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Post date: Mar 30, 2018 3:23:58 PM
This was my first year attending GDC, and my first time in San Francisco.
With the over explosion of new experiences I was able to immerse myself in the crowd and join people by play testing games. By the second day I discovered many great talks such as, Bringing Mars Down to Earth: Designing Education Games with Real Science for Low Income Students, Realistic Foliage Imposter and Forest Rendering in UE4, and Volumetric Fog and Lighting in UE4 by Epic’s Sjoerd De Jong located on the UE4 floor.
My first panel I attended at GDC was the Bringing Mars Down to Earth which was presented by Kate Schnippering and Peter Stattery from IDEO. Kate and Peter came together with Verizon to design and build a multisensory mobile AR bus-meets-spaceship. With the collaboration between Whiskeytree and West Coast Customs, they were able to build an explorer lab from scratch to finished product within nine months. The experience was created for low income middle school students to become an explorer and take a field trip to Mars. This was completely custom-tailored to activate interest in STEM. The talk focused on the goals and challenges they faced to create a truly immersive experience and reaching out to a wide range of students to give each the same opportunity.
The first question Kate and Peter begun to asked was, “what game?”. A game on how people would survive on Mars, of course! The first step was to agree on a game mechanic. The student's experience was to utmost importance. Tablets, texting your rover, and gathering evidence of life on mars were the starting points in this experiment. The core concept is to test, to learn, and to validate. Through their first test they realized that mechanics can misinstruct, player behavior can be read, and design for those who need it the most.
The second action to success is reaching out to unique audience. For example, never talk down to the kids and insure a connection is made with students at their level. It was discovered that the player (students) remember the emotional journey and that kids love high stakes, such as sucking the oxygen out of the bus as one student explained!
Thirdly, personalize play styles. Not all students learn the same, so personalizing play styles by catering to, “No one learns the same way at the same pace”. This allowed Kate and Peter to focus on the intro video by calling students to action and if the player gets lost, the game needs to bring them back. Finding the ways to compel the children to be immersed in the mobile game can include breaking the game. A student discovered by breaking the game, they were able to one-up the adult. This gave the student much pleasure and they felt invincible and connected with the game more so. This also allows the student to think outside the box and find many ways of completing their task at hand, and gaining problem solving skills. And lastly, the end game. Finally after many trial and errors, working with students, and creating a truly immersive experience, Kate and Peter had their very last play test. Here they learned that when a tablet dies with no backup, kids seem to want to work together and complete the task together. This type of collaboration can lead to metacognitive learning experiences. With everything created and designed with kids in mind, the takeaway from this talk is a gained insight into designing education experiences, playtesting to learn rather than to validate designs, and how to incorporate real science into the games. As an educator, learning how play can be used and taught to reach students and overcome challenges presented in front of them is the true education in which students desire.
My second panel I attended at GDC was Realistic Foliage Imposter and Forest Rendering in UE4 - http://shaderbits.com/blog/octahedral-impostors
My third panel I attended was on the GDC UE4 floor which was focussed on Volumetric Fog and Lighting in UE4 by Epic’s Sjoerd De Jong. - https://youtu.be/Xd7-rTzfmCo
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