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In the latest in a series of interviews with speakers from this August's GDC Europe, David Press, technical director at EVE Online
developer CCP Games, discusses the importance of automated testing in
MMOs, and why implementing such a system became a "now-or-never
decision" for the company.

Before joining CCP, Press worked at EA Chicago as a graphics programmer on Def Jam: ICON
and an unreleased fighting title. In 2007, he left for Atlanta, Georgia
to work at CCP as a graphics programmer, and then moved on to become a
systems programmer, and later a technical director.

In anticipation of his GDC Europe talk, "Orchestrator: A Postmortem on an Automated MMO Testing Framework,"
Press explains the various game elements an automated testing system
should or should not test, and how CCP implemented such a system for its
World of Darkness MMO.

What are some of the advantages of automated MMO testing?

Most MMOs are very large projects with numerous interacting game
systems, and it is simply infeasible to have manual testers constantly
testing every nook and cranny of the game. Automated tests allow
developers to get wide test coverage before they even check in their
changes and they can be run on a changelist-by-changelist basis so that
narrowing down bugs is trivial.

At what point did CCP realize that automated testing was necessary? What were the driving actors behind the decision?

For the World of Darkness project, we started unit testing
within the first year of active development, and system testing came in
during the next year. We knew that it is nigh impossible to bolt
automated testing onto code that wasn't written with it in mind, so it
was a now-or-never decision.

[Following
the announcement of the 2012 Independent Games Festival competition,
IGF Chairman Brandon Boyer goes in-depth on the changes made for this year's Festival, examining the ethos for the competition and the shifts in policy and rules for this year's 14th annual IGF experience.]

Well, we made it unscathed through that lucky-13th, and here we are
again, back where we started, with the opening of the 14th year of the
Independent Games Festival. Last year's festival was a landmark one on a
number of levels.

It was the first that folded the IGF Mobile into the main
competition, the first where one of the entrants (and the eventual Grand
Prize winner) surprised everyone (the developers included!) by selling
several hundred thousand copies of their game before judging had even
begun, our first with a new two-tier judge and jury system, and,
obviously, my first year as chairman.

I learned a lot about the festival and how it operates and how it
could better be improved over the past year. So I'm here now to outline
some of the changes we'll be implementing this year, as the IGF, its
role in the community, and the community itself grows and evolves. But
we'll start with one aspect of the festival that we won't be changing:

The IGF will continue to utilize its two-tier judge and jury system.

From
the conversations I've had over the past several months, nearly
everyone involved -- from the judges and jurors themselves to the
individual entrants to those of us organizing the festival -- felt like
the change to this system was an incredibly important and positive
change.

The two-tier system - with our 150-200 judges recommending games in
certain categories, and discipline-specific juries of 8-10 subject
matter experts assigned to each award, ensured that all games in the
festival got an equal chance at making it into the finalist round.

With more eyes than ever on each entry, and each jurist chosen for their specific professional merits for each category (our list of 2011 jurors is available here), experts were able to make a strong case for any game, whether it gathered an initial popular vote or not.

It also meant that our finalist and winner selection was less of a
binary process, and more of a conversation about the deeper merits of
the games and their place and legacy in the independent game community.
Those intimate conversations were a passionate, productive, valuable
look at the pulse of professional indie developers, as you can read in
our Nuovo jury comments and Main Competition jury statements, and we're looking forward to those conversations again this year.

This week, the GDC Vault has debuted a special selection of free lectures from Portal and Half-Life creator Valve Software, with topics including the studio's use of biofeedback, a look at Left 4 Dead's development, and the design philosophy behind Half-Life 2.

These talks join the recently released free videos on the GDC Vault, which include the GDC 2011's classic postmortem series, as well as lectures and panels from speakers such as Playdom's Raph Koster, GDC founder Chris Crawford, and more.

The following free lectures include video, audio and slide-based highlights from Valve Software's sessions at a handful of different Game Developers Conferences, with talks dating from 2011 back to 2004.

The first lecture offered for free in video form is a GDC 2011 session from Valve veteran and experimental psychologist Mike Ambinder, titled, "Biofeedback in Gameplay: How Valve Measures Physiology to Enhance Gaming Experience." This session examines how information regarding a player's physiological states can help developers "explore new avenues of gameplay and to improve in-house playtesting processes."

Using Valve's own Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Alien Swarm as examples, Ambinder explains how the studio measured players' skin conductance response, heart rate, and eye movements to design titles that effectively toy with player's psychological limits.

Next, a newly free GDC 2009 talk video, "From Counter-Strike to Left 4 Dead: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences" features Turtle Rock founder and Valve designer Michael Booth on the high-level design of the studio's cooperative zombie shooter.

Booth provides some background on the game, and explains "how it evolved from Counter-Strike, and the importance of procedural systems such as the AI Director in creating replayable and compelling cooperative experiences."

In the latest of a series of interviews with speakers from this August's GDC Europe, game designer Ernest Adams discusses why "in most persistent worlds, the player cannot change the world permanently" -- and why that needs to change.

Adams has worked in the game industry since 1989, and has worked as a
game developer, professor, and more. He previously served as an audio
and video producer on the Madden NFL franchise for Electronic Arts, and later worked at Bullfrog Productions as a lead producer on the Dungeon Keeper series.

In addition, Adams has written several books on game development, and is the founder of the International Game Developers' Association.

With his GDC Europe talk, "Making MMOGs More Storylike"
drawing ever closer, Adams discussed the flaws of modern online games,
and explained how they should change to make the game world more
dramatic and believable.

With MMOs and similar online games, players share a single,
persistent world. How does this sort of design hinder a developer's
ability to tell a story?

All stories are about change. Either the protagonist changes the
world, or the world changes the protagonist, or both. But in most
persistent worlds, the player cannot change the world permanently. Any
creature you kill respawns in a few minutes, leaving you wondering why
you bothered. This impairs the dramatic impact of events in the world,
because nothing really changes.

How do you suggest online games change to better accommodate an in-game story?

To feel as if they are really part of a story, players need to be
able to make permanent, meaningful changes to the world they inhabit. I
also feel that they need to drop the "Hero's Journey" story form. It
works well for adventure games and single-player RPGs, but it's a bit
ridiculous when hundreds of thousands of people are all trying to have
the same heroic experience.

As views of GDC Vault's video, audio and slides from GDC 2011 top 250,000, the site has detailed the most-viewed sessions from the March show, spanning Doom postmortems through Halo: Reach and beyond.

The specially constructed website archives multimedia from the numerous lectures, panels, and keynotes at the multiple Game Developers Conference shows yearly, and a number of each show's most popular talks are now available for free.

The sessions available on the GDC Vault spanning the last 15+ years have attracted 155,000 unique viewers in the last year, and the content from Game Developers Conference 2011 alone has attracted more than 262,000 views since mid-March.

GDC 2011's Classic Game Postmortem series has proven the most popular by far, with video of these seminal talks making up six of the show's top 10 most-viewed sessions.

These lectures featured various industry legends reflecting on their most seminal classics, including John Romero and Tom Hall on Doom, Eric Chahi on Out of This World/Another World, Ron Gilbert on Maniac Mansion, and more.

Other popular talks included "I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach," featuring Bungie's David Aldridge on the studio's approach to online infrastructure, and "Life and Death and Middle Pair: Go, Poker and the Sublime," a talk featuring Area/Code's Frank Lantz on some of the oldest and most influential games in history.

Organizers of Game Developers Conference Online 2011 have debuted the first sessions from the October show in Austin, TX, including League Of Legends's design director and major talks from Loot Drop and Playdom on social gaming's evolution.

Taking place Monday through Thursday, October 10-13, 2011 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, GDC Online continues as the leading worldwide event to solely discuss the development and business trends surrounding connected games -- including casual titles, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.

This year's Main Conference will include tracks on Business & Marketing, Customer Experience, Design, Production, and Programming, as well as a sponsored track on Monetization.

As the event's Schedule Builder reveals the first set of lectures, the following are some highlights from this year's Main Conference:

- In "Designers are Human Too - Causes of Poor Design Decisions," Riot Games' Tom Cadwell, design director of major hit League of Legends, will discuss poor decision-making in game design, outlining why talented teams don't always act in their own best interest.

Cadwell, a former Blizzard designer and architect of the multiplayer online game smash, will examine the root causes of a number of common design mistakes, and will offer advice on how to avoid them.

- In another signature lecture, Playdom's Steve Meretzky and Dave Rohrl will look back at the recent developments in the growing social space in "The Year in Social Games 2010-2011." In this talk, the veteran pair will examine the emerging trends, standout games, and business innovations that have emerged in the social game market over the last 12 months, and will point out the developments to look for in the coming year.

The GDC Vault service
has debuted several free videos from the Game Developers Conference
2011, featuring Playdom's Raph Koster on whether social games are truly
social, a rant on game AI, and a retrospective look at the forces behind
the successful Humble Indie Bundle.

These talks join recently-debuted free videos from GDC founder Chris Crawford, Bungie's David Aldridge, and Maxis veteran Stone Librande, as well as the much-watched classic postmortem series as part of GDC 2011's 'free recordings' section on GDC Vault.

The following free lectures include highlights from the conference's
notable Summits, which covered topics such as social and online games,
AI, independent games, and more.

The first talk offered for free is a lecture from Playdom's Raph Koster dubbed, "Social Mechanics for Social Games." In this session, Koster picks apart the interpersonal interactions that take place within online social titles.

As he notes in his talk, "Many have accused social games of not
really being social. But they are underpinned by many classic social
mechanics that drive interaction and community-building. Some of these
have been proven to work in other genres such as MMOs and are beginning
to filter into the social games market; others are easily visible and
quite familiar in real life, but have yet to be seen in the design of
social games."