For the impatient – here’s a new set of interviews from the East Coast Games Conference.  For the full rundown, read on!

RTE#22.2 BreakIron Animation and Design

RTE#22.2 Peter Klough and AppMobi

RTE#22.2 Cinesys

RTE#22.2 Digital Roar

RTE#22.2 Stanley Community College

Here’s some more photos from the event: http://www.meetup.com/RuntimeExpectations/photos/7735642/#113776042

In our last post, we were hot off the East Coast Games Conference.  We had some great interviews we put up as soon as we got home that night.  The interviews we posted were some fantastic insights into some of the local east coast colleges/universities and their gaming/simulation programs.

Ben’s favorite was Charles Bevan, a student from NCState.  He went into his department’s crime scene simulation work, narrative generation, and more.  Check out this last post for the full rundown!

We also noted the absence of Flash from the conference, and given our Adobe User Group background we were a bit shocked.

Moving on though, we didn’t note one BIG THING yet!  The conference itself was fantastic.  The organizers and volunteers set us up with an expo floor table for us to sit down with folks.  Adrian and I were drooling over some of the great sessions going on around us.

Giving our web application background, the sessions on subjects like Unity, the Unreal Game Development Kit, and Autodesk Gameware weren’t exactly up our immediate alley – but we were thrilled to see stuff closer to our home turf like “HTML5 & Other Modern Browser Tech for Games”, “Game Making Using HTML5 Technologies”,  “Global Distributions of Social Games”.

We were, of course, tempted to ditch our table and attend some great sessions – but we held firm!

It certainly paid off, because Charlie Breakiron of BreakIron Animation and Design sat down with us.  Breakiron was one of the biggest attention getters we saw, and it looks like News Channel 14 agreed with us.  Charlie and company had setup a Microsoft Kinect controlled motion capture station on the conference floor which was definitely drawing a crowd.

Charlie apologized ahead of time as he was running on no sleep, but we didn’t notice – the interview was great and we were pretty fascinated with some of the great things he and his company does.  This of course includes high end 3D animation for films, television, and games.  He detailed his history working for Softimage, Fox Animation Studios for Titan A.E.

Charlie Breakiron of Breakiron Animation and Design

Charlie also heads the Triangle’s chapter of the Autodesk Animation User Group Association (AAUGA) which covers Softimage, Maya, 3DStudio MAX, and others.

Here’s our talk with Charlie Breakiron of BreakIron Animation and Design:

RTE#22.2 BreakIron Animation and Design

Adrian chatting with Charlie Breakiron

We also sat down with Peter Klough of AppMobi.  Again – Adrian and I, not so much game developers, however Peter caught our interest with this HTML5 application/gaming toolset that you can use to deploy your projects to mobile and as a Chrome app (…and not Blackberry).

Ben asked about how AppMobi renders it’s graphics – and surprisingly enough, Peter had a really cool answer!  Apparently, given that the HTML5 canvas element runs slower on mobile, AppMobi created what they call “DirectCanvas” to render the canvas tag with the mobile hardware.

Peter talked a little bit about the genesis of their company by starting with Phonegap and branching off from there to improve the platform and create a better platform with a better ecosystem for monetization and social tooling.

RTE#22.2 Peter Klough and AppMobi

Peter Klough of AppMobi

Next, we were joined by a sales rep from Cinesys.  He talked to us about being both a software/hardware reseller as well as being a VAR (Value Added Resource) for companies looking for someone to help them integrate.  We had an interesting conversation about the recent TV network’s switch to digital from Sony beta tapes because of the Tsunami in Japan.

We also talked a bit about the recent National Association of Broadcasters conference in Vegas – the drive to online video, the consolidation of local networks, and more.

RTE#22.2 Cinesys

Digital Roar Studios also joined us!  Digital Roar is a games studio based in Atlanta.  Their lead sound designer, Thomas Dahlburg joined us.  We talked about his history starting out at film school and moving into sound design.  He filled Ben in on what is sound design and what the role actually encompasses.  Adrian brought up THE sound designers movie: Blowout.  Thomas talked also talked a little bit about Digital Roar’s recent game Ascencium.

RTE#22.2 Digital Roar

Lastly we were joined by one more student – who also happened to be a conference volunteer.  Cameron Biggers, a Stanley Community College student in the Simulation and Game Design program.  Cameron talked to us a bit about the college and the program.

RTE#22.2 Stanley Community College

Thanks again so much to the East Coast Games Conference for having us.  We had a blast!  We strongly recommend you go next year to the 5th one!

Funcom showing off a new game at their booth

We just posted some great interviews from the East Coast Game Conference, and there will be more to come on Tuesday.

In the post, we noted Adobe’s and Flash’s absence from the conference – not only as a corporate entity, but also as a subject of discussion in the session topics.

This was shocking to us, as Adobe’s latest push to gear Flash completely towards games and video.  Of course, that’s the marketing and engineering push.  The Flash engineers claim that because they are targeting such a tough and demanding market segment, they automatically will produce a solid platform for everything else.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, however the fact is that Flash wasn’t here today to get people excited about using Flash for games.  This wasn’t a rinky-dink conference either.  ECGC brands itself as “the largest gathering of video games professionals on the east coast”, and it’s in it’s 4th year – so it is fairly well established.

Meanwhile, at another conference that just happened in Toronto: FITC, Adobe seemed to have an extremely strong presence here.  I happened to catch a live stream of Flash Player Engineer Thiebault Imbert talking about gaming initiatives with Flash.  It was very compelling.  Flash is no doubt a great tech to pull of this cross-platform wizardry, and Thiebault did a fantastic job here pushing Flash and pushing the Flash gaming story forward.

What’s interesting here is that FITC, while it looks like a fantastic conference, is one that was (at one time) specifically geared towards Flash.  The acronym used to be “Flash in the Can”, however now it stands for “Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity”.  I’d consider myself lucky to go to a true creative professional conference such as this, and Adobe is no doubt right at home here.  But they are preaching to the choir.

Meanwhile, they have no presence at a conference that is specific and arguably vital to a market segment they need to reach for Flash’s continued use.

That’s not to say Adobe is discounted here altogether.  OF COURSE folks are quite taken with Photoshop and Illustrator.  We were talking to software resellers Cinesys, and it sounds like CS6 has a lot of excitement behind it in regards to design and production.  Adobe Premiere is no longer the red headed stepchild of the video production world, and we heard stories about how folks are ditching their Macs and Final Cut Pro for PCs with Adobe Premiere.

Adobe is doing their thing in this market and doing it well.  But for Flash and games?  Well, I  question their strategy here – you can’t make it in a new market if you don’t reach out to new venues.

For those too impatient, here’s the first set of sounds from the conference!  More to come..

RTE#22.1 Hey, Where’s Flash Hiding?

RTE#22.1 Charles Bevin Ph.D. NC State

RTE#22.1 Dustin Kopplin

RTE#22.1 Dustin Kopplin talks Anime, Manga and Comics

RTE#22.1 Josh Vallard talks games at Wake Tech Community College

We were excited to be invited to the East Coast Game Conference on a press pass to get to talk to some cool folks and get a feel for the gaming industry.  Needless to say we were absolutely thrilled when we saw a Runtime Expectations expo table on the map.

The RTE table at ECGC

ECGC is a game conference right in our fair city of Raleigh.  It claims to be “the largest gathering of video games professionals on the east coast”.  Celebrating it’s 4th year, we were eager to check it out.

As our friends and colleagues know, Adrian and I have a pretty significant background in Adobe technologies.  One of the first things we did when we got settled in today is to peruse the schedule and pontificate how Adobe Flash fit into the scene.

You see, Adobe Flash has shed its latest enterprise shackles by turning Flex over to the Apache Foundation.  Adobe now touts heavy investment in the gaming space for Flash.

We were very shocked to see no Adobe presence to speak of when we cracked open the schedule.  Instead, we see folks using HTML5, Unity, the Unreal SDK, and more.  Flash didn’t appear anywhere here, and Adobe seemed to not be taking the chance on our fair coast to push it.

You can hear us discuss it in brief here:

RTE#22.1 Hey, Where’s Flash Hiding?

Of course, it’s not about Flash, or any one technology – it’s about the games and the people who make the games!  We ran into some awesome folks.  Some we are saving for  our regularly scheduled show: Tuesday May 1st, 2012 at 6:30PM EST on Codebass Radio.  We’ll be playing some of our more in-depth interviews from today with BreakIron Animation and Design founder Charlie Breakiron, Michael Eager from Cinesys, and more.

However, the conference buzz hasn’t died down for us tonight, so I’m excited to get some interviews out tonight from some awesome folks we talked to today as a sneak preview of what we’ll be airing on Tuesday.

In fact, our sneak previews are comprised of all awesome people we met today coming to the East Coast Game Conference from their respective colleges and universities.

First up, we have Charles Bevan, a Ph.D. student and researcher from the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.  Charles talked to us about NC State’s gaming initiatives and how they are collaborating with other departments at NC State to create some fantastic work like IC-Crime.  Charles is also exploring generative narrative in his studies.  It’s really crazy stuff (and I do mean crazy in a good way)!

RTE#22.1 Charles Bevin Ph.D. NC State

Charles Bevan Ph.D. at NC State

Secondly, we met Dustin Kopplin who runs the blog Anime of Yesteryear and podcasts as “The Cool Kids Club”.  Dustin currently attends SCAD in their games program and tells us how he got there and what the program is like.

RTE#22.1 Dustin Kopplin

And then, not so tech related, Dustin schools Adrian on Anime, Manga, and comics in part two of this interview.

RTE#22.1 Dustin Kopplin talks Anime, Manga and Comics

Lastly, we have second Semester student at Wake Tech Community College, Josh Vallard.  Josh fills us in on what the Wake Tech Game Design Program is like for him.

RTE#22.1 Josh Vallard talks games at Wake Tech Community College

Josh Vallard, student at Wake Tech Community College

Like I said…more to come!  We have BreakIron, Cinesys, Digital Roar Studios in Atlanta, and AppMobi.  This is all Tuesday night at 6:30 EST on Codebass Radio.  We’ll be live tweeting during our replay, and taking any questions if you have them.

Also, we’d like to thank John Austin and all of the East Coast Game Conference organizers!  Not only was the ECGC volunteers extremely welcoming and friendly, but we were grateful to attend the conference and have a central table to talk to some awesome people.

Scenes from ECGC

Funcom showing off a new game

RTE#21 Javascript Framework Discussion with TriangleJS

On Episode #21, we were joined by 20 or so folks from the Triangle Javascript Meetup organized by Lucas Meyers (@unthunk).  We had big plans to do a “Javascript Battle Royale”, but these folks were just too damn smart to fall into a “religious” war.

Instead we had a lot of great discussion on the different Javascript frameworks and toolkits, as well as good points about the pitfalls of each one, as well as the frameworks in general.

Adrian talking to the Triangle JSers

Right off the bat, we were treated to an Adrian Pomilio styled rant about HTML5.  The rant was focused on a CNN Money Article which talked about the various legal battles that Google and Oracle are going through in regards to Android’s usage of Java.  The HTML5 comment was actually “New technologies like HTML5 are already making Java less important on the Web”.  It came out of nowhere, and of course made no sense, so we just had to point it out.

Lucas Meyers (@unthunk)

Also in recent news was the JSMin conflict. Ben started to give a decent explanation, but was trumped by Chip’s (@chipburris) and Xiaoxin’s (@hyperlinks) great explanation and resolution of the story.

Xiaoxin (@hyperlink) talking about Semi-colon-gate

Rachel (@rachelthegreat) was also there and piped right in when we talked about inline data/styles in our HTML.

One framework called Sammy, which most of us had never heard of was briefly explained by TriangleJS organizer Lucas (@unthunk).

We moved into some more popular frameworks then like Backbone, Angular, and utility belt library Underscore.

After discussing these popular ones, Ben and others noted that “To-do apps” were popular “Hello World” applications for the various frameworks.  To this point, Lucas tweeted:

Todo apps came up @RTExpectations tonight, here’s @addyosami’s TodoMVC project – same Todo app done up in different js frameworks

Adrian and Lucas also talked about the “single page” Javascript application, which some people seemed familiar with and others were not so much.

We then discussed the heavy weight “enterprise” level frameworks – Dojo and Sencha.  Ben discussed his obstacles with learning Sencha.  When bringing up Sencha, of course, license costs and various pros and cons about paying for a Javascript library were raised.

Lastly, Adrian took a poll on Javascript IDE’s to see how everyone was writing their Javascript.  Most folks seemed to be using Sublime.  One other person was using VIM.  MS Visual Web Developer was mentioned yet quickly booed!  Ben mentioned he was using Intellij/WebStorm.

Chip Burris (@chipburris) talking about using jQuery

We had a great time, and we’d love to thank Triangle JS for coming out to join us.  I’d like to note that we did cut some discussion due to audio muddyness and commotion coming from outside our room.  So for that, we do apologize!

RTE#20 Joystick Labs: Tech Startups and Games

Finally! We get to sit down with Joystick Labs!

I would describe Joystick Labs as an anchor of the American Underground for the American Tobacco Campus in our fair city of Durham.

Joystick Labs is a gaming startup incubator. In their own words, they are focused on identifying, funding, and accelerating the next generation of digitally distributed video game entrepreneurs.

We were lucky enough to sit down with John Austin, Managing Director of Joystick. It’s his off-season right now, as new applicants will be launching their startups on August 20th.

John Austin - Managing Director of Joystick Labs

John talked about the gaming industry, how Joystick incubator program works, some previous companies and more.

We had a fantastic time talking with John, and we’re excited to see this type of energy and passion (John and everyone he mentors) in our town.

John also plugged gaming startup Mighty Rabbit and their newly launched “Saturday Morning RPG”

As it was a gaming themed show, we talked a little bit about the new direction Flash is taking towards games and its premium licensing model

Also related was the Unity press release about it’s Flash player export.

We briefly talked about the Leisure Suit Larry Kickstarter, as well as some next gen console rumors (PS4 and XBox).

Ben unfortunately fell for an April Fools prank from Seb Lee Delisle which purported to be a Massive Multiplayer Online game of Asteroids built with HTML canvas and Node JS. Ben didn’t play it long enough to realize that those weren’t hundreds of other ships, but some decent AI. Ben also didn’t stick around for the piece de resistance when all the ships suddenly turn on you.

Lastly, we did a little old timey radio soap opera – adapted from the real-life Twitter drama that unfolded between a developer at OMGPop (famous for their Draw Something app) and their CEO as they were bought out by mega game company Zynga. We thought it would be best to say goodbye to John Austin at this point in the show, so we didn’t tarnish his game cred with stupid antics.

Our Twitter soap opera was based on the story found in these few links:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167244/

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-27-omgpop-dev-explains-why-he-walked-away-from-zynga-takeover

http://blog.games.com/2012/03/30/omgpop-fire-shay-pierce-response/

http://www.cinemablend.com/games/OMGPOP-CEO-Tries-Rectify-His-Reckless-Twitter-Comment-41026.html

RTE#19 Michael Brings the Analytics

In Episode 19, Michael Harrison (@oldbie) was kind enough to join us. Michael is a web and Google Analytics trainer and consultant.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect. As a web developer who doesn’t know a thing about web analytics, I wasn’t quite sure what web analytics entails, or what a professional actually does.

Thankfully, Michael (@oldbie) laid it out for us. Even better, he met up with Daniel Solis (@danielsolis) for drinks ahead of the show and brought him along. Michael offered his web and Google analytics expertise, and Daniel represented the next in line AFTER analytics: marketing.

Michel Harrison (@oldbie) and Daniel Solis (@danielsolis)

Between the two of them, we ran the gamut in terms of what happens from launching your website to tweaking it in response to how users use the site to how we use the data collected from our users.

With my co-host Adrian out of pocket on medical leave, we introduced Nate Hunzaker (@natehunzaker) who filled in awesomely. Nate filled us in on some cool things he’s doing with language processing at the head of the show with his Twitter Mad Libs project and his Emo-Geo-Locational Tweets project.

Nate Hunzaker: Our Temporary Co-Host (@natehunzaker)

As fascinating as Nate was, his role was just the co-host, so we turned things over to Michael who brought the analytics. All of them, in fact.

Michael is currently between jobs, so by all means, hire him. Hire him now, before you don’t have the opportunity!

In our studio audience we welcomed Rachel Nabors (@crowchick), Mike Kingery, Sudhir Shetty, and my lovely wife Becca Gomez (@thegourmez) who took the photos.

In addition to the analytics we talked Michael’s role writing for Wired.com as a “GeekDad”, and about the local gaming scene (which Daniel Solis is a big part of as he writes and creates games of his own).

Relevant links in this episode include the Twitter Analytics announment:

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web-analytics

Additionally, Nate tweeted out Luke Jones’ position on SEO which he referenced in the show: http://www.lukejones.me/articles/seo/

We’d like to thank everyone for joining, and additional wish Adrian well in recovery!

Michael, Daniel, and 2 time former guest Rachel Nabors (@crowchick)

In the audience, we had Sudhir Shetty, Mike Kingery, and Rachel Nabors

RTE#18 Mulberry Mobile

To quote Egan Spengler: “Don’t cross the streams, it would be bad.”

Well, Runtime Expectations crossed the streams with Refresh the Triangle this month and it was GOOD! We broadcasted live from Rebecca Murphey’s (@rmurphey) presentation on Mulberry.

Rebecca works for Toura (http://mulberry.toura.com). From the Toura site:

“Mulberry is an end-to-end toolkit for mobile application development using web technologies. Mulberry helps you set up your application for iOS and Android; provides you with a complete HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for creating your application; and gives you a set of tools to test your app and build it for app stores and the mobile web.”

We got to hear all about Toura tonight, and Rebecca took questions from the audience and live listeners over twitter.

Rebecca has promised a slide deck of her presentation to post, so we’ll get that online when we can!

Rebecca Murphey speaking about Toura's Mulberry

Nate Hunzaker filling in for Adrian as on-air host

The Refresh Crowd watching Rebecca Murphy

RTE#17 Atomic Corona

In Runtime show 17, we were joined by Jake Scarano (@touchjunky). We found Jake as Meetup.com advertised that he was starting a Corona SDK meetup in the Raleigh area. While his first meetup is next Thursday, we wanted to snag him to talk about games, mobile, Corona before that!

Jake Scarano (@touchjunky)

Jake and his family run a business called StayToooned making “edutaining apps for kids”. He is the artist and animator of this outfit.

Through StayTooned, under the iTouchiLearn moniker, Jake and his family have made games for preschool, kindergarten and special needs kids.

Jake gave his non-developer take on making a game with Corona.  He compared it to Flash calling it a lot easier to understand and get off the ground running with.  We briefly mentioned the physics engine and talked about it usage in C++, Flash, Corona, and Angry Birds.

We also talked about Sprite Sheets and SpriteLoq - a tool to convert Flash animations to Corona Sprite Sheets.

Adrian got distracted and started playing Jake’s game “Atomic Aliens” available for iPad and iPhone for free until February 9th.

Ben thinking really hard

Towards the end of the show we wrapped things up, but talked a little bit about Kinect for Windows, how Hasbro re-invented Lazer Tag, and finally the Triangle Startup Factory.

Jake and the good people at Ansca Mobile were nice enough to give away a free independent subscription to the Corona SDK.  We gave it away to Michael Harrison (@oldbie) – who is actually a future guest on RTE, so maybe we’ll hear from him how awesome it is a month from now.

RTE#16 DepOps and Build Automation with rPath

We kick started Episode #16 with a few announcements. The first being our brand new website: www.runtimeexpectations.com. Secondly, we talked about our recent resignation from the Adobe User Group program and our various reasons for doing so.

Adrian mentioned the trouble selling anything but developing for the “open web” to his higher ups, repeating a Forrester article.

After talking about ourselves a fair bit, we let Brad Murphy (@murf80) who runs engineering and Steve Burnett (@steveburnett) the documentation lead talk about rPath.  rPath prides itself for its cloud based build automation solutions.

Brad Murphy and Steve Burnett of rPath

Brad talked about how their system works, what goes into it, and how quickly they can start get customers setup.

Ben interrupted and back-peddled a little into the conversation to talk good things about a great web debugging tool called Charles Web Debugging Proxy (which hopefully everyone knows about).

We tried to goad Brad into talking smack about Flex and Flash in favor of HTML5 – but he didn’t bite.  He gave some pretty great reasons for sticking with Flex, and went into some detail about it.

Also mentioned was rPath’s various partnerships with Cisco – namely CITEIS and CIAC.

We also just had to make sure we had time at the end to talk to Steve Burnett about his ambient/improvisational looping sound project called Subscape Annex….or as he puts it “soundtracks for movies that don’t exist”.

rPath is currently hiring for a UI developer (Flex), an API developer (Python/Django), and a Professional Services Engineer.  They are located in Raleigh, and are a short walk to the RBC center.

Steve and drop-in guest Jake sitting cautiously back

RTE#15 Cajun Style Fogbeam Labs

To see all photos during this episode, checkout our Meetup album

It’s a new year!  We at Runtime were kind of bored with calling all of our episodes “hot this” or “hot that”.  It’s time we branched out, so….Cajun Style?

Either way, we were joined by Phil Rhodes and Sarah Khan of Fogbeam Labs.  Phil started Fogbeam, and later asked Sarah to join the team after being impressed with her CAJUN style (see, we can follow a theme) UX skills after working with her at Lulu.

Phil Rhodes

Sarah Khan - UX Engineer at Adzerk and Fogbeam

Fogbeam purports to be a little reminiscent of Reddit.  It’s a suite of collaboration tools that all come together to cut through the clutter and better help your organization manage it’s information in a social way.

Of course Phil and Sarah can explain better! Listen in to Episode #15.  Unfortunately our audio equipment got the best of us, so there’s a bit of background noise in the first 6 minutes, and I’ve tried to splice it together the best I could – we certainly didn’t want to miss out on any of the CAJUN style bits.

After talking Fogbeam, we grilled Sarah on UX design and engineering.

Ben also took advantage of having two Mac people and one Linux person in the room to talk about his recent exposure to Linux from his Windows background.  We also talked about the legalese in newly funded startup Spool.

Finally….the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) conspiracy theories started.  Luckily it was nearing the end, so instead of getting too political, we wrapped it up.

Ben and Adrian - A Thinker and a Talker

Twitter:
@FogbeamLabs

Blog:
http://fogbeam.blogspot.com

LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/fogbeam-labs