The annual GDC event is taking place this week, and while I would have loved to attend and mingle with indies, the travel and hotel costs were simply too prohibitive. I prefer to sit at home, work on my project and attend next year when I actually have a product to show.
Rather than wallow in self-pity, I’m going to wax nostalgic for a bit on my first experience at GDC. Back in 2007, after having failed for the second year running to convince my employers to send me (being junior sucked), I decided to book a week of holiday, and sponsor myself to a trip. In this way, I didn’t need to worry about what sessions to attend, or any company duties to see to.
I stayed in a little dinky hotel in the semi-ghetto, but other than that it was a lovely experience. The experiences that stood out:
- Seeing Jonathan Blow demo an early build of Braid as well as the various prototypes he produced during the development process.
- Jeff Minter’s IGS keynote, and all his wacky games, including a sneak peek of his latest title, Space Giraffe.
- Attending Shigeru Miyamoto’s keynote. His games are the reason I make games.
- Witnessing the unveiling of Little Big Planet, and then attending the little known Media Molecule session immediately after their keynote. They showed off their development process and all the cool prototypes they created. Oh yeah, and shaking Peter Molyneux’s hand, who was extremely supportive of his former employees’ work.
- The Game Developer Choice Awards, and particularly the IGF awards. You can pretty much draw a direct link between what I am currently working on with watching Jonathan Mak receive his various awards for Everyday Shooter.
- Pretty much the entire IGF summit. In my opinion, the first two days of the Independent Games Summit are worth the full cost of entry to GDC.
- Meeting the various indie developers.
- Getting drunk at the Microsoft party as a Sony developer after having been unable to secure tickets to the Sony party. Fun times.
Already, this year’s IGF summit has produced some interesting sessions. I point you to the 2dboy session where they intimately discuss sales figures for their indie title World of Goo. Apparently Petri Purho’s talk was a treat, and Cactus’ presentation was hilarious (check out Dyson’s Alex May’s photo stream). Hopefully someone will have the decency to upload the videos so the rest of us can enjoy them.
Work Done Last Week
I implemented two new features last week, both affecting the controls of the avatar. The second is a variation on the first, but their parallel behaviors open up some interesting doors for further exploration. The latter feature allows the player to navigate more easily in the vertical direction.
The lack of vertical mobility in the game has been bothering me for a while. It limited the scope of movement in a severe way, and I’m delighted to have found a solution to address this without compromising on the “realistic feel” that I’m going for.
Another important by-product of these features is a natural risk-reward system. These special moves the avatar can now do offer more freedom to the player but come at a certain cost. Resources have to be sacrificed to make the best use of these new abilities. This creates decisions and challenges for the player to solve.
More importantly, I am starting to see different puzzle scenarios emerge. This is personally encouraging as level design is an area I have very little confidence in. I am starting to come up with cool little organic challenges for the player after struggling to do so for a long time.
Work Planned This Week
I am going to continue to experiment with these new features, and implement a couple small scenarios to show them off. I will continue to tweak the behavior of the main avatar, and start toying with the risk-reward balance.
I will also continue to improve various architectural areas in preparation for putting together an effective play test demo. There a lot of areas that need polish (renderer, physics bugs, presentation).
Finally, depending on time, I will create a few more objects to play around with in the test level. I’m starting to get the hang of Photoshop.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply