My first session of the day was one which I, quite honestly, attended solely to write-up a mocking article later on. The session was Richard Rouse III's "Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry." And, if you check out my write-up on the session, you might notice a lack of mockery. This is a result of Rouse handling the topic far differently than I originally intended. I still think it's an absurd topic for a session and handling the material somewhat well doesn't change that fact, but it's not the source of humor I expected going in. Rouse gets extra points for showing the Mad Men scene where Don Draper demonstrates the advertising campaign for Kodak's Carousel.
Immediately after that twenty-five minute session, I went on over to "Designing Shadow Complex" with Donald Mustard. It's unfortunate that this equally short session had to be so abbreviated, because Mustard was not only an incredible speaker but also was showing some amazing procedural tidbits regarding Chair's approach to developing Shadow Complex. Most fascinating was that Mustard and the Chair team used Adobe Illustrator to create an entire 'paper' graph of the world map of Shadow Complex. It was divided into the squares/screens that divide the actual game's world and included various guards, pick-ups, blocked doors, ladder, and, seemingly, a level of clarity for the full game world that was completely fascinating at such an early point in the game's development. On top of this, Chair developed a "player legend." This is the size of the player, the way he can charge in either direction before he hits critical speed, how high a single jump goes, how high a double jump goes, and the maximum height of the player's hook shot. The team then dragged this player legend around the map to get an approximate idea for how Shadow Complex's planned game world would play out.
Once the team was happy with it on a paper level, the entire game world was blocked out in Unreal Engine in BSP and with some pick-ups and enemies and very basic cover. This allowed the team to get into the game with and iterate on and perfect the core gameplay loop. Mustard said handling the development of the game this way allowed them to add more and more weapon functionality that really worked together with the world to create emergent strategies and functionalities. It was a fascinating look into the game's development on a level that I would have adored to see in, say, the Uncharted 2 post-mortem. I asked Mustard how they handled changes once the BSP world had been made, and he said that once the game world block was in the engine that all changes were made directly to the BSP layout (which makes sense) and also that the original BSP brushes formed the basis of the game's collision volumes in a lot of cases. Lee Perry's prototyping talk the day prior had as imilar level of depth and behind-the-scenes to actually aid developers as well.
I ran out of the Mustard's session once I had my process question answered and ran into a nearby lecture hall to get my MacBook power cord back. It was here that I realized the woman who asked to borrow it was Christina Norman, lead gameplay designer at Bioware on Mass Effect 2, and had just finished giving a giant speech on the design refinements between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. So that was awesome. Next up on my rushed attempts to get back to the hotel and head to the airport was a quick meet-and-talk with Manveer Heir, lead designer at Raven Software. He was talking to Michael Abbott when I came to say hi, so it was great to briefly talk about Manveer's talk with him and once again thank Michael for organizing last night's dinner. And this brought an end to my first-ever GDC.
GDC was, quite simply, a totally fantastic week. I'm not a quiet person, but I am very shy about introducing myself and meeting people, so it was totally great to meet all these super friendly people who I've talked to online about games in various forms for years. And listening to five days of sessions gave me some great insight into various design processes as well as some ideas of my own both for my independent work as well as my work on our project at LightBox. My one regret is that there were some people I met that I didn't get to talk to in much detail, but that's just kind of a thing that's bound to happen at a ginormous conference like this.
Here's a wrap-up of my daily GDC write-ups. It's also worth noting that I didn't do full write-ups of all of my sessions as I don't complete hate myself enough to do that, so there are analyses and summaries of various other sessions buried throughout my daily write-ups.And here's a list of all of the live write-ups I did on various sessions/lectures throughout the conference. I can't stress enough that these are very rough, but I felt it was more important to get them up for people who wanted the information than to spend a lot of time on polishing the writing. This is why I'm not a real journalist.
- Abusing Your Players Just for Fun
- Increasing Our Reach: Designing to Grab and Retain
- NinjaBee's Top Ten Development Lessons
- Indie Solutions to Design Savvy Somethings
- Uniquely Ruthless: The Espionage Metagame of EVE Online
- The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design
- Five Ways a Video Game Can Make You Cry
