GDC: Pushing the State of the Art with Nokia First Party Games

Dan Scott, Nokia’s Head of Global Production took this stage this afternoon to present to the Game Developer’s Conference some of the things that Nokia is doing as a first party games publisher on the N-Gage platform.

He said that the mission of Nokia Games was to drive innovation on the platform, demonstrate best practices in terms of development, and of course, bring revenue to Nokia.Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol

While mentioning there were many more first-party games in development than have been announced, he held back from showing anything new. Instead he used the examples of ONE, Creatures of the Deep, and Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol to make his points.

Among the things Nokia games could do to innovate were introduce micro-transactions, episodic content (which he suggested would roll out with Dirk Dagger), games that used pervasive real-world elements, and even games that used different things such as the camera or the motion sensor for input controls.

Another possibility was something called a “cross-genre” game. In this instance, the events in one game, such as a strategy game could affect what happens in another game, perhaps an action or roleplaying game, sharing metadata across the N-Gage Arena service.

Scott also mentioned games such as Project White Rock in terms of a game with both a PC and mobile presence and Yamake for its community of user-generated content. Even a massively multiplayer game for mobile was given as a possibility for N-Gage, but not defined as anything specifically under development.

Above all, one came away with a sense of excitement and a desire to innovate on the part of Nokia’s first party game efforts: the best is yet to come.

*For another take on this story, see this Pocket Gamer write-up.