Hi, I'm Dan Higgins. I'm here at the Intel booth at GDC 2017, and I want to tell you about Lords of New York, my game. Lords of New York is a 1920s poker RPG, which means it's a game about cheating in poker. So originally there was a movie, Rounders, with Matt Damon. And I loved that movie and I wanted to make an experience where you felt like Matt Damon.
I was like, who shouldn't feel like Matt Damon, right? Everybody wants to. So I want to give you these superstar abilities in poker, so that's how we gave these abilities. Like, how do I build intuition into characters when they go into poker, and make them come in and feel like they can read someone's body language and all that kind of stuff? So that's kind of the genesis of how we created Lords of New York. So it is a story-based game, so while there's a multiplayer component, there's a story. And then the quests motivate the poker. So poker is like your combat, but you know you're not just out there to win money. You're traveling around New York, you're trying to win this tournament, but you're thrown in jail and you're trying to get out of jail, and all this kind of stuff. So all this drama, but poker is like your main combat. So we set our game in the 1920s, because if there was ever a period of time where I felt attached to, it was 1920. And specifically it's 1927, which was a crazy year. It's like the Lindbergh year and the Babe Ruth year and all these famous murder trials, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that went on that's insane in that year. And so we actually kind of follow those events. They happen and you kind of get clued into it while they're happening. But really it's the era and the history that we love so much. You know, prohibition, obviously. These are gangsters. So you're working around in a gangster world and even if you're not playing a gangster character, still prohibition is a big influence. So one interesting element that you might find fascinating is, we did everything in 2-D, right? So Lord of New York is a 2-D game. But we wanted to add body language to our characters and we wanted to make our characters dynamic. So we actually built a brand-new type of 2-D animation system. So if you go to check out Lords of New York, you'll see that each character is a single texture. So we're able to do all this kind of expression dynamically with a single texture, which I know you game developers will love. I'm going to be having a tool come out later which will allow all of you to do this as well. I was really introduced to Intel gaming through the Intel Buzz Workshop in Seattle. So I went to this workshop, and Lords of New York won the contest, which was amazing. It was so incredible. And so we actually got, the award was a Brix machine. And that Brix machine turned out to be super vital for us. It was really cool. But from there, we had lots of great relationship moments with them, including, like, it plays great on Intel . So being an indie developer, being a person who writes their own engine, I need all the support I can get. Nothing's free, nothing's given to me, so I have to-- QA, for example. All the indie developers have to battle this QA battle of, like, how do I get people to test my game try this website? I don't know! Intel was able to put it through a hardware compatibility lab, crash results, performance results, all these things that-- it's a huge unknown, sending it out into the world and being like, I have no idea if it's going to play on everybody's machine. Getting back a chart of where things were in hardware was super valuable. So we're really grateful for Intel. Obviously, I have a long history with them, VTune and TBB, which is the concurrency libraries I use. So I do a lot of heavy concurrency inside Lords of New York, which sounds strange. But I do lots of poker simulations to do the AI. In fact, you can go to Intel's website to find an article on our AI for Lords of New York if you're interested in that kind of personality-based AI stuff. So Lords of New York is out on early access on Steam, so it's Mac and Windows right now. Later in the year it'll be on other platforms, but the primary right now. You can go there and it's multiplayer and our single-player preview. So you can get a feel for what the single-player narrative will be like, but in several months you'll be able to actually play the full story, with chapter one of the story. And we're going to be developing Lords of New York over many years. So we're going to continually add characters, like a MOBA. You'll get a new character every month with new abilities and things like that.
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AuthorTim Sobers is a famous traveler and blogger, passionate camping and hiking lover. Tim is from Washington, D.C., US. He is also a writer at Students QA platform. ArchivesCategories |