Happy New Year - The Future, some assembly required

Thanks for the messages over December, to say its been a difficult time is an understatement.

Looking backwards to look forwards is a popular sport at the turn of the year. I was recently asked to add my opinion to virtual round table of developers on simulations and guess the future. You can read our collective thoughts and opinions in the article SimHQ The Future of Simulations - 2010.

Some very interesting points came out. The comment from "Fighter Ops" Julian Leonard on how bottlenecks have shifted from hardware to complexity is pretty spot-on, I'll have to steal that.

Everyone agrees how small the market is and like starving Victorian children gazing through the window of a tea-room, see consoles getting big numbers. In console terms, 5000 units is considered a total disaster (and as it happens figures for a recently released console skateboarding title), for us that would be a healthy figure. Console and PC markets are high-risk high reward vs low risk low reward. I don't see that changing in the future but we can borrow ideas from successful genres and experiment in applying them to games like simulations. Which is in part what Combat-Helo is intended to be, an experiment in simple presentation of complexity.

Console games focus on user experience, sometimes they get it right and sometimes mind bogglingly wrong. But mostly they work to adopted practices, anyone playing a $60 game has certain expectations. Such elements can go a long way to bring complex simulations to a wider audience.

And I'll cite perhaps the most successful next-gen game in terms of sales and community involvement with well over one million instances of player made content to date. What's surprising is that it's a point and click game development kit, not unlike several made before but presentation is everything in Little Big Planet. Sadly presentation costs huge amounts of time not available to niche market games.

What does this all mean?

I have no idea. Roll on 2011, the year we finally 'get to da chopper' one way or another. I have a ton of papers to scan and sort out this week then to look at my project planner which is looking very sorry for itself.

Happy New Year everyone.