Category: Essays and Opinions

Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Crafting Satisfying Combat Experiences at Insomniac

Steps for a basic combat experience –

  1. Establish a front
  2. Layer setup
  3. Establish a combat focus
  4. Useful and clear cover
  5. Send enemies in waves
  6. Have a clear flanking route
  7. Re-direct the front
  8. Effectively use high-priority targets

Give players an immediate read of the space

Continue reading “GDC 2011 Notes – Crafting Satisfying Combat Experiences at Insomniac”
Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Tech Art Roundtable 3

How do you optimize across multiple platforms?

Optimizing for WinXP is bad because it’s worse than phones right now

More people at the roundtable compared to two years ago. The room was too full!

 

Education -> Need TA students to solve real-world problems

  • Tech Art training sounds like its best done on a person-by-person basis, so many skills that can’t be taught in classroom
  • Find the ones that have a talent or interest in it? Are they problem-solvers? Do they tinker? Do they teach other students?
  • Have potential TAs do a rotation through IT (Or expand role of lab monitors to really include troubleshooting student issues, and pump TAs through that)

 

How do you institutionally encourage this behavior?

  • Documentation, Tools-writing, Tinkering, Helping other students
  • Potential TAs need to get work done too, establish rules so they can get it done
  • Mentorship of younger TAs by established ones in school?
  • Hire students to act as tech artists in on-campus facilities?

 

Tech Artists are Force Multipliers, Firefighters, and Preemptive Firefighters

  • Look Development
    • Shaders
  • Tools programming
  • Problem-solvers
  • Riggers
    • Tech Animators
  • Outsource Wranglers

 

They MUST work alongside artists, be embedded with them (works well at Volition)

TAs need people and managerial skills

 

How do you test tech artists right out of school?

  • Tests

Games are innovating faster because teams are smaller and more agile than film

Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Strategy Games Panel

We’re seeing a lot Cinderella success stories int he strategy gaming realm, lots of one-man projects rocking the show

What Needs to Change

  • Put design first
    • Maintain core values
    • Player Choice!
  • Think at all different levels of intensity
    • Smaller games -> do they need single-player campaigns?
      • Sins of a Solar Empire doesn’t have one, for example
    • Cut to the chase
    • Minimize design clutter
    • Check scope
  • Cheaper delivery methods
  • Focus on one audience
    • Acknowledge that you can’t please everyone
  • Focus on user experiences

Soren Johnsons on League of Legends: “The facebook game for people who like games”

 

Everyone learned humility in the face of Facebook games

 

Players are interested in interesting decisions and the consequences thereof

 

“Co-op CompStomp”

  • Want kind of RTS would you make if you didn’t include PvP?

Key Issue -> Accessibility

  • Limited by manuals and documentation
  • Need tutorials and intro levels

Will AI get better?

  • Yes, but we don’t need a Terminator, we need a Terminator w/ enough flaws to entertain

 

iPad and iPhone aren’t stealing because they serve different purposes and different audiences

Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Art Direction for Photoreal Games

It’s really all about getting everything looking juuuuust right

Photoreal is just as much an art direction decision as any other style, and there’s a lot of room to play around in that

Photoreal requires a lot of creativity, it’s not easy, very difficult to achieve

“cinematic photoreal” -> beautiful and visually distinct images

-Every film has its own unique look, and you can pick out a shot from films even if you have no contextual information at all

Photoreal can be achieved through proper application and use of:

  1. Textures
  2. Lighting
  3. Post Effects
Continue reading “GDC 2011 Notes – Art Direction for Photoreal Games”
Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Art Culture Panel

“No dicks, no douchebags, no drama” ~ Gearbox

Gearbox encourages culture of critique through anonymous peer reviews of both person and work

Encourage mindset of “How good is that other guy, and how do I figure out what he knows?”

Have “Training Days” -> Everyone teaches something

Show and Tell days -> Art Councils in different fields that discuss techniques to better each other.

Cooking Show-type tutorials

Continue reading “GDC 2011 Notes – Art Culture Panel”
Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Notes – Designing Limbo’s Puzzles

Focus on gameplay

Puzzle Design Principles in Limbo

  • Challenging problem-solving
  • There’s a difference between pretending to solve a puzzle (doing a puzzle) vs. actually solving a puzzle (thinking through, arriving at conclusion, executing)
  • Easy and quickly-understandable mechanics
  • As few elements as possible and simple elements
  • Discourage brute-force trial and error, it ends with the player not getting enough of a sense of achievement
  • Don’t repeat puzzles, puzzles do not have replay value
  • Solve complicated problems with simple explanation
  • Do not challenge player through volume of STUFF

Continue reading “GDC 2011 Notes – Designing Limbo’s Puzzles”
Categories
Essays and Opinions

GDC 2011 Postmortem

Went to GDC this year, had a lot of fun. Met a lot of great people, expanded my knowledge base even more.

Advice

  • If you worked at a studio over the summer, it’s likely better to wear some manner of apparel from that studio than to try and dress fancy. A lot of devs walk around the conference advertising the studio they work for through apparel, and if you can immediately implant the idea in the recruiters’ mind that you’re a dev, you skip the “Student” perception entirely. I didn’t do this, but it seemed to benefit others.
  • Adapted from Seth Gibson: you spend all this time in school learning, and by the time you get out your portfolio might not look totally consistent because you’ve got work that spans over a year or more. If you’re struggling to get a job, you’d do yourself a favor by spending three months after graduation building a portfolio of new work that better reflects the current state of your skills.
  • Different studios want different thing –
    • Someone doesn’t care about lower poly-counts, whereas another does.
    • One studio might want to see that you can take your own photo-source textures, while another doesn’t care that you use CGtextures
    • Some studios will say “your work is good enough to get you hired”, while someone else rips you to shreds
    • Your art director from over the summer might love the spaceship you did, while the hiring manager at Obsidian might think that very same spaceship makes you look like you’re coming straight out of college
    • One wants to see concept art and process drawings, while another would just want models
    • One may say your stuff looks unoriginal, but another might buy you a drink because of it
  • You don’t want to be just a swiss army knife, nor do you want to be just a scalpel. Your best bet is to be a swiss army knife with a scalpel. Be really good at one thing, and have a good awareness of everything else.
  • Use of Crazybump was noticed in my portfolio on a couple of occasions, and I was discouraged from using it. Additionally, I was discouraged from having black appear on my normal maps.
  • When wandering the Career Pavilion floor, I would advocate that students ask for critique on their portfolio instead of asking about internships. This show’s you’re forward-thinking and can take critique, all plusses.
  • Some studios who locate themselves exclusively in the business center may also have people who can look at portfolios! Don’t be afraid, it never hurts to ask
  • Let your work speak for itself, if it’s really good stuff it’ll show. Beyond that, just make sure you’re not insane and you’ll have a good chance at making an impact on the people you’re talking to.
  • Don’t forget to ask “what’s the next step” when at the Career Pavilion
  • Offer business cards, don’t ask for them. This gives people the opportunity to stay in touch with YOU
  • Follow up, follow up, follow up
  • Your portfolio should tell whoever is looking at it what you want to do, if they have to ask your portfolio is probably too broad
    • To that end, only show what you want to do

Conference Observations

  • Not as many students bum-rushed the Career Pavilion on the final day, it was actually somewhat managable
  • Lots of people end up at the W
  • iPhone and Indie devs roamed the conference looking for artists lined up for portfolio reviews, seeing who they could snag to work on their projects. This is a trend I expect to continue in coming years.
  • I got the impression that most parties ended between 10pm and 12am, make sure you get to whatever party you found out about before this time.
  • 19,000 people this year, holy crap

Food and Drink

  • Johnny Foley’s has a dueling piano bar, which was pretty fun on my last night there
  • Gotta keep moving and operating in smaller units, 10 is probably the max of any one group going out to eat. We did 15 one night and that was  madness
  • If you’re in a pinch, the Metreon has a few quick-service places to eat, this ended up being my default most days. I would, however, recommend the Chaat Cafe if you have the time.
  • Look into the Anti-Saloon League, 441, or Swig
  • Osha Thai
  • Fang
  • Thirsty Bear Brewing Company
  • Annabelle’s Bar and Bistro
  • Mel’s Diner (good in a pinch, quick service)
  • Canton Dimsum

San Francisco

  • Bums were out in even greater force and fervor this year
  • Cold and windy year, why was it so early?!
  • The Musee Mechanique is no longer free 🙁

College

  • 32 Students/Recent Ringling Alum attended,  8 times our 2009 attendance. Of those, 4 were Conference Associates, 15 seniors, 9 juniors, 3 sophomores, 2 illustrators, and 2 2010 graduates
Categories
Essays and Opinions

Traditional Game Jamming

Along with Jeremy Griffith, Amanda Cha, and Linnea Harrison, I help to operate the Ringling College of Art and Design’s Game Design Club. Our mission is simple, to provide a structured and regular forum for Ringling students to engage in curriculum-based and extracurricular game design activities. In the first semester of each academic year the Sophomores in the curriculum are  learning about game design using traditional games, and Game Design Club found a niche in supporting that project.

Finding a way to maintain relevance during the Spring semester proved somewhat more of a challenge. We wanted a way to hone our understanding of Game Design, and traditional media had proven useful in the past. With no project grounded in the curriculum, however, encouraging students to play and analyze board games every week proved somewhat shortlived, or would prove rather expensive.

After a fair amount of reading about Global Game Jam and some idea synthesis Jeremy and I sat down with a deck of cards with the simple goal of “make a game.” Our first experiment was both success and failure. The game itself was rather boring, and unnecessarily complex. The success lay in our realization that we learned volumes about game design in 2 hours with one deck of cards, moreso than we could have trying to knock together a flash game in 48 hours.

Following that first experiment Jeremy and I simply dubbed the activity “Traditional Game Jamming” and tasked the Game Design Club with the same goal: “Make a game”. As time has progressed we vary the constraints and the media. Sometimes dice, sometimes cards, sometimes we use the assets of an extant board game outside the context of the board game’s rules.

Regardless of the contstraints these game jams held a common thread: a 2 hour time limit.  This, we found, allowed us to rapidly iterate not only on our games, but on our design skills as well. If we made a game that turned out to be boring or complex we’d analyze why the game was a failure and take that knowledge with us to the next game jam. Through this iteration we found we’re more quickly able to sketch up mechanics, goals, and challenges regardless of the projects we’ve been assgined in classes.

So, to anyone who feels it takes millions of dollars and a significant risk to make a game I say “poppy-cock”. To those who think it takes significant programming experience to bang out a prototype I say the same. I encourage you to grab a deck of cards, grab a friend, and make a game in 2 hours. It’s a great way to practice game design with no risk involved.

Artists sketch, why can’t designers jam?