Mark "messhof" Essen and Daniel Benmergui (developer of Today I Die)
This session was titled "Control Inspiration," but was actually less focused on controls and perhaps more on inspiration by itself. The format was extremely informal and was basically just two separate talks given by Mark and then Daniel.
Yesterday Cactus identified creating games with punk rock, and cited Mark as one of his inspirations. Seeing him explain several of his games in person makes this analogy ring particularly true. His games are minimalist and pared down (much like punk rock songs, which can often be a minute or less compared to the three to four minutes seen in mainstream music.) Mark presented some of his inspirations, such as a video of a robot that learns to walk by itself, and discussed some of the things he has been experimenting with visually, such as random texture generation.
Daniel's presentation was essentially a history of the development of Today I Die, as well as look into the future of the game. Daniel described some of the issues he had during early development, such as a poem-building mechanic in which rearranging key words in a poem would control gameplay. The problem he encountered with this was that in these early versions, words would change into an entirely different word when placed in a different location in the poem, which was confusing to players because one couldn't predict what would happen to a word when it was moved into a different location. Eventually, Daniel went through over a hundred revisions of Today I Die over its six month development period -- including almost abandoning it for a space shooter prototype -- before arriving at the final version. He also presented a look at the next revision of Today I Die, which will be released as an iPhone game, with improved graphics and revised gameplay that should keep players from giving up early on due to confusion.
