GDC 2013 - Will Avery

Post date: Apr 01, 2013 1:14:14 PM

“3 Insightful Observations from GDC”

Well, GDC 2013 was pretty holy-sh*t awesome, if you’ll pardon the censored French. Most of the talks that I actually wanted to attend were part of the Narrative Design summit, but that’s an essay for another day. Today, I’d like to talk about the three things that I learned at GDC that I feel most strongly should be applied to our curriculum at Ringling or just related to the underclassmen. First, a talk.

Andrew Maximov is an environment artist (oh look, that thing that I want to be!) listed solely as “independent”. Initially I thought that, with no major developer name backing him, this talk might not be worth attending. I quite quickly learned, however, that I would’ve been remorse to miss it. Andrew is internet-famous, you see, for making a desert environment (a rather large one, at that) in UDK without a single diffuse texture. Once I learned that it was that guy who was lecturing us, you can be damn sure I pulled out my laptop and started taking notes.

He began by describing his criteria for appealing art in a game; there were five main categories that a game could excel in, visually, and as long as the game in question scored enough in any combination of these categories, it could be considered aesthetically pleasing. These five categories were: color, lighting, composition, detail, and subject. According to Maximov, if a game can execute even one of these aspects of beauty incredibly well, it can be considered beautiful. Among the several examples he listed were Journey, for its brilliant color and lighting – it can be considered beautiful, even if it lacks a stress on composition and has almost no intricate detailing. On the other end of the spectrum, Gears of War is gorgeous because of how much it geeks out on its detailing – even with all of its intricacy, though, it lacks much color at all, and the subject is something we’ve seen a million times – big guys with guns. It’s still gorgeous, though.

This thinking has caused me to reconsider my approach at making 3D art. I can’t wait to experiment with focusing on specific aspects of my execution and how I can use it to my advantage. Next, a talk on level design.

Actually, this was one of the very last talks given at GDC. I’d sort of forgotten how much I was into level design – hell, most of my summer was spent drawing overhead layouts for dungeons and puzzle rooms on a game that will now probably never get made (insert sad face here). Now to the point, this talk was entitled “10 Principles of Good Level Design”, and was delivered by a man named Dan Taylor, who’s a lead level designer over at Square Enix Montreal (the current Hitman guys).

Now, going down the list would be kind of a waste of our combined time, so I’ll just talk about my favorite aspects of the list. First, there was bullet number three: “good level design tells the player what to do, but not how to do it”. This is something I feel we’ve forgotten in the recent years of gaming. From poorly disguised exposition to blatant “do this by doing that” prompts on the screen, I feel as though many games nowadays tend to just tell the player exactly how to complete the game (that is, unless the game is of the puzzle genre, or something similar.)

Dan suggests giving the player “nebulous objectives” – that is, you let them know generally what needs doing, but never say anything more than that. Using Skyrim as an example, the player is always told something like “Old Man Olafsson needs help down on his farm”, and that’ll be it. By this point in the game, the player has been forced to walk by the stretch of land that is full of farms (the map is designed so that you must see them before you get this quest), so it’s only a matter of heading down to the farmland and asking around for Olafsson to locate him. No one says “Old Man Olafsson needs help down on his farm, to the South of here. You just walk over Glen Bridge and take a right at the Durga’s Estate, and then you’re at his house.” There’s just no need, since the level has been designed so that you generally already know how to get there.

The second most noteworthy bullet would definitely be “good level design is surprising”, in which Dan referenced the good, old-fashioned “roller coaster interest curve”, where rising action is broken up by slight lulls leading into a climax. Even though this formula was created to keep at experience continuously entertaining, it too becomes boring if repeated too often. That’s another thing that games nowadays seem to be suffering from – lazy design. “Does it fit into the formula?” “Yes.” “Then ship it, we’re done.”

Dan mentions a chapter from Dead Space 2 for this bullet; a level that revisits the first game’s main environment, the Ishimura. Most of Dead Space 2 follows the roller coaster interest curve, but once you reach this level, there’s literally nothing that jumps out at you, nothing that even threatens you; not a peep from the walls, nor a creak from the metal. But that lack of the threat of death is so much more terrifying than there being any indication of danger – for a solid 20 minutes you’re so paralyzed with the fear that you’ll be maimed at any moment, that you can hardly stand to take another step. I can confirm this feeling from personal experience.

And probably my favorite bit was bullet nine, “good level design creates emotion”. There’s not much use in going too in-depth on what this means, but the example really struck me as genius. I cannot recall the first-person shooter than Mr. Taylor referenced, but the mission was the “hold out for a while – reinforcements are on their way”. So you, as the player, are supposed to think “okay, cool, I’ll just hold out for a few minutes and we’ll be good.”

However, the system in place for spawning the reinforcements is not based on a timer; it’s based purely on the number of soldiers under your command that are still alive. As soon as you’re down to two men, the reinforcements arrive. This way, no matter how good at the game you are, you’ll always feel like your back is to the wall and you’ll feel grateful for the arrival of your polygonal aid. Just… genius.

The last overall lesson from GDC that I’d like to talk about came from my experience on the career floor. To put it bluntly: I really wish I’d been told how important the career floor was in comparison to the talks. Sure, those two I just mentioned were some of the few exceptions, but they also conveniently fell into time slots in which I was either too tired to make a good impression on a potential employer or the career floor was closed. It was easy to make those talks; I sacrificed nothing.

I skipped out on a line at the Sony booth in order to make it to a talk on Bungie’s new IP, and it might’ve been the biggest mistake I made throughout the whole conference. Not only was Bungie’s presentation pretty much just “oh hey, look at how cool it’s going to be!” with some really obvious lessons in making design decisions thrown into the mix, but I also missed out on the Sony line being cut short because of it. Now, stick with me here. With the Sony line closing down, the people running the booth knew they’d have some people in line sore with them, so they offered those in line some tickets, that they could present pretty much whenever the following day to cut to the front of the line.

So the following day, I got back in the Sony line as soon as I could, and was stuck waiting for about an hour. Now there was a classmate of mine who, the previous day, had gotten a ticket – she used it and got to talk to a recruiter right as he was fresh and rearing to go. I got to the same guy and, after having seen him talk to my classmate, he’d definitely lost his initial go-get-‘em attitude. The portfolio review was fairly hum-drum, and I generally got the feeling the he was exhausted (it was Friday, you see, so the floodgates had been opened to students) and disinterested. Whereas I got a “see you later”, my classmate who’d gotten there first received a business card and a request for her to e-mail Sony with personal details.

Now, obviously there could be various factors at work here, but still – I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if I’d gotten to speak with that guy first thing in the morning. My point is: having “what ifs” hang around you at something as important as GDC is something that should definitely be avoided.