Brittany Shively - GDC Notes

Post date: Mar 15, 2015 3:28:21 AM

The next person I talked to was Michael Mucci who is a Senior Interactive Designer at Nickelodeon. His main responsibilities at Nickelodeon include working a lot with the general art direction of a project. His most recent projects at Nickelodeon consist of the SpongeBob free runner games. I met him while watching someone play through Ori and the Blind Forest and talked to him about his views on the game. He mentioned that he thought the art direction was beautiful, but he did not think the goal of the game was obvious enough. He knew what he was supposed to do, but did not know why he was supposed to do it. He asked me about what I was working on currently at Ringling, so I explained how we were working on preproduction for our senior thesis projects, and the work we do during that process. He really liked that Ringling has us do that before starting to actually create our thesis projects.

After this I attended my first real presentation at GDC. It was a talk titled “How We Made a Game Not Fun”, and Mike Hines who is a Developer Evangelist for Amazon Games presented it. His first point he brought up was, “Is the game fun for the winner AND the loser?” In order to make the answer to this question a yes, you as the game designer must find a way to help the player in last place gain some pace or not fall further behind, without hindering the winning player too much. He then went to describe Flow that is the state a player is in when they are simply focused in the moment. When a player is able to enter the Flow state, the length of their sessions while playing a game increase, they begin to play more sessions of the game, and they generate a deeper emotional connection to the game. He brought up a game from the website http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ which is part of a thesis study that can be found on www.jenovachen.com/flowingames. The game is titled flOw and was used as an example because it was a great example of his next point, which was, “In order for a game to have good flow, it must have a clear goal, few distractions, immediate feedback, and balance perceived difficulties and perceived skills.” He said one of the most helpful was to test your game is to use AB testing which is where you try multiple variants with multiple variant groups to track results and figure out which variant scored highest and why.

After this talk I had the chance to talk to Lysandra Silber who was an Environment Artist for a revamped volleyball style indie game at the Xbox One lounge. I talked to her about our preproduction work, which caused her to talk about her preproduction for her senior thesis project and how it guided her to where she is today. Her game had a retro Sega Genesis side scrolling style. There were two teams both from different countries, and there was a defensive player and an offensive player. The defensive player could not move, but their gun fired 3 bullets at a time and they could fire it twice while the ball was on their side of the court. The offensive player could move around, but their gun only shot one bullet and they could only fire the gun once when the ball was on their side of the court. The players could score by having the ball hit the ground on their opponent’s side of the court, or by getting the ball into one of the three goals behind their opponent. She loved seeing us get competitive and into playing her game.

 The next person I had the privilege of talking to was another indie game developer by the name of David Banner. David currently works for a company called Whales Interactive, but worked on AAA games like Tomb Raider for most of his career. He chose to move to indie games so that he could be his own boss, and make the games he wanted to make. He advised me to try and learn Unity and 3ds Max in my spare time because those are the software’s that Xbox gives out to its indie developers. He also advised us to work on a lot of personal project to help us become well rounded with different programs and art styles. I also had the chance to playtest his game. He chose a simple style of art to help separate it from other games that are coming out. His game is a first person exploring game. The player is able to get different powers that will power up on of their hands. Each of these powers must be used to open new passages to explore more areas. The two powers we were able to playtest included a see-through skeleton hand that allowed you to take away or apply matter to an object, and a green hand that allowed you to telepathically move objects.

I also had the pleasure of eating lunch with the Crystal Dynamics team and having the opportunity to talk and get portfolio reviews from some of the employees there. One piece of advice they kept giving us was to model some super cool prop, and not to worry about the texture size or poly count. They just want to see that we have the ability to make something that looks cool. 

The last talk I had the chance to go to was the Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer talk featuring Wyeth Johnson from Epic, Shawn Robertson from Irrational, Greg Foertsch from Firaxis, David Johnson from Infinity Ward, and Steve Scott from Bungie. In this talk they discussed what could make or break a portfolio! Everyone on the panel agreed that contact sheets are must because they all hate turnaround videos for models. They said unless you are an animator or VFX artist do not show us a reel, still images are fine. They also stressed the importance of being able to edit your portfolio. Do not keep work in there because you have grown attached to it or want to show how far you have come. Only show your best work because they will judge your ability to design good work by whether the work in your portfolio is good or not. If you kept a bad piece in there, then they will think you just do not know the difference between good art and bad art. They also said to only show things of equal strength. They do not want to see a portfolio that starts strong and fades or a portfolio that starts strong, fades, and then gets strong again. They want to see strong image after strong image. Another common consensus was that a spelling error shows a lack of attention to detail, so always check your spelling and grammar in your resumes and cover letters because they will pass over you if there are errors. Everyone on the panel also agreed that we should all just focus on being good artists. They said it is good to know the tool, but they can always teach you a new tool, they cannot always teach you how to be a good artist. David Johnson said that in his demo reel, instead of having music, he had a voice over of the process he went through when creating each of his visual effects. When he said this, everyone of the panel freaked out and said they have never had someone do that before, but now they want everyone to do that! They also discussed how everyone has to take art tests and not to stop working on the art test once you have completed what the company wanted. For example, they said if you are supposed to model a character, constantly ask the company for feedback and critique, and once you finish modeling the character (which was the requirement) go ahead and bake it down, texture it, pose it, and put it into a lit environment. This shows them just how much you really want the position, and the effort you are willing to put in once they hire you. They even said it would be okay to model a prop that you did not design as long as you got permission from the artist and credit them as the original designer. This is because it shows them that you are able to take a concept and create it (which is what you will have to do in the industry). Someone asked what to where to an interview and the response was a short story that ended with, “wear ass-less chaps.” Basically they want us to show up to an interview the same way we would show up to work. They want just want to see our personality and not a mask we put on for an interview. When a job listing states, “Must have 2-3 years of work experience,” they said that really means, “Should have work representative of 2-3 years of work experience.” They do not really care if you have had a job before as long as your work is at the caliber of fidelity that they need it to be.

After this talk I went up and talked to Shawn Robertson about Ringling since he is an Illustration alumni class of 1994, and he insisted that Kevin and I go to the portfolio reviews after and choose him to review our work. He gave a lot of the same critique I had been receiving in the past, but also mentioned one thing that was brand new. He loved my car model and advised me to bring it into Ue4 and redo the materials there. He said it should definitely keep in in my portfolio, and not touch the model at all because he thinks it looks fine, but giving it a material update using PBR could really push it to the next level.

Overall I had an amazing experience at GDC! The only downfall was there were not many companies doing official portfolio reviews, but if you talked to enough people then it was easy to find artists to review it for you. I learned so much from GDC and definitely plan to go again next year.

Here are some pictures from the week!

Ringling Booth: Business cards!