Creating Review Video to Get ESRB Rating

One of the requirements of getting an ESRB rating is you have to submit a video of of your game play with the application. By the way GGBS is will be rated "E" for Everyone, so kids to your grand mother can enjoy our game. Creating this video was a real pain and took me much longer than expected. I wasn't concerned about the video quality so I first got a cheap USB video capture device made by Pinacle. The captured quality was so bad, total waste of money. I ended up taking the dev kit to my parents who have a DVD recorder and captured the output that way, of course the video is only standard definition. The quality was marginally better than using the computer. So I had a dvd video and now I need to convert it to a WMV file. This was a nightmare until I found a free program called Prism. So dvd recorder -> ripped to a XVID avi -> to WMV.

Some findings:
- Movie maker is no good because I couldn't figure out how to not rescale the image.
- Windows Media Encoder is a system hog and ran into a a ton of errors trying to read the avi file.
- Searching the net for AVI to WMV converters gives you lots of results for apps. These apps may be "free" but they generally only convert say 5 minutes unless you buy them.
- Capturing good quality video is also a pain, i need to invest in a good tv capture video card I guess. No HD video capture also. How do people capture HD from game consoles I wonder.

Game Testing at VFS

Its funny because during development sometimes people would ask me, "Did you have focus group testing, etc?". I would chuckle and say, "Yup, I have a whole department of 100 testers doing that!". Being an Indie developer is definitely way more fly by the seat of your pants. However if you are creative you can find some alternative solutions. We were very concerned about the game difficulty, was it tuned to hard? What we needed was some feedback from gamers... We contacted the Vancouver Film School and orgnaized game tesing with students in their Game Design Program. We set up our dev kits in VFS game Lab and had students each play the game for one hour. We gave students the controllers and basically just sat back, watched how they playd and taok notes. After the hour session we gave them a questionaire to fill out. One issue we mulled over was, "Are students in a game design program representative of the buyers of our game?". They are definitely a core demographic, leaning torward the "hard core" vs the"casual" gamer. I can't say I really have a good idea if they are. I do think Xbox gamers tend to be more "hard core" gamers. The students were really great in giving us good feedback and their response to the game was very encouraging. After 2 days of play testing I gave a talk/Q&A to the students...many of them seemed very interested in the business side of things.