Notes from a talk by Ken Mitchell of AMD Have to pay attention to cross core memory latencies in Threadripper Improvements in Windows Insider Program for TR memory interconnects Instruction set evolution: Zen+ has a ton of new features—pay attention to CLZERO, SSE3 Avoid mixing legacy SIMD and AVX instructions (has a penalty for switching)—move … Continue reading Ryzen Optimization
Notes from a roundtable discussion moderated by Andrew Fray at GDC 2019 For more, see autotestingroundtable.comFirst steps getting started with testingFirst decide what you want out of testing; if you want a rock-solid engine, need unit tests (despite it being hard on a legacy engine)Unit testingAnalyze how long it takes you to go through a … Continue reading Automated Testing Process Roundtable
Notes on a talk by Mike Gordon of Iron Horse Games Iron Horse has had 11M installs, mostly on Android, mostly paid acquisition Marketing in 3 phases on Google Play Google Play organic installs are significantly higher than Apple ROI tends to be better Open beta Don’t treat this as a test platform, because you … Continue reading Paid Acquisition on Mobile: A Scrappy, Practical Guide
Notes on a roundtable discussion at GDC 2019 Run by Chris Rando (@Rodneysquint)IGDA QA communityQA Mixer first floor of Marriot MarquisHow do we articulate how QA prevents bugsBug preventionDoing acceptance testing—QA sets the criteria to decide when something's done (rather than just doing some testing when the devs say it's done)QA involved in game design … Continue reading Preventing Bugs: The Dark Matter of QA
Notes on a talk by Steve Filby of Evil Empire & IndieCatapult, formerly Motion Twin at GDC 2019 BackgroundMotion Twin did F2P browser games, tried to move to mobile F2P/premiumThrew out everything to make Dead Cells for PCLeft in 2016 to start marketing agency Indie CatapultStarted Evil Empire recentlyHow we made Dead Cells a hit … Continue reading Decorticating “Dead Cells”: A business & marketing deep dive
Notes on a talk by Robert Masella (@ZipLockBagMan) of Rare/Microsoft Studios Wanted automated testing on all parts of the code, incl. (notoriously difficult to test) gameplay featuresChallengesComplexity from open world designConstantly evolving game-as-a-serviceWanted to cut releases in a week... can't spend weeks on testingWhy use automated testingManual testing slow, unreliableSubtle bug in AI behavior gets … Continue reading Automated Testing of Gameplay Features in “Sea of Thieves”
Notes on a talk from GDC 2019 To be a good platform, need to:Create value for players and devsBest experience for a given gameGrow the addressable marketInvent new ways for devs to make customers happy...over the long termE.g., Steam Link Anywhere automatically makes your game more valuable—no integration costs for devsComing soonSteam Events: communicate to … Continue reading Steam Business Update
