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Post date: Mar 16, 2015 1:22:38 AM
GDC 2015 was my first Game Development Conference which I’ve had the pleasure of being able to attend. I was incredibly nervous to at first, but after diving into it as soon as I was able to walk into the convention halls the whole GDC event was totally worth it and I can’t wait for next year. I met a lot of great people and have taken away a lot from the experiences I had there.
Monday:
Monday was hectic due to it being the day my roommates and myself had to take two flights to make it to San Francisco. Most of the morning, afternoon, and partial evening was spent packing+flying+and preparing our poor souls for the experience of attending GDC.
After making it to San Francisco I attended a small dinner with my roommates Walker and Louis and met up with Kat, Daniel, and Tudy at one of San Fran’s many Asian style restaurants. While there one of my friends had gotten to attention of two men, Collin and Matt, who were professional VFX artists. We spoke to them for a bit and they told us about how it’s better to work in VFX for games now a days than for movies due to way too many people are flooding the job market in the film industry while the gaming industry is always in need of a good VFX artist. We all ended up trading business cards between another and called it a night.
Tuesday:
Tuesday wasn’t my official start of the conference since I had an Expo pass but I was able to get into some really nice talks during the day. Tuesday was also my main day for becoming oriented with where everything was in the Moscone Center like the Expo floor, the Career Center, etc.
Talk 1: Grow Home, Ubisoft Lounge, 10:00am, Speaker: Andy Buck- Ubisoft Senior Programmer
This talk had a small crowd but it was incredibly insightful and really informative.
Buck started off talking about how Grow Home’s mission was to find a solution to creative gameplay. He also went into how the project was created with an 8 person team. Safety in numbers was noted by Buck as they could create a small game like Grow Home due to how big Ubisoft’s overall team is. At one point I believe someone asked him if doing small projects like Grow Home would change how Ubisoft works on bigger projects. Buck stated how he hoped they would take on bigger projects with big risks. Sometimes with bigger risks come great surprises as seen with what happened with Grow Home.
What I found really cool about Grow Home was how, as Buck described, was procedurely animated. This was mainly applied to the main character that players take control of in the game which is a robot. The team didn’t want the robot to move like a human but more like a “cartoon” of a robot. For the most part it the robot walked around like it was drunk of course. They wanted to add character through this choice though. The Grow Home team went with a walking simulator for the robot character instead of fixing the issue by creating the animations themselves.
The game itself was incredibly open for players to explore and play through. Many parts of the environment could also be manipulated however the players sees fit. The team wanted a child-based exploration approach for Grow Home. The wonder of finding a new world and exploring it is one of the key points they wanted for the game.
The appearance of the game is really impressive. Buck explained how many of the assets in the game are very low-poly but because of a complex lighting system the game has a very Pixar-like style to it which gives it a really appealing look.
The approach to the colors of the textures used on many of the in-game assets was also quite impressive. Grow Home only uses 1 texture with a multitude of color swatches for the whole game world and its assets. The UVs for which ever object are applied onto the swatch. This allowed for creating a coherent color scheme within the game.
Extra points from the talk: 1. Push ideas for gameplay and experiment! 2. Choose the fights you know you can win.
Talk 2: How We Made A Game No Fun, 1:30-2:15pm, Speaker: Mike Hines-Amazon
I arrived later than I wanted and they had already let everybody into the talk so I had to wait due to most of the room being full. I was able to catch the last 10 minutes of the presentation.
Basics that I picked up from the talk were focused on if a game was fun for both the winner and loser.
Helping the player in last place gain some pace so as to not get further behind is important.
Consider game session length as this could affect a player’s emotional connection to the game.
Facilitate the flow of a game:
1. Have clear goals
2. Have few distractions
3. Have immediate feedback
4. Balance perceived difficulties and perceived skills
Wednesday:
Wednesday was a tad hectic due to balancing time spent on the Expo and Career floors while also attending various panels/talks that I had planned to see previously. I was able to spend plenty of time on either when it came down to good planning.
I spent most of my morning wandering around on the Expo floor and the Career Center.
While at the Career Center I checked out the booths for Nexon, Storm8, and Glu. Most of the booths on the floor weren’t looking for interns so I felt more inclined to just talk to as many people as I could just to get some connections. I headed off to the Expo floor to check out the gaming tech they had on display and see the demos of the new games coming out soon. I ended up making a name for myself at the Qualcommm booth due to routinely coming back and forth to play their air derby race game on the new snapdragon TV they were showing off. I came Wednesday and Thursday to see if I could win the top lead in the leader boards and I ended up chatting with the exhibitors there since they knew my name.
Talk1: Game Developer Harassment: How To get Through, 3:30-4:30pm, Speakers: Elizabeth Sampat(Optical Binary), Zoe Quinn(The Quinnspiracy), Neha Nair(Storm8), Donna Prior(Green Ronin Publishing/Founder, Salish Events)
Speaker1: Elizabeth- No matter how small or big the incident is, all harassment counts! It is not a competition to see who’s more harassed or whose was worse. If you’re harassed that counts and should be dealt with!
Harassment happens and it sucks.
Harassment isn’t new. It’s been around for a very long time but it’s more noticed now due to more people paying attention to it.
Harassment in the game industry is keeping women from wanting to become a part of it.
Speaker2: Neha- No matter the harassment, you can get through it!
Neha went on about how being a double minority can have its drawbacks in the industry. She’s a woman of Indian decent.
She talked about her experiences with racism and sexism from people in the industry and online. They targeted her for her race and weight.
Talked about how harassment can unfortunately bleed into real-life. At an event called Digital Life in 2007 she had worked a booth with her teammates. One of her teammates had sexually assaulted her during the event.
Another event, Ikil5, Neha managed a Riot Games event. An inebriated attendee had come up to her at one point and made a very rude comment about her weight.
Her final advice to the attendees in the room was that one should “be their own knight” to defend themselves against harassment. It was a very touching part of the talk.
Speaker3: Donna- Was a moderator for The Old Republic forums.
Donna received gendered harassment from forum posters while her male co-workers were left alone.
She was blamed for destroying the forums and games. It got pretty out of hand!
What was the worst part of this was the fact that Donna and the other moderators had their information out in the open instead of being left anonymous. This turned out to be disastrous for them.
Donna made some important points by discussing how company/team representatives should have anonymous handles.
Forum users should not be allowed at all to get away with abusing staff. There should be zero tolerance for staff abuse.
Staff should always be packed up in instances of abuse or harassment.
Donna also mentioned how you should NEVER add players to your Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Speaker3: Zoe Quinn- Zoe discussed her answer to the problem of harassment in the industry instead of going into detail about what happened to her. We all know by now.
She had help co-found Crash Override, an Online Anti-Harassment Task Force which combats online hate.
It’s not your fault if you’re targeted. It can happen to anyone on the internet and real-life.
Quinn went on to stress the importance of taking care of yourself first and foremost in the case of harassment.
Document everything that happens! You’ll need evidence if the harassment gets really bad. Always take down URLs and timestamps of harassment occurrences.
Find resources to help you in the case of harassment. A good site to use as a resource is AVO.com.
Doxxing is getting more popular for hackers and harassers to use so it’s important to: Google yourself, delete old accounts, check “Who Is” info, and remove information from 3rd party information brokers like Spokeo and Retail Me Not.
In the case of hacking always have a 2-Factor Authentication. Don’t use App specific passwords and use Last Pass to help generate and keep randomly generated passwords.
Yubikey is a good investment. It’s extra-set security and is incredibly hard to break into.
Quinn closed her speech by introducing O.A.P.I, the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative. It’s going to help combat harassment and the whole room exploded in applause as she discussed it’s significance.
Talk 2: LGBT+ SIG Roundtable, 5:00-6:00pm, Speaker: Josh Moss(Independent)
The LGBT+ roundtable was a great experience and it was really refreshing to see a full room of so many diverse individuals in the game industry and people making their way into it who identified with the LGBT+ community.
The roundtable started with questions like, ”What do developers want to see?”. It’s important to know what people want to have in their games but it’s also important to work towards being inclusive of diverse groups like the LGBT+ community.
What policies do companies have in place for LGBT+ individuals? Unfortunately harassment in the workplace due to a person’s orientation is still a thing so it’s important to know, and call for, the protection of LGBT+ People in the workplace.
The roundtable also brought up how important it is for LGBT+ characters in gaming to be written by actual LGBT+ people. There’s nothing more underwhelming that seeing a heterosexual male writing a lesbian character without actually researching and speaking to actual lesbians on how to appropriately write out the character. By not having this incentive it’s hard to have accurately written LGBT+ characters in games. They end up coming out as stereostypes.
One individual at the roundtable, I unfortunately don’t recall his name since there were so many people to remember in that room, discussed GaymerX, an LGBT+ gamer convention held in California. He also talked about a few other LGBT+ game conventions and how it’s a great that we now have actual LGBT+ friendly conventions for actual queer gamers. It creates a safe space and inclusion.
Another question that was posed was whether or not LGBT+ content would incite negative actions. It is unfortunate that there are still people out there who would freak out at the idea of a queer scene or character in a game but it’s important to take into account how to approach the possibility of this sort of thing.
Lastly, how does one get allies to support LGBT+ game content? It’s still not enough that so many LGBT+ groups call her inclusion and positive representation in the community. The help from allies is needed as they’re the ones who will help bridge the gap to offer more support of seeing LGBT+ positive aspects in the gaming industry and games in general.
After the talk I hung around with my friends who attended the roundtable as well and we managed to meet a Blizzard senior software engineer named Joseph who gave us his business card and had a good chat with us about working as an LGBT+ individual at Blizzard. He talked about how people were accepting for the most part but there were still some people who weren’t comfortable with the idea of working with an LGBT+ co-worker. It was very insightful and he was a very nice guy. We also met and spoke with Howard, who’s the developer and co-founder of MochiBits games.
Later in the evening I attended the LGBT+ party at a famous bar known as The Stud. I didn’t meet to many people or talk too much due to how crowded it got so I just grabbed a drink and then headed off to the Epic Games party.
The Epic Games party was great, although I wish I had talked to more people. It was insanely crowded but the crowd was really energetic. I ended up playing the demo for the new Unreal Tournament on the second floor of the club and afterwards I met and spoke to a freelance animator and lighting artist about the game and various game dev related things. While I was waiting in line to play the demo though I spoke to an Epic Games employee who was in charge of making sure the level streaming and the overall game ran smoothly. It was a short talk but it was cool to talk to someone who had a job that you didn’t really hear about to much. Afterwards I hung out with other Ringling students at the party and tried my best to talk over the music blaring in the club. Didn’t work out too well.
Thursday:
I spent my Thursday morning scouting out the Career Center and the Expo floor again. I managed to have a good chat with one of the exhibitors in charge of the booth where they were demoing the tech for a program called Faceshift which does real-time facial capture that is applied to a mesh. It was really awesome to try the demo out and make faces at the computer for five minutes since I was animating a character’s face in real-time. The program had it’s flaws of course, my glasses caused the camera used with the program to not be able to pick up my whole face so the mesh on the screen hilariously bugged out, but it was impressive overall.
Talk 1: We Suck At Inclusivity: How Language Creates The Largest Invisible Minority For Games, 3:00-3:30pm, Speaker: Rami Ismail(Vlambeer)
This is the shortest talk I went to but it was good.
Rami started the talk by going on about how most video games are made for countries/territories that mainly speak English or Japanese.
He then went on to introduce his native language, Arabic. Arabic is spoken by 30% of the world’s population. Arabic reads from right to left instead of left to right like how we do with English. This portion of the talk turned into a linguistics lesson, but it was cool.
Rami taught the attendees in the room some basic Arabic letters and words while helping us pronounce them. It was very entertaining.
After the lesson in Arabic Rami brought up a slide showing an image from Battlefield 3. He went on about how despite the games $100,000,000 development price, they couldn’t hire someone to help them research actual, and accurate, Arabic writing for their level designs!!! The Arabic on the hotel is literally gibberish!
Rami went into detail about how even translation programs online can’t accurately translate Arabic.
He talked about how when the topic of learning another language came up to other game developers their reply was that you should just “learn English”.
By keeping games and their development tools bound in only a couple languages this keeps many people from getting into gaming and can make it confusing for outsiders to the game industry.
It can also be uncomfrotable for people who want to make games since they’ll need to learn English or another language they’ve never really used before if they want to get anywhere with developing an actual game.
This causes a big disconnect in the game developer community.
Rami closed his talk by introducing Game.dev.world which would help to connect people in gaming by translating to languages used around the world.
Talk 2: Global Game Jam Roundtable, 5:30-6:30pm, Speaker: Ciro Duran(Carcas Game Jam)
The roundtable opened up by having everybody introduce themselves and what country the came from. It was incredible to see so many game developers from all over the world in one little room.
We were then asked to split up into little groups to discuss what our best experiences with Global Game Jam were, our negatives, and what could be done better.
I had formed a group with 5 other guys who were mainly students, graduates, and at least one actually worked in the industry. We traded game jam stories and connected with each other by giving each other business cards. It was great to just talk with other people and hear how their game jam experiences were.
The main discussions afterwards turned to people from around the roundtable talking about their experiences and what came about from global game jam.
One person talked about how the game jam team they were in ended up becoming a small company over time.
It’s hard to get into a group if you have a very small skillset. Someone had discussed how their jam team had created stickers for people to wear to show what skills they were good in so it would be easy to identify and tell what person which task they would do.
Global Game Jam is great because it brings together amateurs and professionals.
Good communication is key for a game jam team and participating offers valuable lessons in team communication.
Friday:
Talk 1: Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer: Part 1- Advice From Industry Artists, Speakers: Steve Scott(Bungie), Greg Foertsch(Firaxis Games), Wyeth Johnson(Epic Games), Shawn Robertson(Irrational Games), Alison Kelly(Alison Kelly Consulting), David Johnson(Infinityward)
This was a big talk so I’ll go over as much as I can.
Always show new work in your portfolio. By showing new work you display your improvement and commitment in your portfolio.
What did you do? Isolate the parts of a level, character, etc. you worked on and show textures, bakes, and items.
Show your thought process in your work!!!!!
For VFX, make sure you fix color problems and watch for additive particles that blow out to white.
A demo reel should be made primarily by VFX and Animator ONLY!
Show how you construct your effects. Show your ability to synthesize game information.
Make sure you edit your demo reel well and portfolio! You’re judged on the worst piece you have in your portfolio.
Quality VS Quantity: Ask your friends to look at your work and used feedback from that to choose what you should have in your portfolio. Move up and improve!
Start your portfolio or demo reel with a strong piece, then show the next ones but make sure they hold just as much strength.
Check out the Polycount forums to see what quality your portfolio pieces should be. Many of the artist on Polycount are what you’ll be up against.
Don’t feel compelled to put everything you have into your portfolio.
Make sure your URL for your portfolio website works online. There’s nothing worse than showing up to a portfolio critic with a broken site.
Have good taste in what you’re showing. Make sure your work has no spelling errors and edit issues. Check for anything you may have missed!
Include work/concept sketches in your portfolio!
Have a good process visible in your portfolio. Being able to communicate your process is important. It also shows how well you’ll collaborate with others and if you’ll work well on a team.
For demo reels, include narration instead of funky music or techno beats. Narrating and explaining your process behind each piece can help sell your ideas better.
Have a good sense of color, aesthetic, storytelling, and detail in your pieces.
For characters, show their bakes, textures, have them posed, and have them put into an environment to offer context. Show the engine you made them in.
Know what the company you want to apply to wants. Align your work to the chosen company. Apply to their IP and style. This is especially good for character modeling.
Don’t show IP in concept art. They don’t want to see fan art, they want to see new ideas.
If you’re rejected keep trying! Ask why you were rejected and what you can do better.
Have a good online presence. Be professional and don’t be a jerk.
Have a good and easy to read blog that is updated!
Do contests!
In terms of resending a portfolio if you’re rejected, always include improvements and new work.
Construct an online portfolio that has categorized sections.
DO NOT put bad work into your portfolio. This will reflect badly on you.
If the work is not a part of the job you want do not put it in there!
For senior year, know where the bar is and apply yourself to making great work. Fill gaps where you want to stick out.
Show work that’s representative of 2-3 years of experience.
Show your best pieces in each genre.
Keep your demo reel under 2 minutes.
Bring a sketchbook and physical portfolio to a review just in case. Especially for a character modeler, draw figures.
In the end just make the best looking portfolio you’re capable of.
Talk 2: Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer: Part 2- Portfolio Reviews, Speakers: Steve Scott(Bungie), Greg Foertsch(Firaxis Games), Wyeth Johnson(Epic Games), Shawn Robertson(Irrational Games), David Johnson(Infinityward), Darren Bacon(343 Industries), Marie-Michelle Pepin(Independent)
After waiting for almost an hour or so in line I was able to get a portfolio review from Marie-Michelle Pepin, a character artist and modeler who’s done a number of projects in the game industry.
Marie looked at my portfolio and gave me some incredibly helpful advice overall.
For my boss character model, Marie mentioned that I should take down the polycount. Most character models in the industry are as high as 20,000 and as low as 5,000. She also said I should have used less texture space and less textures overall. She liked the design of my boss and found him appealing. She pointed out that I should have more material definition in the model. I should also give him a more dynamic pose and put the model in a turntable with a nice 3-point lighting set up.
For most of the armor on my characters, Marie pointed out how I should work on defining the hard surfaces better due to how muddy they look. She mentioned that in ZBrush I could use the conversion brush to help with this.
For the ecorche model, it wasn’t accurate but it was good. Work on it and make it better!
Overall, Marie told me how I was off to a really good start as a character artist. This really made my day as I was afraid that my portfolio would be really underwhelming and in need of a ton of work. She told me to work hard on my characters and adjust the models where needed. It was a great portfolio review and I know I’m going to work hard over the summer to start a new version of my portfolio.
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