Black Lab Games Blog » GCAP

On camera interview with Gamepron

Black Lab Games — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:46:03 +0000

When I was at the excellent GameConnect Asia Pacific 2011 last month, I had a chat with the one and only Jessica Citizen from Gamepron about Black Lab Games, being a developing in Perth and other stuff. The video has now been posted…here.

Back from GCAP

Black Lab Games — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:23:29 +0000

So, GCAP 2009 is now officially over. Overall, it’s been an excellent conference.

Highlights for me:

Tony Albrecht gave an excellent presentation on day one called “The Pitfalls of Object Orientated Design”. He raised the point that whilst CPU speeds have increased 1000x fold over the last 20 years, memory speed has increased 10x. Object-orientated techniques can cause performance issues by accessing memory a lot, whilst doing relatively few calculations. Tony recommended “Data Orientated Design“, which optimises memory layout of data in a way that makes it more cache friendly, and in turn makes the game run faster
A video link with David Jaffe. “Aim to make hits”. Very sound advice.
Justin Halliday from recently closed studio Transmission Games gave a very frank postmortem of Heroes of Europe, which was released by Ubisoft in September 2009. Justin stated that HoE was responsible for the closure of the studio due to delays and budget blowouts. To me, the talk reinforced two points : project management is vital (and totally underrated), and buying technology where possible is better than building your own.
Meeting people. As with any conference, it’s always great to meet new people. Props to Alander from Prickly Pixel for being awesome. And meeting Farbs was cool too.

Lowlights for me :

My presentation. I gave a talk titled “Managed Code in Game Development”. It’s something I’m interested in and believe in. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what “managed code” is, I won’t go into detail). I don’t really feel like I delivered the material very well at all. I think I need public speaking lessons.
Insufficient coffee. Several rooms full of game developers. One coffee provided for 20 minutes during the afternoon tea break. Wtf?

Overall : Highly recommended.

Presenting at GCAP

Black Lab Games — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:44:05 +0000

Earlier in the year, the organisers of Game Connect Asia Pacific 2009 put out a call for submission for this years conference in Melbourne. I’ve never presented at something like this, but I’ve wanted to for some time, so I submitted an abstract. Well, my submission was accepted and I’m going to be presenting.

My presentation will be part of the “Tech” track, on Tuesday the 8th of December. The topic for the presentation will be ‘Managed Code in Game Development’. I’ll be talking about the pro and cons of managed code, what options are available, when to use them and when not to. Many programmers in game development think that languages stop and start with C++. I hope to show that this is not the case.

So, if you’re going to GCAP this year, come and check it out. (Registrations are now open)