#migw17

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

The Games Industry in Australia has changed a lot since I was back studying Game Development. I started studying in June 2008, when Australia had several different game studios open - most of them AAA companies, or working for big publishers. Western Australia even had a large studio of its own, Interzone, working on a football (soccer) MMORPG. But everything had already began to change.

Studios began closing, and Australia started to experience a dramatic brain drain as talented people started moving overseas to studios where they could continue to work for a living wage. I found myself graduating University in a country that no longer had any big AAA studios to support the career I’d been studying and gone into debt to get into. It was only by sticking around and being stubborn about not leaving the country, that Australia started to see its game development community return.

Today, there’s several very strong indie studios scattered around the country. But a large number of them are focused in Victoria - where funding is plentiful, and there’s a large coworking space in which developers can gather and help one another. For better or for worse, Victorian developers are a privileged few in the Australian game development scene.

When you find yourself in the city for Melbourne International Games Week, you wouldn’t really notice that developers struggle to get by in Australia. You’d be forgiven for thinking that most Game Development takes place in Melbourne, with the support of the Victorian government, out of the Arcade co-working space.

That’s not really any one group’s fault. Melbourne game devs sell Melbourne successes, because they need to keep the interest of the Victorian government and show just how much good they are helping the game developers there to do. But because it’s “Melbourne International Games Week”, very many people - even developers attending - are surprised when they hear that any state outside of Melbourne is successfully making games, and have people attending.

I don’t know how many times when I’m in Melbourne that people express shock to me that there’s actually a single Perth developer attending, let alone the 20-30+ that fly over every year. Your presence gets lost in the noise that is the celebration of Melbourne-made games and the successes that they produce.

Which is a problem, when the successes of games in other states get lost in this noise. A success in the Perth game development community becomes a success of the Melbourne game development community. Ideally, we could just call them all Australian made games. But that’s ignoring the different challenges each state poses to established or aspiring Game Devs.

In my experience (as a white man, so take it as you will) minority groups face similar (but not even close to the same) issues when they experience success. The game development community in Australia has gotten better at amplifying the voices of women and making their successes in the community clear to the world, but people of colour and anyone that is transgender or non-binary or queer - they still find their successes simply being wrapped up inside of the same pre-defined categories. Despite their experiences and challenges being so dramatically different.

That’s an extremely complex set of different problems that I’m really not qualified to speak on (see: white man). But it’s something I care about, and I know for a fact it needs to change.

Melbourne has made a successful Game Development community and talks it up every day. So any time somebody not from Melbourne is successful, and doesn’t speak about the challenges they faced or just the fact alone that they are not from Melbourne - their success simply becomes a Melbourne success.

These voices are the ones that need the most amplification. We need to be better about talking about our successes (and equally importantly, our failures) so that the ripples of change that have made such an impact on Melbourne can start making changes elsewhere. We won’t see similar government funding in other states on the back of Melbourne’s success, if other state governments are under the impression that Melbourne is the only state with successful game studios.

At the Australian Game Developer Awards this year, 9 games were given awards. Of those 9 games, only 3 were developed in Melbourne, Victoria. Two were developed in Perth, Western Australia. Two were developed in Adelaide, South Australia. And two more were developed in Brisbane, Queensland.

The only way I knew this was by looking up the different studio names listed on a Kotaku Australia news article. Of course, I was aware of the location of several of the studios based on personal experience with them - but again, you’d be mistaken for thinking that they were all based in Melbourne.

Right now, the entire Australian Game Dev community is making ripples in every single city around the country. But only one of those places is calling out each and every ripple they make, drawing a spotlight on their successes. The ripples won’t seem to get far outside of Victoria at face value. Not unless you go searching for them.

I graduated University and attended the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco as a scholar in 2013. This year at Melbourne International Games Week, I was given the opportunity and privilege to give back to that program by being the mentor of a scholar attending MIGW. I got the offer to do that through a good friend who I’d never have met if I wasn’t getting out of Perth. The substantial ripples of my scholarship at a conference on the other side of the world four years ago caught up with me and gave me an opportunity to give back and learn something about myself again this year. And who knows if or where they’ll catch up with me again?

If I just stayed in the one place, creating ripples in that one location, never going elsewhere to seek out new experiences and speaking about my personal successes, I’d never have gotten that incredible opportunity.

We - as a community - need to get better at amplifying our successes, as well as the successes of others. Especially those that don’t have the same privileges that we have. We need to shine a spotlight on successes that are made under especially trying circumstances, when they are successes that we take for granted. That’s when we’ll start to see real change - not just as a community - but as an industry.

Put Melbourne and the incredible women in games development in the spotlight. Have a spotlight for every game from another state and every other person that had to fight through adversity to do something good. Show everybody that they are not just an accepted part of our community, but a part of it that’s embraced and welcomed as an equal - without pigeonholing them in with others. Show Victoria why they should continue to fund games and support game development spaces, and give every other state a reason to start - by drawing attention to their successes.

Don’t just make ripples.

So GCAP Day 2 for me was the most heavily ‘Production talk’ oriented. Well... I say that, but there was a fair amount of QA and testing stuff in the morning by Daniel Kidney of Media Molecule, and Luke Dicken of Zynga/IGDA. The latter being the more important one (to me, at least) as I had met Luke back in 2013 during my GDC scholarship, when he was just fresh out of his own scholarship and took over organising the Scholars program.

Or at least, that’s my understanding of the story. I could be told I’m wrong.

The afternoon was taken up primarily by a talk by another friend of mine - Amy Dallas - about managing the unmanageable project. It was a particularly cathartic talk and... reassuring in the sense that sometimes bad projects just happen, and it’s out of your control how they can go down. That’s a possible story for another time though, when it comes to my own personal experience with bad projects.

I was unfortunately not able to make the - what I have been told is - incredibly powerful talk by Kate Edwards at the end of the day to close out GCAP, but I’ll be hunting it down the moment it turns up on YouTube. No, instead, I was spending my afternoon in a meeting with a Sony account manager discussing Symphony of the Machine (Stirfire’s most recently released title, a VR game) and potential future projects.

With GCAP wrapped up, and the meeting done, we went back and got changed to head to the Australian Game Developer’s Awards. Stirfire’s Symphony of the Machine was nominated for an award, which we unfortunately didn’t win. But two other Western Australian games did - Paradigm, and Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock. Of course walking away without an award was disappointing (though I think as anybody does walking into an award ceremony like that, you hype yourself up more to lose than you do to win anything).

But I think my real disappointment of the evening was the missed opportunity to not talk up the success of the games industry in other states more than we did, while given a golden opportunity. I think - Western Australia and the other states aside from Victoria are particularly bad at calling out their successes. And so at an event like GCAP, any success is assumed to be a Victorian success unless you say something to the contrary.

That’s probably another blog post for another time...

Thursday - as mentioned - was supposed to be a relaxing day. Spent inside, just chilling out after Unite, GCAP and the AGDA’s. We went out for breakfast fairly late - around 10. Found a fantastic little coffee shop, had some incredible breakfast, and then headed back. Lisa - Stirfire’s Creative Director - parted ways with us to go off to the WIG lunch. And so Dylan - my friend, Stirfire coworker, and co-partner in Citrus Shark - and myself, sat around.

But only for like, 30 minutes, before declaring that we were going to head to the Arcade.

The Arcade is Melbourne’s Game Development co-working space. They moved fairly recently into new digs, and to say it’s incredible is an understatement. They really are priveleged to have such an excellent location to work out of, with utilities and resources at their disposal that most other indie devs in Australia would kill for. For real. Actually kill. Go out there and sign me up to be a hitman as long as you pay for a desk for me at the Arcade.

It was awesome, getting to meet other devs and seeing how they operate in Melbourne. Makes me absolutely jealous, for sure, but it was definitely awesome. And there was free food. But that was less important than the creativity and talent literally dripping from the walls at this place.

Well, not literally. Ew. but you know what I mean.

Of course, I’d gone out to the Arcade because it didn’t seem like my other plan of the day was going to come to fruition. And then it did. I had been trying to get time to sit down and have a chat with Amy Dallas. 

Game dev is a weird thing where you meet somebody once or twice, chat with them for an hour, decide you are now great friends, and then try to chase eachother down while your degrees of separation are small enough to make it a viable option. That’s basically my relationship with Amy. We’d tried to make time to catch up at GDC earlier this year, but it fell through because our schedules just couldn’t align.

So this was a good opportunity! I said my goodbyes to peeps at the Arcade, and hopped a tram to a coffee place I’d suggested we meet at. It turned out to be terrible, so I suggested a bar instead and we met up. We talked game dev, and dentists, and politics (seriously, I’m pretty sure at this stage that American game devs love coming to Australia because they can rant). Before I knew it, we’d been sitting an hour and it was time for Amy to get going.

I caught up with others for a brief little get together to see off Lisa (the aforementioned Stirfire Art Director), and then made my way off to dinner with Vee (Stirfire’s CEO) and the Party Loaded crew. It was just a chill dinner, chatting over food and drinks about games and movies and such. But not from a “what are you doing for work” perspective. It was the perfect way to start winding down and transitioning into that PAX mindset.