With my own game "Twist Tac Toads" in the iPhone store (created on the side of my Intel job), I know first hand how hard it can be to get your game seen.  I'll address this visibility problem and how AppUp helps.

Below is the full abstract.  Sound good?  What else do you want to know?  It's not too late for me to adjust my content based on your input. 

The full abstract:

Title: Monetizing Games on Devices: Intel’s AppUp “Stores on store” model

Description: Examine the critical choices that developers make to successfully use app stores. Explore how you can build your application once and make money with minimal efforts on multiple devices, including >70,000,000 netbooks as well as laptops and other form factors. Attendees will understand how to get an application into multiple AppUp stores in countries around the world quickly with a focus on validation and store economy. We’ll discuss application discoverability and marketing.  We’ll look at the MeeGo operating system and more.  Explore how to design & build games for Intel’s AppUp store, including the multiple runtimes supported.  A netbook will be given away to a lucky attendee!

 Attendee Takeaway:

• Learn which game companies are already distributing through AppUp, and why.
• Learn how AppUp covers multiple operating systems, device form factors, and stores, all with one program.
• Learn to solve typical app store problems for current developers including discoverability and profitability, and how AppUp offers solutions.

 Intended Audience: Anyone interested in the financial/business side of game apps, devices such as tablets, phones, smart TVs and netbooks, and app stores.

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What would happen to real time strategy game play if you could control thousands of units, instead of the hundreds of units typically possible in today’s real time strategy (RTS) games?  How would you control those units…or would you?   As a big fan of RTS games, I wonder what modern multi-core compute power will enable in the genre.  I’ve been having excited discussions with my esteemed peers here at Intel, and some interesting points have been made.  It’s easy to imagine huge waves of soldiers battling each other.  I think the game would start to look like an animated painting: red is making inroads in the north, blue is flanking around the edges of the map.

It’s much harder to imagine trying to control all of those thousands of units.  Obviously units would be controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), but could AI completely control units once they were added to the world?    You might only control “faucets” that poured units into the world, and perhaps a few basic parameters:  aggressive or defensive units?  Fast or heavily armored units?  Would it be frustrating to not be able to control your units once they were added to the world?   What if you could only set “desired points” for your units; that is, you can’t tell individual units what to do, but you can say “all my units nearby go here”.

How would the fact that units were part of a large group affect their behavior?  Perhaps units that are part of a group receive defensive bonuses.  Perhaps groups of units moving together gain an attack bonus relative to their speed. 

To us, the possibilities are intriguing.  Do you agree?  Is this interesting territory to explore?  I know of a very few games that have more than average units…are there games that have actually reached thousands of units?  How many questions can I ask before you will answer me? J”

--Scott

What: Trip report from the International Game Developer’s Association (IGDA) Leadership Forum (conference)

Where: San Francisco, CA, USA

When: November 13^th & 14^th, 2008 (Sorry I'm a bit slow with this, insert typical busy excuse here! :))

More official information including other bloggers’ notes and eventually videos of talks: www.igda.org/leadership

Summary: My talk on “Truly Tapping Your Strengths—and those of your team” seemed to be very well received by an interacting audience of 85.  (Official feedback scores coming.)  This was a great conference with several hundred attendees, almost all of them leads of one kind or another: producers, associate producers, CEOs, QA leads, etc.  Plus I got to catch up with industry friends including a couple of 'mates' from my time working at Sidhe Interactive in New Zealand.

 Details: This was the 2^nd annual event.   I highly recommend it as a leadership-focused event, much smaller than GDC and other large conferences.  The quality of attendees was great.  I was usually seated next to a CTO, Producer, etc.  I talked with a lot of game developers from a lot of companies, but tried to be asking questions and listening more than pushing the Intel agenda at the conference.  Talks were organized along 3 tracks: Personal, Project, and Management (some ambiguity & overlap between those).  Sessions were generally of very high quality.  I attended these:

Keynote: MVP Leadership by Curt Shilling The Red Sox pitcher (and hero of mine for helping my beloved Sox win the World Series twice after a drought of 86 years) was an energetic speaker, with some good points on leadership, team composition, etc.  His slides were inconsistent--some great, some so crammed with text it was unreadable.  Like a lot of speakers, he ran out of time far before he ran out of material he had planned to go over.

Workshop: Personality Analysis.  Good interactive talk by Kathy Gibson, Threewave Software.  I had heard much of this before, but it was well delivered.  Essentially: learn how different personalities work, and how to work with them.               

Truly Tapping Your Strengths-and those of your team was my talk, delivered to 85 people, with excellent interaction from the audience and consistently great comments afterwards.  Official scores coming so I can see if it went over as well as I believe & hope it did. :)

 Myths of Scrum-A good talk by Clinton Keith, about what's realistic to expect and not expect from Scrum.  Most interestingly, he said he thinks Scrum is great for pre-production, not so great for production.

Managing an Engineering Community by Stefan Posthuma, Technical Director, EA Blackbox-an entertaining and educational "here's what I did and what worked and didn't" talk.  Slides weren't great (too much text, like almost all slides) but good information anyway.

Being a Pioneer-Staying Passionate About the Future of Games-by Don Daglow, President of Stormfront Studios (shut down).  This wasn't technology focused the way I was hoping, but it was an inspirational talk about focusing on figuring out what you are passionate about and doing as much of that as possible.

Management Idea Swap-a neat format where all of us met at round tables organized around various subjects for 20 minutes each.  I talked with others about quality of life, retaining talent, and regional development of game industries.

Charitable Efforts: Giving Back is Good-An interesting panel discussion of non-profit efforts.

Leadership in Conflict: Navigating Through Choppy Waters-A very-well delivered, interactive talk about making others comfortable with you.  Kane Minkus, managing partner of Somatone Interactive Audio, seemed to run out of time before he got to the end of his talk, but an otherwise fantastic job of delivering this talk.

MBA Lessons Applied by David Edery, Xbox Live Arcade.  How do you distill the most important things you learned getting an MBA in one hour?  By talking really fast and taking no questions!  Still, some good stuff here about the time value of money, and a lot about psychology's effect on demand, sales, etc.

Book Review Jam an interesting format-various pre-arranged people got up and talked about books they had read and whether they recommend them or not, with how the ideas apply to the game industry.  I recommended several books on strengths I mentioned in my talk, as well as "Awake at Work", a book that applies Buddhist principles to work.

Studio Heads on the Hot Seat-A panel discussion with wide-ranging topics and opinions.  Crunch was yet again a key topic with significant disagreement.  Amazingly, > 100 of us attended this talk despite the fact that it was at 5:30 on a Friday evening.

I welcome questions & feedback, and I hope to see some of you there next year.

Cheers,

--Scott

This pair of game prototypes--a tanks game and a group jigsaw puzzle--plays with the idea of big shared screen multiplayer games. What if portable games didn't have to be small? What if you could control an avatar on an enormous screen using your hand held device? We decided to find the answers to those and other questions, and the resulting demos are quite fun and interesting. We'll be giving away the code here on ISN before long, so stay tuned. More importantly, what are your ideas for this new usage model? We would love to hear them here and see you take the code we are giving away and build them. Will you be the one to build one of my favorite ideas: a communal virtual graffiti wall for artists and others to play with?

Of course at GDC there will be the usual great keynotes, tutorials, sessions, and yes, parties. In fact Intel will be putting on a 1/2 day tutorial on PC Threading Success Stories, as well as hour-long sessions on everything from Intel Graphics to Laptop gaming. And we'll have our big booth as well, filled with cool demos and knowledgable staff. All of that will rock. But pay attention to the fringes as well...that may be where some of the most interesting innovation will be found.

I've seen the entries, and I can't wait for everyone else to see them, too. Just a few more days (Sept 5th), and winners will be announced and shown off. Stay tuned to the official contest site. Thanks to everyone who entered for making our judging process fun and difficult. And early congratulations to our winners, even though you don't know who you are yet.

And it turns out GDC is a great place to launch the Intel Game Demo Contest.  I Googled [Intel "game demo contest"] this morning and got over 46,000 results!  Wow.  I can't wait to see the entries!  Given all the creative energy at GDC, I have high hopes to see some great stuff.

The Serious Games Summit is happening as part of the Game Developers Conference, and it brings a fascinating new aspect to the world of games. Essentially, games are being used for purposes beyond entertainment, including health care, education, and various other non-entertainment simulations. Games are being created that can make the world a better place. Which is not to say that entertainment games make the world a worse place. Anyone who thinks they do should read the book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones.

I'll write more as soon as I get a chance.

--Scott

I get to focus on video games because that's what I've been doing ever since I first wrote "Scubadventure" on an Apple II in high school.  From there I went to kids and family PC games.  Yes, I am the guy behind titles such as "Little Bear's Rainy Day Adventure". :)   

Then I moved onto interesting video-as-input games including early PS2 work with the EyeToy.  Then it was off to New Zealand for a year, where I worked on a rugby game for PS2, X-Box, and PC, before returning to the US to work on mobile phone games.  Finally I worked on the PS2, X-Box, and PC workout 'game' called Yourself!Fitness, before joining Intel.  At Intel, I have the amazing opportunity to work not only on a variety of games, but also on the whole PC gaming industry...which meets next week in San Francisco for the Game Developer's Conference.  I'm very excited about it, and will be posting more from there. 

 I hope to see your questions & thoughts, so I can post about things people actually care to read.  Game on! --Scott