Post 27 - Can't Sleep Games Will Eat Me

You read it in the title, and it was true.

I attended the 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and it was amazing! The number of booths to visit, people to talk to and interactions with other industry groups were astounding.

I was able to attend a two day game design workshop specifically headed by Marc Leblanc. It was an intense hands-on event, involving group discussion, analysis of theme and mechanics, and critique. It was focused on the Mechanics-Design-Aesthetics (MDA) game design approach. We iterated on the base game mechanics of Sissy-Fight 3000, focusing on how the games is viewed as a system, in terms of its mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. We discussed what worked, and what didn't work. We discussed if it was fun, and if that fun helped meet the theme of the game. It was wonderful!

And that was just part of Day 1!!!

I'm not going to describe every piece of each day, but GDC was worth the trip. I met many people looking for jobs, internships, long-term game veterans, start-ups, and general software developers. Hell, I even met the Space-X team who builds reusable rockets, and how they are trying to go to Mars.

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As with this trip, I have lost lots of sleep and focus. I'm tired, and beat up mentally and emotionally. It was a great trip, but everyone knows that "vacations" are a lot of work. With this being true, then "work vacations" are double, if not triple, the total amount of work.

We came back to our group discussions on the game engine to focus on for our Master Thesis Game: Hostile Territory. During this discussion everyone was very interested if we could make the character run up walls in the Unreal 4 Engine. I spent over an hour at the Unreal booth at GDC discussing with one of their head engineers, and he explained that with the three-dimensional nav-meshes, as they are currently built, it would be very difficult to do this. If we had five engineers and a few months, we might find a way to get it working.

I explained this hardship to the group, so gravity/wall walking is not the main focus right now. There was much discussion as to how the game is changing in design. Lots of "talking" occurred, but not a lot of "testing" occurred. I explained about the design workshop I attended at GDC, and if we are going to change anything, we should playtest it. This includes not just code, but paper-prototypes.

And that was the week back from GDC. More to come!