[Hey folks, the following is a guest post from my summer intern, Nicholas Brown. It'll be the first in a series of at least a few posts from him talking about what he's been up to this summer. This post is kind of an overall discussion of his encounter with the Boston area and the Boston game dev scene. -Darius]

Being in Boston for the summer has certainly been an interesting experience. I came up here in a bit of a hurry with no place to stay lined up and I’d never been to Boston before, so I was a little nervous and didn’t quite know what to expect. I came up here to work for Darius as an intern for the summer and also to meet the famously large Boston community of game industry pros and indies.

Getting an apartment in Boston was a somewhat trying experience. Craigslist has hundreds of sublet listings, especially in the summer because, I’ve been told, about 40% of Boston’s population is students. Oh and you want a place with off-street parking if you have a car. Boston and the surrounding cities have permit parking on the streets and you can get ticketed for almost anything. It doesn’t matter too much though since Boston has great public transit. The Red Line is the main artery through Boston, Somerville, and Cambridge and there are lots of buses and other metro lines so if you don’t mind walking a bit you can go almost completely without a car.

Boston has two large Game Developer meet-ups that I’ve attended. The first is the local IGDA chapter meetings, the Boston Post Mortem, which is held second Tuesday or Wednesday (they alternate months) of the month. It’s a meet up of about 200 game devs, enthusiasts, and even a few people who just like games. The meeting starts at about seven with the presentation of the night starting around eight. They also invite anyone who has an announcement to take the mic around fifteen minutes before eight. This is also a great networking opportunity so get there early. After the event wraps up there’s a bit more time to hang out and network and things finish around ten.

The other area meet up is Boston Indies which is a monthly meet-up for Boston’s independent developers. It’s a similar format to the Post Mortem but the location seems to vary a little since it’s a newer group and smaller. It’s definitely a great group of people though and a good event to visit if you’re curious about the indie scene in Boston or just independent development in general. Oh yeah and pretty much anyone can show up to either of these meetings.

I just received word that I’m moderating a panel at PAX East! It’ll be Saturday, March 27th, at noon in the Wyvern Theatre. Right here in Boston. Aw yeah.

I HAVE A GREAT IDEA FOR A GAME!!

That’s great! We’re happy for you, we really are. But you know what? Our studio isn’t gonna help you realize your vision, and chances are no other company will either. I know it’s shocking, but the reason we dove headfirst into the start-up ocean full of shattered dreams and razor blades was because WE ACTUALLY HAVE A GREAT IDEA FOR A GAME TOO! So if you really feel passionately about your awesome idea and want nothing more than to see it live then go make it your own damn self, we’re busy. But we’ll throw you a bone with this helpful panel full of tasty tidbits on how to get started. Gaming entrepreneurs Chris Oltyan, Eitan Glinert, and Ichiro Lambe will regale you with tales of wonder and woe, led by our fearless moderator Darius Kazemi. Only the brave will survive, no refunds.

With participants:

• Chris Oltyan,  Director of Product Development, ZeeGee Games
• Eitan Glinert, President, Firehose Games
• Ichiro Lambe, President, Dejobaan Games
• Darius Kazemi, President, Orbus Gameworks (Moderator)

(Banner photo by the ever-excellent Vincent Diamante. I love how I can search Flickr for CC-licensed PAX photos and his are the first to come up.)

If you’re in the Boston area, come check out the Boston Post Mortem tonight! We’ll be having our first-ever iPhone development talk. Our speaker will be Jamie Gotch, one of the developers behind the hit iPhone game, Fieldrunners. He will talk about his experience in bringing Fieldrunners to the iPhone and share his own philosophy on how iPhone game development has evolved since the launch of the App Store.

Today, my friend Scott Macmillan and I ran a conference here in Boston that we’ve been planning for about three months. I’m not going to say much about it just now because I am super tired. However, I do want to say this.

I am so lucky to belong to an industry full of brilliant, wonderful people, many of whom I can count as not just colleagues, but friends. The last week or two especially have involved a lot of interaction with game developers, both faraway folks I’ve known for a long time and nearby folks I’ve just met. I’ve done a lot of that connecting-people-with-people thing that I tend to do.

And running around with Scott, putting together stuff for the conference in the past week, I’ve done a lot of reminiscing. I’m sure I’ve said this here before, but I just get sappy when I think about all the developers I know. They are just such… high quality people. I think back to past conferences, and visits to cities where devs have been nice enough to let me crash on their couch, or host me at their studio for a few hours, and I just can’t help but feel happy.

One of the joys I get in organizing events like the Boston Post Mortem, or the Boston Game Jam, or Boston GameLoop, is that I’m hopefully creating the kind of place where these memories are forged for other people.

I don’t really want to name names because I don’t want anyone to feel left off this list, but at this very moment I’m feeling particularly thankful for the amazing group of friends and mentors I made while I was at the 2005 Indie Game Jam (wow I was such a n00b back then). Especially Chris Hecker, Doug Church, Casey Muratori, Randy Smith, Robin Hunicke, Chris Butcher, Austin Grossman, Brian Sharp… I’m sure I’m missing a few. Some are friends, some are mere acquaintances, many live in that nebulous place in between. All of these people have helped me a lot with their advice and support, even if it is sometimes as little as a few minutes of conversation a year wedged between conference sessions. They’re actually a huge part of how I was able to rapidly grow from starry-eyed newbie to the kind of guy I am now. Um, whatever kind of guy that might be.

I’m especially indebted to Chris Hecker, whose “You want something cool to happen? Fuck it, just make it happen” attitude has informed everything I’ve done for community-building in Boston. Actually, it’s informed everything I’ve done, period. But yeah, I want Boston to get better and better as a game development community. And thanks to Chris, I have no patience for, “Oh why do we never have any conferences here in town?” Scott and I said, “Hey, let’s just make it happen.” It’s nights like these that I feel like it’s really working. So… thanks Chris. You really do deserve that IGDA community award.

Paul Graham just posted a fantastic essay about the messages cities send. And I’m not saying it’s fantastic just because he gives reasons why Cambridge, MA is the intellectual capital of the world. The essay is about psychogeography and also the personalities of individual cities. This has been a hobby of mine for a long time.

And Graham is right on when he talks about the accidental ways you learn the personality of a city. Overheard conversations, peeking into livings rooms at dusk through people’s windows–these are two methods he mentions are both are excellent ways of catching a city off-guard, so to speak.

My one criticism of Graham’s essay is that in every city he mentions, he’s focusing on a specific subset of educated, at least middle-class people. He is not at all addressing what the city says to its poor, its second-class citizens. Yes, the message Cambridge sends is “You should be smarter.” But is that the message it sends its homeless? Its immigrants working two or three jobs? Or hell, the townies?

But this ties in to my message to students who want to break into the game industry: move to a city where the game industry is thriving. Then do your job hunt. (Tom Sloper gives this advice, too.) And may I humbly submit that Boston, and Cambridge right next door, is a great place to move for that sort of thing? In Central Square alone we have Demiurge Studios, Harmonix, GamerDNA, and of course my company Orbus Gameworks.

So according to some, tonight we will know (more or less) the fate of EA’s attempt at a hostile takeover of Take Two. This has me nervous: two of our biggest studios here in Boston are owned by Take Two (2K Boston, and, more recently, Rockstar New England). What could an EA buyout mean for the Boston area? Would they shut down 2K Boston? Not likely. What about RNE, which doesn’t have a massive critical and sales hit game on their hands? As much as an EA takeover might mean good things for those studios, I’m looking at our development scene here and thinking that things are pretty good and I’d rather not see any major changes at all at this point.

Also of note is that Boston is pretty much the only major game development hub that doesn’t have an EA-owned studio. (Okay, Seattle too, I think.)

There’s some really good history and analysis of the buyout from Leigh Alexander (and a bunch of analysts) over at Kotaku.

Wow. Massachusetts-based Mad Doc Software has been acquired by Rockstar. Congratulations to all the guys there! I’m hoping this means growth for the company. What I’ve heard from folks over at Mad Doc so far has seemed pretty positive, so: huzzah!

I’m wondering what the difference is between a 2K-branded studio like 2K Boston and a Rockstar-branded studio like the newly minted Rockstar New England.

Tomorrow night is the December meeting of the Boston Post Mortem. This is our local IGDA chapter meeting, where game developers get together to chat, have beers, and see a presentation. You should come check it out: the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab folks will be doing a post mortem of the six research-directed games they did this past summer.

For more info, see our blog post.

So tonight we’re having our Boston Post Mortem meeting co-located with an event that the ESA is having to expose legislators to the game industry. If you’re in the area, I recommend you check it out!

So at last night’s Boston Post Mortem we featured a great talk by Ken Levine of Irrational 2K Boston, along with two of his leads. It wasn’t a formal presentation, there was no PowerPoint or anything like that. Just three guys and a mic. Yet it was not a hip-hop freestyle battle.

Ken and crew talked about how BioShock went from a basic idea, just a high-level concept, through its various iterations while the game was being pitched and prototyped, to what it is today. He also covered the way that they pitched the game to journalists early on, and how that changed over time as the pitch became less targeted towards a hardcore three-year-early preview kind of audience and more towards a hopefully multi-million selling blockbuster audience.

Here are a few tidbits I remember from the night. I kind of wish I took notes! (Funny hearing that from me, right?) Please correct me if I’ve mis-remembered any of this stuff.

• Early on, the team built a very small, 45-second, one-room demo that was super polished and conveyed the atmosphere of the game moreso than the gameplay. Ken stressed multiple times during his talk that building a shippable-looking demo of extremely small scope focusing on one or two things really sharply is way better than attempting to do an entire vertical slice too early.
• The Little Sister started out as a sea slug, but focus testers had no idea why the hulking Big Daddy would be protecting a sea slug. When they realized that this was a problem, they went through a whole bunch of different ideas (including a dog in a wheelchair!) before settling on the creepy little girl. Once they switched, people instantly understood the relationship. Big strong man protects helpless child.
• As many game publishers and developers do, they used GameSpot Trax, which basically measures how much hype (page views, commentary, etc) a given game is receiving. When they did their initial unveiling of BioShock including the 45-second demo (I believe this was the resulting article), they got huge numbers on Trax. When they had their awesome E3 demo in 2006, the Trax numbers didn’t change that much, even though everyone at E3 was talking about their game! To me, this seems to support the fact that even an awesome demo at the old E3 would get lost in a sea of game news.
• They made sure to focus test with random John Q. Popcorn off the street, the kind of person who owns an Xbox but only has Halo and Madden. That really helped them with the direction for their game.
• Ken Levine on pitching a game: “You don’t want to see yourself having weird sex, and you don’t want to see yourself pitching games.” Amen to that.