This year’s Game Developer Choice Award Winners have been announced. Shadow of the Colossus is the big winner with 5 awards : Character Design, Game Design, Visual Arts, Best Game and Innovation. Omedetou gozaimasu (Congratulations) Atsuko Fukuyama, Koji Hasegawa, Junichi Hosono, Kenji Kaido, Masanori Kajita, Yasuhide Kobayashi, Hironobu Nakano, Hitoshi Niwa, Shunpei Suzuki, Fumito Ueda!
Guitar Hero’s team won Audio and Innovation. Congrats to Greg LoPiccolo, Ryan Lesser, Eric Brosius and Kasson Crooker. Nintendog’s team took Technology and Innovation awards back home. Kudos to Tsutomu Kaneshige, Hideki Konno, Shigeru Miyamoto and Kiyoshi Mizuki. Caroline Esmurdoc, Tim Schafer and Erik Wolpaw of the Psychonauts’s team were honored with the Writing and New Studio (Double Fine Productions) awards.
And congratulations to all Game Developer that were involved in any of the game that were nominated !
Richard “Lord British” Garriott is going to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s GDCA “for fuelling the presence of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) in the mass market”. Richard joins the ranks of Will Wright (Maxis - SimCity and The Sims), Yuji Naka (Sega - Sonic The Hedgehog), Gunpei Yokoi(Nintendo - Game & Watch and GameBoy creator), Mark Cerny and Eugene Jarvis, previous recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award.
All hails the Lord !
When it comes to game programming, size does matter, at least when you’re a beginner. Even if your head is full of ideas, pace yourself, write them down and start something small instead.
Why ? From personnal experiences, I’ve discovered that I was actualy learning more from small project that I was able to finish, than from big and ambitious projects that I was never able to get past the half of what I planned.
It does not matter what the small project is: a small pong-clone, an air hockey simulator or breakout-clone. All you need is to be able to create something that you’re going to be able to finish, learn from your mistakes and be proud of the result.
Guillaume Provost (Production Director) and William Ho (Creative Director) from Pseudo Interactive were present to talk about the game design of Full Auto 360 and how they tried to find a good balance with a emergent gameplay and an arcade gameplay. It was really interesting for the game designer in me to see how these guys designed their game. What they had to do in order to find this balance, adding things, removing stuff, etc.
There’s a brief summary report of the event on the IGDA Montreal website.
The Game Developers Choice Awards 2006 nominees have been annonced. God of War is leading with six nomminations (Audio, Character Design, Game Design, Visual Arts, Writing and Best Game), followed by Shadow of the Colossus with five (Character Design, Game Design, Technology, Visual Arts, Best Game) and Psychonauts with 4 (Character Design, Game Design, Writing, New Studio)
The GDCA, presented by the IGDA, is a peer-based, open nomination awards program where honors are given by developers to developers. The awards will be handed out at the Game Developers Conference, March 22
