Bioware presented an interesting look at localizing Mass Effect 2 worldwide with some key insights being:
- Granular scheduling does not work – instead they used a 1 month buffer between the English VO recordings and translation to other languages
- Key deliverables to translators were a pronunciation guide, IP glossary and character bible

Some of the stats from Mass Effect 2 are 2.7M words, 350 actors and 300+ days in the studio.  Yeah, huge.

Another session on indie mobile game development talked a lot about the usual suspects of cross promotion, ads and integrating social streams although other sessions had some folks saying that bringing in Twitter and Facebook did NOT bring a lot of value add to the experience or dollars.  I suspect this may depend on the business model most appropriate for your particular game.

Some cool announcements from the folks at Unity – version 3 and potential Xbox and PS3 integration later this year.  Fantastic!

An AI session on interactive storytelling had some intriguing thoughts on weaving a compelling narrative.  A lot of tie in to another session about behaviour trees and their implementation as well as SHPFSM (scripted hierarchical probabilistic finite state machines) .  As a company, Red Reptile is obviously pushing hard on the boundary of existing narrative structures and a way to procedurally create a good story.

Bob Salvatore’s session on world building was both funny and informative.  He actually touched on something that Sid talked about in his keynote about the concept of asking the player to suspend disbelief – and to not let the player guess.

Finally, the session for Sony’s Playstation platform highlighted some really awesome tech that would be great for those of you looking to get onto the Playstation 3.

Met a lot of cool people this year and looking forward to building more relationships as we move forward.  We’ve certainly started to hit a breaking point in nearing the completion of our own first iPhone title with more in development, both for iPhone and other platforms.  We’re looking to secure additional funding and build a solid team in the short term to begin hard core development of our games – so if you’re looking to join us or invest in us drop us a line and visit the site often for updates.

Cheers!
Dwayne

The Reptile twitter feed will be updated constantly throughout the week for those wondering what we’re up to and where we are.

Check out the rest of the site to see what we’re up to, and please register and comment if the mood strikes you.  We’d love to hear from you!

Cheers,
Dwayne