19th – 20th June was the GameHorizon conference 2008, a first-rate conference organised by the Codeworks GameHorizon team. It was hosted by games industry legend Ian Livingstone of EIDOS and featured an inspiring selection of the games industry pantheon.
We opened with a talk from Chris Satchell of Microsoft talking about XNA and Microsoft’s vision for the future of community gaming. One of his key points being, the need for developers to create games which have social relevance; a goal that we share.
A large portion of the conference was then dedicated to discussing the future of online games both multiplayer and casual, including the various business models that can be used to finance them. This is indeed an interesting area and something we are also looking into, watch this space…
We were also fortunate enough, to see some exciting demonstrations of technology including an innovative voice control system for real-time strategy games, in Ubisoft’s Endwar. Euphoria the natural motion synthesis engine used in GTA4 (Grand Theft Auto); I imagine this will soon be the approach used for realistic character animations in most game. Real-time worlds also unveiled APB (All Points Bulletin) a GTA like MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game), which had an impressive level of detail for its avatar creation system.
Overall it was a great conference and another great event for the NorthEast.
Labels: Chris Satchel, Codeworks, GameHorizon 08, Ian Livingstone, NorthEast
