Game Design

As a whole i managed to get around and meet some really cool people, and the talks were so inspirational. I’ll do my best to go through summaries of the talks that i went to over two days as a way for me to decompress my thoughts and take away’s from each. 

(A quick disclaimer, my notes were a bit haphazard in places so if i miss crediting anyone for a talk please let me know and i will update it) 

Opening Keynote  

After registration was the opening keynote got underway with Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja started us off a talk getting us thinking about this years theme, the ripple effect. The basic premise of which was about the connections you make in your life as a dev and how over time those connections turn into a network as those people scatter to the winds with their connection to you with them. 

Main take away’s

Make connections so that you can make connections that make connections.

Apply for jobs even if you think you aren't qualified as you never know where they can lead.

Nobody can do this by themselves, get help from your peers.

Design Hindsight's From Long Running Games

This was the first of the many design talks i was planning on going to in GCAP. Emilie Poissenot gave a fantastic speech about long running games or games as service as another way of putting it. It covered things like how documenting everything is ten times as important in games that you need to keep working on for five plus years and how the industry changes so quickly that it is impossible to plan for it, so plan that your plans won’t work.

Main take away’s

Plan for mistakes due to industry changes.

Readjust to those changes by making informed decisions with as much current relevant data as possible.

Creating A World And Making It Stick

Following on from one design talk to another this time with David Gaider talking about the creation of the Dragon Age universe and the pitfalls that it fell into. The talk was a very interesting look at what kind of diverging paths your team can naturally go down if you don’t touch base and make sure that your team is working on the same product. Again this talk went into the importance of documentation and how even if you have written an encyclopedia full of information, if you don’t have the cliff notes somewhere no one will read it.

Main take away’s

Don’t work in a bubble making assumptions about the work of others.

The lore and gameplay should serve into each other, they are not entirely separate things.

You are writing a guide for your team, not an encyclopedia.

You don’t get to decide what statements your decisions make. analyse what statements you could potentially be saying and ask yourself if you are okay with that.

Designing Ethical Interfaces

Onto a talk very close to my heart, accessibility. Alayna Cole and John Kane were fantastic in getting into the nitty gritty of the issues to do with not only what we traditionally think of as accessibility such as colourblind options, subtitles etc. But also the kind of accessibility options that not having push people away from your game such as representation of queer people in your media that when done poorly puts those people off of your game. It went in depth into how all of these things you should be talking to people that the options are for so as to make informed decisions on how they are implemented.

Main take away’s

There is no excuse for not thinking about accessibility for your game

Act early, with language especially as there are many design impacts that easy to implement early but hard to put in after the fact.

Consult with people whenever possible, get a wide range of perspectives for you game.

If you offend someone use it as a learning opportunity.

Tackling The Fear

Moving away from design talks for a bit and onto some business, Producing. Emre Deniz from OPX talked a lot about pitching your idea and how getting funding for your studio is not straight forward as it took 5 months of iterating on how the game presented before the idea was sold. It also touched on the idea of planning for failure and having contingencies in place that helped OPX adapt to the declining VR market. In amongst this were the themes of cultivating a healthy and rewarding company culture.

Main take away’s

Pitch a business that you would invest in

Pay people properly so they can focus on the work and deliver a better product in the end.

Think about how your going to defend your idea.

Stress is corrosive not explosive, avoid burnout by taking healthy breaks from your project if needed.

Positioning - How To Discover And Amplify What Is Remarkable About Your Game

This talk AKA “why should anyone give a F###”, was one of the most applicable talks i went to as an aspiring indie/solo dev. Marla Fitzsimmons, Felix Kramer, and Chris Wright talked about how to position your game for widespread appeal by mainly standing apart from the crowd and understanding what makes your game special.

Main take away’s

Think about your potential competitors and how you stand out from them.

Elevator pitches should:

What is it about

What makes it special

Described in easy to understand terms

Should create intrigue that leads to deeper questions about your game

Do as much research as possible to find out what is remarkable about your game and how you can push that.

Day 1 - Final Thoughts

All of the pre-prod documents are finally out of the way, and its time to start getting this game made. We currently have a prototype with the beginnings of movement and the start of the dodge mechanic.

What I enjoyed: In the unit i set myself the goal of modelling everything that was going into my project, I thought i could really use the practice as i wasn’t entirely happy with how i performed in the art unit earlier in the year.

This lead to me quickly realising that i wasn’t going to reach my initial vision for the project, however having learned from the aforementioned art unit that you should always re-scope early I managed to avoid complete crisis and deliver something that i’m happy to show off.

What I didn’t enjoy: Narrative in general has never been my strong point in anything i had always struggled with putting pen to paper when it came to constructing stories and have always preferred disciplines that give much clearer pass or fail results.

Narrative however is very subjective when it comes to the quality of the final result which really sets my anxiety off, because of this i decided to play to my strengths and make something funny and a bit dumb about a possessed toaster that helps you make breakfast.

This however raised another problem. Where do i go from there? I had the base premise down however it was so bare bones and bonkers i had no idea what to do with it for the first week! Eventually the ball got rolling after some back and forth banter and joking with the teacher and other students that got my mind turning giving me some ideas. 

Here is a line of screen shots as the project evolved from alpha to beta to gold

In summary i’m ultimately very happy with how this unit turned out and i’m tentatively looking forward to future project work.

Today i learned a valuable lesson on uploading multiple versions of your project for submission days to make sure you get it in on time. I didn’t commit my SVN the night before so the alpha i submitted was more like a greybox.

I still managed to get some useful testing out of it in regards to lighting, scale and overall level layout though and for the most part i hit what i was going for with the warm comfortable feeling i was going for.

Once i was home i went straight to cleaning up some code and properly setting up the ability to pick things up and open doors. which resulted in the above GIF which gave me a good laugh.

I finally ironed it all out though and arrived at this.