I’ve been asked by PA to manage the art track at PAXDev. Given my background I’m obviously very interested in making sure that tech art is well represented there. I know there is already some interest around the boards as well but I figured I’d make a broader post about this.
I know there is not a lot of info thus far on what it is going to be so I’ll elaborate a bit here.
[ul]
[li]There are going to be 4 tracks : Art (including audio), Design, Engineering and Tabletop[/li][li]There can be absolutely no product pitch, all content must be oriented towards sharing or advancing some aspect of production. It all has to focus on craft.[/li][li]20% of the passes will be for students in game oriented programs.[/li][li]And that’s it…[/li][/ul]
…so far. What the people including myself have been told is that we have two days, a venue and a blank slate to put there what we as a dev community think should be there. As we nail down more details here in the next couple of weeks I’m going to ask them to relay more info on the site as well so people have a better idea of what to expect.
So, on the tech art front here is what I know I would like to see:
[ul]
[li]Tech Artist Round Table(s)[/li][li]Tech Artist Bootcamp[/li][li]Student Facing Tech Artist Panel - “So you wanna be a tech artist”[/li][/ul]
I’m also going to follow up in Seth’s thread and make sure his idea gets some love or see how we can factor it into a bootcamp style presentation.
Consider this a call to arms friends. They’re giving us the platform, let’s use it for good
Let me play Devil’s Advocate here. It took almost a year of planning and work by 10 people to pull off the 8 hr TA Bootcamp at GDC this year. Pulling a compelling all day BC together in around 90 days would be a huge effort.
Keep in mind that the GDC TA Bootcamp was created to address a few issues. One of which was to concentrate a TA track inside of a large conference that has a pretty rough signal:noise ratio of TA talks relative to everything else. With Pax Dev being limited attendance and a smaller venue a concentrated, segregated Boot Camp might not be the best fit.
[QUOTE=lanedaughtry;10575]Interesting. Do you have any suggestions for something you think would fit better?
-L[/QUOTE]
I think you should determine your audience and go from there. Is Pax DEV going to be mostly attended by people from large studios? Indies? mobile?, students? etc… It very well could be that the show will be attended by people/teams that have no idea what tech art is…or (and I hope not), teams that are so small as to feel they don’t need TAs. It maybe be majorily students who are more interested in fundamentals, not specific implementation details. This being a 1.0 show means you have no historic data to rely on to help answer these questions.
An 8 hr bootcamp full of sessions related to a general them, like how to manage tools and tech for large scale development, may totally miss the audience mark. A day full of disparate 1 hr TA talks that cover a wide range of subjects may have more success due to the shot-gun nature of the topics, even though some talks may be better attended than others. Like I said above, Pax Dev is a 1.0 attempt. With a shot-gun approach you can more quickly determine what worked and didn’t and use that to direct v 2.0, 3.0, etc… With a structured bootcamp you can only get a boolean answer to one question, “Did this work?”
I have no idea how Pax Dev is being structured in terms of talk length, length of day, room size, or provided AV equipment. All of those variables will play in to what will be the optimum fit for the show, also.
I’d second Jeff’s cautions and just urge a strong showing of a small amount than doing too much. I think as TA’s we are in a difficult ‘presentation’ niche because we have so few practitioners but so many different topics. Consider how few TA talks there are outside of GDC in SF, and now multiply that by the design-centric focus of a site like Penny Arcade. I doubt you’ll get a showing of enough people to fill more than a couple TA talks.
This is purely speculative, of course- we’ll have better ideas next year. But my point is just to urge on the side of less, rather than more (to the degree that I wouldn’t be concerned if there were no TA talks at all at PAXDev).
From the feedback here and the amount of time it’s looking like we’ll get for actual content I’m thinking a broader presentation may be the ticket here. I’m gonna get together with Seth soon to talk ideas. Expect to see more questions/information here in the near future.
