplayer, we’ll be sure to let you know in detail.
“Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” available TODAY
Our latest downloadable content for UNCHARTED 2 – the “Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” – is now available on our local PlayStation Network Store for purchase.
The PlayStation.Blog post we put up today has full details on what’s included and pricing for the United States PSN Store. They also posted a few high-resolution character renders that we’ve got in a convenient set for you to view or download on our Flickr page.
The “Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” bundle includes the six new character skins for competitive multiplayer and two new maps, all based on characters and environments from UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune, at the awesome price of $5.99. You’ll notice this bundle saves you some cash over purchasing everything separately.
The six character skins are: UDF Drake, UDF Elena, Gabriel Roman, Atoq Navarro, Eddy Raja and Javier – who was the mercenary chopper pilot. The skins are also available separately for $2.99.
We’re really excited about the two maps, which have been recreated as multiplayer and cooperative arenas entirely within the Naughty Dog Engine 2.0 with all the graphical upgrades and benefits that come with it. We’ve got a bunch of nice screenshots of the two maps – “The Flooded Ruins” and “The Facility” – in a set on our Flickr page. That way you can check out what they look like and even work out some strategies before committing the purchase. The maps are also available separately for $3.99.
Downloading either the maps or the full bundle also unlocks 12 new Trophies – all of which are tied to playing multiplayer and cooperative matches. Of these, 11 are Bronze Trophies and we’ve included 1 Silver Trophy.
NOTE: Downloading the skins-only content will NOT unlock the Trophies.
Even though there is an in-game prompt to have you set your matchmaking preferences, head over to our post about how we’ve incorporated the new maps into matchmaking for a quick rundown on how it works.
And now we leave you with the trailer we made to announce the “Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” content. Oh, and if you haven’t noticed – “The Flooded Ruins” has rain, thunder and lightning. That’s right.
We’re right on the doorstep of releasing the “Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” – our latest set of downloadable content which includes six character skins and two new maps available separately or as a bundle for use with UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves. A common question we’ve seen from our players is how we will add these maps to our matchmaking system.
Purchasing either the maps or the bundle unlocks an option in your online profile, which is accessible by pushing the square button on your controller.
As you can see in this set of screenshots, the new option is called “Matchmaking.” The option has two available options: “Default” and “DLC.”
Leaving the option at “Default” essentially tells our matchmaking system that you want to get into matches as quickly as possible. The matchmaking system will then prioritize your matchmaking based on the installed content.
The matchmaking system will first attempt to place you in matches where all players have the new maps installed – up to 10 players in competitive modes and 3 players in cooperative modes. If it cannot find an open slot for you, your party or create a new full match within a reasonable amount of time, the matchmaking system then expands its search and attempts to place you in any match using the original on-disk maps with open spots.
This does mean that you risk the chance of not playing the new maps very often until enough players with the new maps installed have entered the matchmaking pool.
Choosing the “DLC” option tells our matchmaking system that you want to be matched with players who also have the new maps above all else. This means you are essentially forcing yourself to ONLY play with players who also have the new maps installed. This can potentially mean long waits if there are no open slots in existing matches or if the system cannot create a new match where all players have the new maps installed.
If you have a party of friends who all have the new maps, have the “Matchmaking” option selected to “DLC” and THEN a new friend joins your party without the new maps, the system will recognize this and only place your party in matches playing the original on-disk maps to ensure that your party does not have to break up.
Whatever setting you choose, we hope you’ll find “Drake’s Fortune Multiplayer Pack” worth your hard earned cash. Choose wisely and see you online!
Naughty Dog is proud to reveal that after 6 years in our current studio space, it’s time for the Dogs to move on to a bigger, better Kennel. As of March 1, 2010, we’ll be based out of our new studio less than 500 feet away from our current space.
We’ve built out our new studio from a raw and open floorplan to a killer new studio that provides us with more flexibility in space, layout and adjusting to fluctuating staffing needs – not to mention there are some significant upgrades to help us keep developing cutting-edge, award-winning games.
As I was talking to our Co-President Evan Wells about the history of Naughty Dog and the several moves the studio has made in its lifetime – more on that later – he mentioned that he felt our new space “positions Naughty Dog perfectly to adapt to the demands of developing PlayStation games that continue to raise the bar for our industry for the next decade and beyond.” Needless to say, all of the Dogs are looking forward to settling in to our brand new Kennel!
Head on over to our Flickr set to check out some in-progress shots of the new Naughty Dog studio as it was being built out for our imminent arrival.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be showing you a bit more about what makes our new space great – including photos from our move in and a closer look at our upgrades.
It’s been a week since we released Title Update 1.05 to our multiplayer community. Without a doubt, this has been our most talked about update to multiplayer to date and for good reason – there were a lot of additions and adjustments we made and not all of them were received well by everyone. This is something we’ve seen from your comments on our blog, on Facebook, in various forums, and via Twitter.
Our game designers have been discussing some further adjustments to what we introduced with Title Update 1.05; some of those we’ve been trying out during our daily playtesting sessions. We don’t have anything we can share yet, however we’ll be forthcoming as to the “what” and “when” regarding any future adjustments so you know what to expect.
We value our multiplayer community and your feedback quite a bit. As Richard mentioned during his session at the D.I.C.E. Summit last week, collaboration and iteration is an integral part of our development process. Including the voice of our community as part of this process is important to us as we continue supporting the multiplayer modes to UNCHARTED 2.
Today’s sessions had Randy Pitchford explaining the history, overall development philosophy and business management of Gearbox Software; John Schappert from EA promising not to tell us how much money he’s made and discussing EA’s publishing philosophy in these more difficult economic times; Mike Yuen from Zeebo talking about how his company is looking for success in under-served markets while fostering low development costs; Joe Madureira and David Adams from Vigil Games taking us through their development process of Darksiders as an independent studio; and, to conclude the day and the summit, Greg Short and Geoffrey Zatkin from EEDAR providing quantitative data and analysis on this console generation by looking at trends and comparisons in a variety of ways.
The EEDAR session was really interesting and eye-opening and rather than try (and fail) to summarize the important things I’ve learned from that session, I would recommend checking back to www.dicesummit.org next week as their presentation will be published there. I’ll also update this post when I’ve noticed it live on the website.
After that last session, we said goodbye to friends and colleagues of both the new and old variety, saw some of our childhood game design heroes leave the premises and headed back home. For me, it was inspiring in a way that I can’t put to words right now, but it will definitely show through as I head back to work next week and I’ll carry it with me for a long while to come. Hopefully, at least, until the D.I.C.E. Summit 2011 next year.
Robt Juster from G4 sent me a Tweet today that they posted Richard Lemarchand’s opening session talk, “Uncharted 2 - How to Fly By the Seat of Your Pants Without Crapping Them” online for all of us.
Head over to G4 to view the video or you can also watch the embedded version below. Thanks @Juster!
UNCHARTED 2 nabs 10 awards, GOTY at the Interactive Achievement Awards
Even though we’ve been out celebrating, this news just can’t wait.
Earlier this evening, eight Naughty Dogs including myself, attended the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony as part of the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010. We didn’t know what to expect, as we were nominated in an unprecedented 15 categories and up against some very worthy games in every category—2009 was an incredible year for gaming as every game nominated was great enough to win an award. But I know we all wanted to win something, to be recognized, with the hope that the members of our industry, the members of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences thought our game was worthy of recognition, hopefully of the Game of the Year kind.
Boy, did they.
We’re proud, honored and exceedingly flattered to have UNCHARTED 2 nab 10 awards this evening:
Game of the Year
Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction
Adventure Game of the Year
Outstanding Achievement in Animation
Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering
Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction
Outstanding Achievement in Story - Original
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition
Outstanding Achievement in Game Play Engineering
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design
There will be a better time for a more thoughtful thank you, but we couldn’t wait to tell everyone—thank you to all our fans and community and all our colleagues in the gaming industry for the positive words, the support and the recognition you’ve brought to our studio, our work and our games. It means a lot to us.
Also—a well-deserved congratulations to the many friends and colleagues throughout the industry whose work was nominated or won an award this evening!
We’re not stopping just because we won a crazy number of important awards. We have the great fortune of having an amazing multiplayer community for UNCHARTED 2 that is really important to us. We’ll continue to support that community through our downloadable content and updates to our online modes—however popular or unpopular they may be—to refine UNCHARTED 2 multiplayer and it as awesome as we can.
Watch the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards online tonight
We’re about halfway through a very long day at the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010 today. Our own Richard Lemarchand kicked off the sessions for the day with his talk, “Uncharted 2 - How to Fly By the Seat of Your Pants Without Crapping Them.” His talk presented an overview of how Naughty Dog operates as a studio and an inside look at what our development process is like. I hope it was interesting to many of the developers and business folk in the audience, because I like to believe we have fairly unique and unorthodox development process, but one that at a glance may freak many people out (especially producers) used to more rigid development processes.
Richard can put it far better than I could ever put it, even though I’m seen him speak about our process a handful of times already. In a nutshell, he explained how we value a highly collaborative and iterative process that can seem to outsiders extremely chaotic and on the verge of falling apart. But that doesn’t happen—instead through incredibly passionate and talented people, who have an incredible amount of trust and mutual respect of their co-workers, work together to produce games with a high level of quality and technical innovation. Richard mentioned that when he was listening to Weta Digital co-founder Richard Taylor speak about how they were able to produce a their high level of quality and success from their employees—that Weta sought out individuals who presented the following four attributes, in order of importance: Passion, Enthusiasm, Tenacity and Talent. Having experienced how Naughty Dog operates for just over a year and a half now, I can tell that those same attributes are highly valued when it comes to prospective new hires.
There are a ton of interesting ways our studio thinks differently from some of the more traditional styles of game development that I believe contributes to our success in games, and I hope that Richard’s peek into that was insightful to many of our colleagues at the summit today.
So far, the rest of the day following Richard has had a lot of incredibly interesting talks and insights from speakers Jesse Schell discussing how Facebook surprised a lot of people and game design (even if it hasn’t been designed by a game designer) lives in a lot of things around us; Bobby Kotick discussing his personal background in games and personal history with Activision, including some lessons learned about how they do business and work with studios; and Brian Reynolds, Chief Game Designer at Zynga discussing social games, what they’ve learned about making them successful and how the genre differs from traditional game development.
There’s more sessions for the rest of the day, as you can see on the D.I.C.E. Summit schedule. Matias Myllyrinne talk on Remedy and the development of Alan Wake over six years and Jamin Brophy-Warren’s panel on diversity in games should be pretty interesting.
As you may have seen from Evan Well’s Twitter update earlier today, several of the Dogs are heading into Las Vegas today to attend the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. I noticed late last night that IFC.com will be streaming the awards ceremony LIVE, starting at 7:00 PM PST (what time is that in my city?). Head over to the site in a few hours to check it out.
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