Mark Danks

Moving back to development with my studio means that I have seen a lot about what publishers are looking for these days. Wii is, of course, very popular, but there is generally a desire to be “casual.” The interesting thing is that most publishers are unsure what that means. They want the popularity of the Wii, but still want to make games like they did for the PS2 and before.

A few publishers have figured out that the Wii market is different than the hardcore market from before, but that requires an understanding of a very different demographic than has bought Doom, Gears of War, and Call of Duty in the past.

Now that Microsoft’s Natal and Sony’s motion controller have been announced, the day for the joystick might seem to be limited.  However, not every player nor every gamer wants to jump around the room, regardless of the genre.

I am getting ready to head down to E3 in LA tomorrow.  From all of the noise, it seems that the E3 of old is back, with the lights, noise, and spectacle.  From the industry’s point of view, E3 is a way to get the main stream media’s attention.  I have seen interviews and announcements all over the place from newspapers to radio.  Add in the parties and it should be as crazy as ever.

This year is different for me, since I have meetings about my studio.  Normally, I am there representing EA or Sony, so I am approaching things from the publisher or platform side, instead of as a developer.  As it is, I have meetings every day, all day, which will make for a great E3!

I am incredibly excited to launch my studio today.  I am the co-studio head for Zoë Mode San Francisco!  We are hard at work on a number of games and I am extremely honored to be working with such a great group of people.

Press release

Interview at GamesIndustry.biz

In most modern games, asynchronous file loading is a standard requirement.  This is especially true for open world games or games which never want to show a loading screen.  On the surface, it seems like an easy thing to do: spawn a new thread and load files on request.  However, there are a few complications which get in the way.

One of the most obvious issues is knowing when the file has actually been loaded.  In an asynch environment, you issue a request, and some time later, the request is fulfilled.  Most systems return a handle which the game can check periodically to see if the data has been read.  This is fairly easy to implement, works well in a multithreaded environment, and is pretty easy to debug.  Other alternatives are to use a callback mechanism or put the calling thread to sleep until the data is loaded.  The sleep option is usually done in custom scripting languages, instead of trying to do it in C++.

A standard approach is to compress the data at build time and decompress at run time.  If you are reading from DVD Continue Reading »

A recent CNET article has much of the blog-o-sphere commenting away like crazy.  The article contains a quote from Kaz Hirai from SCE that the PS3 is hard to develop for.  In reading the article, the author does not appear to have thought much about why Kaz might have said that.

As a note, these are only my views and do not represent my current employer, SCE, EA, or any past employers.  These views are also not based on any “inside” information, but instead are based on many years in the video games industry.

It is absolutely true that of the current consoles (PS3, XBox360, and Wii), the PS3 is the most complicated.  However, there are two aspects to developing on a console.  1) The hardware and 2) the development environment.  The thing that the author of the CNET article seemed to forget is that (excluding Nintendo), selling software is what makes the money, not selling the hardware.

Continue Reading »

Week one is done for my new studio.  Spent the week working a game pitch, running phone and ethernet wires, and generally getting everything set up at the office.  It is extremely exciting and scary to not have “the man” telling you what to do every day.  The success of the studio will be a direct result of the work of my co-studio head and I.

And I love taking BART every day.  My commute time is about the same as when I was at EA and Sony, but now I get to read and relax with my iPod.

I made the leap.  Today was my last day at Sony.  It has been an amazing time there and I am truly honored to have worked with such talented people.

…but something came up…

I am starting a new game studio in San Francisco.

I have noticed an interesting way that I play games these days.  Keep in mind, I have children and interests outside of the games industry.

On my home consoles (which include a PS3, XBox 360, and Wii), I tend to play games which are pick up and play, usually with no story.  This includes Boom Blox, The Last Guy, Eden, and Braid.  Basically, all games which I can play for 15-30 minutes and then turn off the console.  Also, I don’t have to worry about remembering some involved story to get back into the game.

On my portables, I am playing the long, involved story games.  I just finished Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and it looks like I’m going to get back to The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass soon.

The interesting thing to me is this is completely backwards to how people are “supposed” to play games.  My pickup games are on my home system with the big plasma TV, while the long session games are on my portable systems.  It reflects my life these days…I have very little time at home to play games, but when I travel, I’m trapped on an airplane for ten hours at a time.

I have implemented a task system for my brushing program. In many ways, it emulates a PS3 by creating 6 threads which sleep until told to do something. That “something” is a function which does a task and then exits. There are two issues with this that I am resolving at the moment.

1. It is hard to debug the tasks when there are hundreds or thousands a frame
2. I want to emulate the PS3 SPU local store, which means segmenting my memory space

To make each of these easier to deal with, all of the task entry functions take an argument. This argument is a pointer to a ClTaskArg class. Tasks are expected to derive from this class to get their arguments into, and potentially out of, the task function.

Continue Reading »

I just put up a post on the PlayStation blog about the PlayStation-edu program:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/06/06/playstation-edu/

It is a program to get development hardware into the classrooms of universities and colleges.

I am giving a talk about it at the Game Education Summit next week in Dallas.

[update]

Made slashdot!