back in Singapore
20 November 2008My first time in Korea and at KGC was a very positive experience. I really enjoyed every second there and luckily our M-EDGE project was very well received: the hall was mostly full and there were interesting questions and feedback afterwards. The slides of my presentation (without the media files, though) are available here.
The overall conference was very high quality and well organized, with simultaneous translations available for most sessions and very new interesting market niches had the spotlight like “exergaming” which were clearly illustrated by Mr. Tom Soderlund.
Wrapping up in just a few words, I simply can’t wait for the next edition! 
In Seoul for KGC!
12 November 2008Well, surely this year wasn’t a boring one for me: Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Game Convention Asia in Singapore, Tokyo Game Show and now the Korea Games Conference where I am presenting our work on M-EDGE!
I’m writing from Seoul right now where I arrived this morning. The first impact with this city where I have never been before has been extremely positive (kind and helpful people, sunny and refreshing weather, complex subway network but not as scary as the one in Tokyo etc.) and the conference program looks very high quality and exciting (check http://www.kgconf.com ).
I look forward to learning a lot during these few days.
from Tokyo Game Show
11 October 2008These days I’m taking part to Tokyo Game Show! It’s my very first time in Tokyo and, needless to say, I’m very excited about that. The show floor is definitely the biggest I have ever seen and seeing it so crowded by so many gamers and business people alike is really a great experience (though it’s very hard, if not impossible, to walk around!).
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the huge amount of games and excitement around Sony and Microsft areas and, while Nintendo doesn’t have its own booth, Wii and DS games are everywhere, in almost all publishers booths. I enjoyed playing some upcoming titles myself as we can see from the following pic
On a business note, we had a couple of very interesting and instructive meeting with some highly respected Japanese game designers who were interested in knowing more about our M-EDGE project. We have a lot of more work to do but we are optimistc there’d be something innovative and comercially viable ahead. ;)
Even though I didn’t really have much time for tourist activities (as it always happens when travelling for work), I had a chance to a have a quick look at the famous IT shopping areas in Tokyo. Despite industry’s moving forward very fast, it’s quite striking to realize that the local gaming shops still dedicate a lot of shelf space to PS2 games. And rightly so as the old system can still be the best selling home console as reported on Gamasutra this week: see here
GCA 08
21 September 2008The second edition of Game Convention Asia is just over (18th - 20th September) and those were days packed with very good talks and exciting expo booths. Honestly, I had the impression the overall event was slightly smaller then last year but, despite this, the quality of the lectures was definitely higher (actually, last year I was a “full” speaker while this year I was involved only in a panel on “Game Research and Teaching in Asia”, representing NYP, and could speak for about 5 minutes only…. maybe this contributed in moving the average up!? :-P) and some, like those by Mr. Don Daglow, Mr. Peter Molyneux and Dr. Joonmo Kwon were particularly inspiring and, I’d dare to say, enlightening.
A wonderful idea was the inclusion of a “student day” (offered for free to all local students!!) including some very interesting talks like an “Assassin’s Creed” crowd behaviour post-mortem analysis by Mr. Claude Langlais. This is an initiative that, hopefully, will be taken also by several other conferences in the field.
Looking forward to the 2009 edition!
First M-EDGE game!
18 August 2008We just ended our first demo game to showcase the M-EDGE engine: “Moody Balloons”!
It’s a very simple game concept: there are different types of balloons representing different emotions (Happy, Sad and Angry) and the player has to perform the corresponding mood to make them pop and score points.
The game can be played with many different instruments (like woodwinds, bowed and plucked strings and percussions) and each player is able to create a specific profile and train the system according to his or her own style.
There is no need to be a musician to have fun, in fact I’m currently enjoying the gaming experience by playing bongos (which I never played before) and trying to figure out how to represent those emotions into my playing. As long as the player is able to make “different” music, our engine will be able to appreciate the differences and quantify them for the in game action.
Hopefully the game will be able to rise interest among fellow developers (we are going to show it at some upcoming events) and the project will grow further. Stay tuned!
busy with M-EDGE
5 July 2008Unfortunately I didn’t write much lately as I am always very busy at work both with teaching and with our M-EDGE (Music and Emotion Driven Game Engine) project. This is growing quite well so far: the team has grown up considerably and the engine is taking shape with all core components almost in place.
Also, I did all the musical data analysis already and a first prototype of the emotion analyzer and classifier is ready: yesterday I tried it for the first time “live” playing a set of bongos: even though the engine was using the default training set (obtained through the performance of an excellent pro player, maestro Mark Suter) it was able to classify my “Angry” and “Sad” moods quite well while I had some problems in getting the proper “Happy” one as Mr. Suter did…. (which actually makes sense as I am a flutist and not a bongo player! :p)
Still a lot of work has to be done to make the overall system robust and easily customizable, anyway it seems we are on the right path… 
cheers!
Amadeus, a new little game in the works
27 May 2008These days (or, better, these evenings/nights) I am spending my spare time writing a new little Flash based game using AS3. I’m trying to do a sort of “Guitar Hero” inspired game but where we are playing a piano and the game will be “melody” instead of “rythm” based. By this I mean that the player will actually be able to play the full melodic line of some little and well known tunes as prompted by the game and will actually “play” the game music. Stay tuned for more updates!
New DS upcoming: Good or Bad idea?
17 April 2008Lately several game industry related sites have spreaded news about an upcoming third iteration of the best selling Nintendo console. From a calendar perspective, the time seems right: the DS Lite came out about 2 years after the original DS and now 2 more years have passed since then. According to the rumors, the new version should be unveiled during Nintendo’s next E3 press conference and should feature an even smaller and thinner DS thanks to the removal of the GBA slot.
Is this a good idea? Honestly, I am not too sure. Let’s see why.
If you checked other gaming sites these days, you’d have probably noticed that the wildly popular franchise Guitar Hero is coming to the DS (don’t confuse it with the news circulated a couple of weeks ago about Rock Band going to the PSP: that was an April’s Fool joke instead! ). The interesting thing here is that they have developed a “guitar frets device” that you can connect to the DS and actually play something like the original version on the big consoles!
This is going to be a very big hit (I’ll definitely get it!) but guess where the new controller is going to be plugged into? Right, the GBA slot! So what’s going to happen if Nintendo is going to remove it from the upcoming version? Well, I will surely stick to my original DSLite for quite some time….
In conclusion, even if 2 years have passed since the launch of the DSLite and portable consoles tend to have fast restyling cycles, I believe the DS is not showing its age at all: it’s an almost perfect, slick and lightweight console which still has a lot to offer and many new innovative ideas are still possible using it’s own GBA slot, as the upcoming “Guitar Hero: On Tour” (to be released in June) is showing. Changing it now would be a bad mistake as it seems that both developers and gamers alike don’t feel the need for any changes (yet).
Playing Lucilla!
11 April 2008I realized that my simple flash game “Hurry, Lucilla!”, published through the MochiAds network, has been released this week on several well known portals such as www.rockyou.com, www.gamershell.com , www.hecticflashgames.com , www.arcademixer.com and others: in a few days it has been played more than 5,000 times! Obviously these are very small numbers compared to those some very good games can make, anyway it was a very nice surprise to see that so many people from all around the world have played my Lucilla game! ( honestly, I didn’t believe anyone would have really played it at all!) :)
Cheers!
Game Design for SogniReali
10 March 2008Gianluca Masina, the founder and main writer of the blog SogniReali.com asked me to collaborate on his latest idea by writing a game design doc for a simple game that should showcase the problems that young people/entrapreneurs face when they want to propose their ideas.
In a nutshell, I thought of a game settled in a maze/city seen from a topdown view (like the original SimCity) where the player has to move from street to street and collect different kind of projects which have to be taken to the correct destination for being developed. Roaming the city there will be also a few NPCs like hackers (who would steal the projects) and burocrats (who would slow down and stop the player for a few seconds, making him more vulnerable to hackers), thus producing a “hide and seek” gameplay dynamics that should be fun and exciting.
The doc, in Italian, is available on http://www.SogniReali.com and the game is going to be developed in XNA.
Cheers!
