Erisa GDC 2019

Post date: Mar 25, 2019 6:56:2 PM

Overall, I wish we had the time to look through the expo floor more carefully and go to more talks. The roundtables were very interesting, but I didn’t look at the list and realized we could go to them until Thursday. Also, I didn’t get a Perforce bee plush toy, and that made my GDC experience worse by a considerable amount.

Localization Roundtable

Localization roundtable was cut short by a meeting we had, but for the 15 minutes we did attend, it was interesting hearing about how localization was handled and what challenges their teams faced when dealing with projects or teams. Localization/translation is something we wanted done down the line, but had zero experience or know-how on the subject. Before we went in, I jokingly said they probably just throw translators a Google Sheets...turns out, some places do still just give spreadsheets, but no one wants that (the guy literally said “please stop doing this”). Larger companies like Nexon have some magical tool that is able to parse out information from specific engine files and integrate it into the localization teams’ toolset.

Unfortunately, I’m not apart of a AAA company with dedicated tools programmers, so we had to keep listening. Another common software mentioned was MemoQ, pronounced memo cube. Honestly, it just looks like specialized spreadsheet with funny buttons, but I don’t know much about either. All in all, it seems like localization is just honestly a big pain, and takes a lot of work between the developers, translators, and project managers to wrangle the tasks.

We knew before going in that how we are handling the text and dialogue in Snacko is wrong - it’s currently baked into the systems. We have no reference document or composite document that has all our text in one place. It seems like it’s more preferable now to have translation or localization start sooner, rather than after the game is complete because of font and UI issues. Going forward, this is something we definitely have to think about and restructure our text files and UI elements accordingly. At the moment, my UI elements are made one-to-one for certain assets, and if the text string were to change length (ex: English to Chinese would become much shorter), the whole interface would have to be redone.

UX Roundtable

The UX roundtable was set up differently. We were extra keen on this one, since we’re handling playtests and QA ourselves at the moment. While we will probably have outsourced QA support in the future, we were still curious how playtest data is synthesized, and if there are any tidbits of general information we could glean from the discussions. Unfortunately, the roundtable was split up into two. “I want to learn about this” (students, non-specialists) and the industry specialists on the other side.

I absolutely hated this format, especially because this took place on Friday where student passes could come in. Most of the answers asked that day from the “want-to-learn” side consisted of Google-able questions such as “what should I put in my resume” and “what is UX”. This was not what I expected from a roundtable, but I did get to eavesdrop a bit on the professionals side. They talked about rolling launches, like Anthem’s, and how the game received favourable scores from critics, but received poorly by the public, with sales numbers to back it up. This was the stuff I came here to listen to, not advice on how to structure a portfolio website.

In the future, I hope these kind of student sessions are split up into a different panel and marketed as such, or simple/career questions banned by the moderators completely. You can find similar sentiment for the writing and narrative roundtable around Twitter about inappropriate questions for this specific setting. Maybe localization is just such a dry subject no students wanted to attend.

Twitter is one hell of a marketing tool

100% of the opportunities, people, and conversations I was able to have at this year’s GDC came because of Twitter. Could this have worked through cold-calling? Sure. Could this have worked through Artstation? Absolutely. But the ease of sharing and casual atmosphere of Twitter makes it easy to make non-transactional relationships and keep in touch with other professionals. There were people I didn’t know, or employees of AAA studios that knew about me or Snacko that I didn’t even know about. It’s a little finicky to use, and I still have no idea why XYZ becomes popular, but generally, good work will get traction. It’s something that all social media savvy artists should have - it’s one of the easiest ways to promote yourself!

Don’t be afraid to take yourself too seriously

I struggled with this a lot before going to GDC. I didn’t want to put “lead artist” on my business card, because it’s a senior title and I don’t even have my degree yet. I didn’t want to put a slide in our pitch deck talking about projected sales or launch prices, because I thought that was cocky or getting ahead of myself to do. I didn’t want to have certain documents or an iPad on hand because I was worried I’d look too prepared, or that I tried too hard because I’m desperate (I am). In the end, the comments we got from our meetings were that we were the most well-prepared team they have spoken to at GDCs, and that it was refreshing that we had it on-hand and ready to go. I’m still afraid and apprehensive about doing certain things that I feel like make me look like I have a stick up my ass, but apparently it’s good…?

GDC Expo floor is where you pay to look at ads

Asides from some of the talks that you could eventually find on YouTube or beg someone for a Vault, there was almost nothing useful that came from inside GDC. It was more being around the vicinity of GDC that was productive. Most corporate meetings are held in private hotel suites, and private meetings are held somewhere with nice food or coffee. In the future, unless there's parts of a Summit that are really interesting, I'll probably come without a pass and just bum around San Fran.