GDC 2013 Max's Notes

Post date: Apr 02, 2013 12:31:0 AM

Unfortunately, I could not watch as many talks as I would have liked because I was volunteering this year. I did manage to stay inside for a few talks, but many of them were not really relevant to our major. In any case, here goes. 

I went to the Raising Dunwall talk and learned a few things that were pretty cool:

Apparently, the original setting of the game was going to be Japan/eastern Asia, but they settled with a London because they understood the culture better and they could work the the plague in their story. Because of the nature of the game, they had to think vertically when designing their levels as well as horizontally. With the ability to blink anywhere, the game design had to follow that function. 

The style they were going for was a sort of retro-future style. People called it steam-punk  but it was really something even more basic than that. They went to an old machinery museum for reference because it had the type of old technology they wanted to incorporate into the world of Dunwall. 

And when it comes to characters, they actually went to the trouble of polypainting their zbrush sculpts to look like the concept art so that there was a nearly seamless transition from 2D to 3D. Also, hands are as important as faces when it comes to narration and unspoken narrative, such as the character's history. 

I worked a talk that was about making games for young children. Most of these games are learning games and apparently, the app stores are quite flooded with them. If you want to get into this field, you have a lot of competition to overcome-especially Sesame Street and other huge companies that do this as a business. 

One interesting thing that I learned was that the things children find challenging and fun change drastically between the ages of 0-2 and 3-6. They learn quickly and a game for an infant is very different from a game for a toddler. Another thing is that you have to be very aware of what you put in the post-game progress report for the parent. It's important to make it positive. For example: if a child had trouble identifying circles, do not say that the child got 2 out of 5 right. This will upset and frighten the parent. Instead, say that the child spent a lot of time on circles and suggest that the parent and the child spend time identifying circular things in the real world.