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Post date: Mar 28, 2014 5:49:42 AM
Man oh man what a week it has been! The Game Developers Conference 2014 took place this week in astonishingly sunny San Francisco, and it was my first time attending anything even remotely like it! I've learned an incredible amounts about the industry in just five days, but I think I'll try and break it down into a few separate posts instead of just one for general readability. This post will cover which panels and events I went to on Monday and Tuesday during the Summits, Tutorials, and Boot camps part of the Conference.
Monday
At 10 am, bright and early, I started off my conference experience with my friend Chad Jenkins' talk on modularity in Kerbal Space Program.
Kerbal Space Programming by its sandbox nature is a very modular game: you take all sorts of parts of different vehicles and rockets and piece them together in the hopes of building an actual functional rocket, or plane, or intergalactic space frigate. To program such a game requires some foresight; Chad describes the way Kerbals programmers would ascribe certain behaviours to each particular part in turn, which lead to a system that was not only hard to edit but was bulky with repeated code. So what was the solution? Apply modularity! Especially since a significant amount of Kerbal's fan base made their own mods for the game, making the code iterable and modular was a necessity. So the previous code was scrapped entirely and replaced with a new system in which discrete behaviour for each part was linked to certain modules that could be swapped, interchanged, and edited to the programmer's whim. To this extent, as new modules could also be created, new things like definable energy sources could be specified and implemented: for example, a rocket that runs on sunshine.
This talk was interesting because it gave a lot of insight
into how to think about the logistics of a game and how it's laid out from a programmer's point of view. As artists training for a heavily technical industry, it's important we understand these trains of thought so we, too, can be efficient and useful.
Second on Monday came a talk by Mike Jungbluth about establishing an 'ecology' for NPCs- that is, when it comes to world building, where does a particular character fall in the scale of things and how does that define them?
Mike works for Zenimax Online, which works on Elder Scrolls Online. One of the problems he has encountered is how do you create realistic and compelling animations for an entire world full of different creatures with vastly different needs? He breaks it down like this: what objective does the NPC has, where does it lie on the hierarchy of needs, and how does that compare to other creatures within the same world?
First off, Mike refers to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and gives three examples. A skeleton solider, for instance, would fall on the second rung on the pyramid of needs: they don't need to eat to survive, but rather wish to fulfill their duty. A zombie, on the other hand, is driven by the basest need for food and so falls one rung below the skeleton. A ghostly spectre has no need for a sense of security or food, but instead is one rung above the other two as it seeks emotional support. So how would that affect how they move? Well, a skeleton soldier would move with purpose: lots of straight lines, right angle turns. A zombie would lurch and sprint in a slightly more unexpected manner. A spectre would be even more unpredictable in their movements.
So what's the point of understanding these parts of a character? In level design, it's very important to understand where to place the NPC so it makes the most sense for the player. If you're entering a library, you'd expect the person with the most information, the librarian, to be readily available in the foreground of the complex. More than just understanding how it would affect the movements and animation of a character, creating a successful ecology for your NPC helps the player themselves feel more integrated into the environment because the way people act there is the way people should act in real life, where they exist within their own ecologies.
I went to two other talks on Monday, but there's only really one I'd want to talk about (the other one was about how to write evocative stories, but I don't think it's as interesting as this one). Tom Abernathy of Riot and Richard Rouse III of Microsoft gave talk about the three-act structure and its affect on video game narrative, and how it really isn't applicable anymore.
The three-act structure is a well-known one: if you've ever suffered through your first english class, you'd be familiar with the triangular shape that indicates a beginning, middle, and end, or Peristatis, Epistatis, and Catastrophe. This structure can be important, Tom and Richard posit, because it can make stories more satisfying... if they're movies. Video games, on the other hand, are an entirely different beast. If you apply the three-act structure onto a video game, you get excruciatingly long sequences the player has to slough through where there's just constant build up with no release until the end or the middle of the act. Video games as a media are just way too long to be broken down into such large chunks. Three-act structures in video games cater to what the player expects, rather than what the player wants.
So what alternatives are there? Tom and Richard give the example of serialized storytelling, as featured in games like The Walking Dead or the Last of Us: narrative structures that have multiple tiny setups, confrontations, and resolutions within themselves, not unlike a television series with an overlying plot. This can work in some games, but what about open world games? What about sandbox games?
Maybe the idea is that we really don't need plot in video games. Statistically, most players don't even finish games they pick up: almost 30% of the people that played Portal, for example, never finished. More people remember the characters and settings than the plot, Tom and Richard concluded. It would benefit the game developer most if they stopped caring about plot entirely and instead focused on creating a user experience that felt it was worth completing. Aligning the narrative with the needs of your games user experience is key in making a game really compelling through its story.
Tuesday
Tuesday was mostly devoted to the Unity Dev Day talks; as I was on a Main Conference Pass, I couldn't get into any other talks as Mary was using her Summits and Bootcamp pass to get into all the Tech Art talks. So I learned about what new things Unity 5.0 is coming out with, which turned out to be a really interesting glimpse into what other engines look like. Working almost entirely with the Unreal engine, I had no idea what other artists in the industry were working with. Admittedly a lot of the things went entirely over my head, but it was a really interesting insight into a new engine. I heard about the new version of Mechanim tool, used to animate, and the new shader system implemented with an ubershader to make the shader process more efficient.
After that, I hit the indie game showcase! A few games that stood out to me in particular were Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and Tetropolis, both done using the Unity game engine to make a 2D-feeling game with 3D graphics. Lovers is an adorable co-op game that requires two local players to work together in tandem to ensure their spaceship can navigate an asteroid and critter infested space and save little trapped bunnies. Tetropolis is a Castlevania-style side scroller that allows the player to switch between Tetris blocks to solve puzzles and swap the world around to protect 'broken' Tetris pieces. To see what I had heard about in the Unity Dev Day talks implemented was a real thrill. It was also awesome to be able to talk to all the indie developers as well: the length and breadth of their skill sets were really impressive! I talked with a sound developer who told me the way he got the noise his game's dumbo squid protagonist made was by squishing pumpkin guts together.
Wednesday-Friday
I did so much during these days, I thought I'd narrow it down to two significant highlights. I also hit up the Career Centre and Expo Floor, but I thought I'd show what I learned from the presentations, as the portfolio reviews were for personal betterment and the Expo Floor was for extreme ogling.
The first presentation of excellence was Matt Vainio of Sucker Punch's fantastic presentation on the visual effects of Infamous: Second Son.
If you can find this talk on the GDC Vault, I would really recommend looking at it if you're even remotely interested in visual effects. The overhaul Sucker Punch did on their VFX engine really shows through with the kind of work they were able to produce for this game, and to be given even the tiniest bit of insight into the creative process behind it was, to a word, fascinating.
First of all, Matt went into serious detail about the smoke effects that helped detail how the protagonist navigated the world. He explained the logic behind the smoke run and how they decided to keep all the particles from the beginning of the run to the end. Going from concept to visualization whilst keeping the basic pillars of each design was super important, Matt emphasised, but so was making sure the effects themselves made the player feel powerful. The point of the game was power! So the player should feel that.
I could get really technical into the talk, as the talk itself was really technical, but I really think Matt said it much better than I could even try to parse into understandable text. Suffice to say, I was really blown away by the new capabilities of next generation consoles! I'm excited, so you should be too!
Speaking of excited, here's my favourite bit of GDC:
The RANT APOCALYPSE.
Here's a warning, cuz this is about to get image heavy. Please forgive the terrible quality, as my hands were shaking during a lot of this.
The Game Developers Rant is a staple of any GDC: in fact, this one marked the 10th anniversary of a group of people in the game design industry being in a room and talking at a captive audience about pretty much anything that bothered them about the state of the industry in general. To say this is a popular event is an understatement: I think we had one of the larger rooms in the convention center, and it was packed.
First up was Jason Del Roca with his Top 10 Game Rants of the past 10 years. He compared the state of the industry to what it was like in 2005 and came up with these results.
Yes, academics now care about games perhaps a bit too much. Yes, now there are almost too many indie games. Yes, now the industry cares more than about teenage boys! Unfortunately, a significant amount of games are still being made by straight white men. However, games are no longer separate from the real world, thanks to mobile and handheld games and a new desire for ARGs! The States now have a black president, and games are art! Games don't tell better stories, but perhaps they don't need to (see my previous post on game narratives) and yes, still, the game design industry is terrible. Well, what can you do? We must simply press forward!
Next was Greg Costikyan to talk about how game markets are killed by greed and lack of taste. He talked about how he foretold that consoles would squeeze the creativity out of the industry, and predicted the death throes of AAA game systems. In the next few years, he averred, we would be seeing a revolution. All distribution platforms are terrible, except for Steam which is only mildly awful. Distributers suck, he said. I have no idea what you can do about it.
Then came Justin Hall to address the all important question of: how can we stay remembered? In a market absolutely saturated with media, how can you ensure that, even though your company is a bust and your games don't sell, you're still relevant? His solution is something he calls #OGDY: Open Game Data Yes, or Oh Goody. Using this hashtag and resource, he intends to make a place where game developers can share their knowledge- their source code, their player data, their business plans, so that people can learn from their successes and mistakes and continue to better the game design industry. I wasn't aware that these things were important in keeping a game developer afloat, but that just really goes to show how little I know about what goes on behind the game development process.
Ian Bogost was up next, with his fantastic sci-fi retrospective of the current state of the games industry. His talk, A Taxonomy of Extinct Terrestrial Tribes, read like an Ian M Banks novel as he picked apart our current position as only a post-societal futuristic anthropologist can. Using phrases like "governmentally sponsored global violence," and describing games as a way to "fill the time between microtransactions," Ian dug in with gusto to point out the inherent absurdities in the way free-to-play games toy with their users and how publishers, or "video game procurers," don't really care about games. It was a lot of similar information to what everyone else seemed to be angry about, but damn if it wasn't in a really nice format.
Heather Chaplin unfortunately wasn't able to make it to the rant itself, but she made an appearance from New York by way of video presentation to deliver a scathing lambast of the free-to-play games business model. She started off by describing the way that pubs would pour out the whiskey dregs from the night before into the street when gold miners would pass by in the morning. This would put the idea of whiskey in the minds of the miners so when they got off work they would head back to the pub to feed their craving. This addiction-feeding model, she said, was not unlike the way a lot of free-to-play games operate now, reeling in players with the promise of fun gameplay and getting them hooked in the system to keep paying to play. Is it a good way to run? Is this what happens when games become infinite? She cited a BF Skinner study that stated that rats would push levers thousands of times in a go to get that next shot of cocaine, and by transitive property humans could be coaxed to act in a similar manner. Game companies now operated like gambling companies, she averred, looking for 'whales' to pump for cash until it ran dry. The problem with this was that, of course, game designers were making games wherein players paid money to be less bored. As game designers ourselves, could we even find this idea to be conscionable?
Ooh boy, now there's a good question.
He also quoted Anne Anthropy of auntiepixelante.com fame at length, defying the 'x isn't a real game' argument, defining our need to have more representation in games, arguing for the importance of context, and the need to take a political stance when talking about video games. A lot of it was about how to critically approach a video game: we're no longer in the age in which a game can be mere fun and not viewed as a piece of art within the context of our society, and having the right tools to pick apart the meanings and intentions behind a game are crucial to ensure we keep moving forward as an industry.
Then Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris came forward to talk about a series of words that may send some people flinching: Trigger Warning. For some reason, the idea of setting up a trigger warning, a message at the beginning to a game to warn the player about its content, for a video game has become a ridiculed idea within certain circles of video game enthusiasts. When a Tumblr user politely asked Mitu to add a trigger warning to her game about misogyny within science fiction environments, there was a significant amount of backlash. Why should the game maker cater to a single players whims, the critics asked. Shouldn't the shock of the action serve to hammer home the point of the game, that there are still so many toxic aspects of character writing in video games? No, Mitu stated outright. A game should never be made at the expense of the player. Trigger warnings mitigate damage and act to make the content more inclusive for all players. Game developers should never make games that put the game before the player.
Frank Latz brings it home with his 'You're Doing It Wrong' presentation, which goes as follows:
IF:
You aren't proud of the game you're working on.
You set the difficulty to easy so you can see all the content.
There aren't any games you love.
You can't summarize your opponents position and give the best existing arguments for it.
You run on your last click.
You think everyone else is doing it wrong.
You are flat broke.
Everyone is mad at you.
YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
I can't help but feel like some of these were pointed towards specific people. But the basic gist of his talk is: Empathise! Love games, love playing them, love making them! Work to be less stupid, and not more smart.
And then came Brenda Romero, and oh boy I think I have a crush. Brenda Romero came out with this absolutely brilliant diatribe about how women are treated, even now, at a convention which is still highly populated by male-identifiers. She spat venom about how she had to deal with a man who couldn't keep a professional attitude in his pants when talking to her, and bequeathed the audience with a simple piece of advise: no one wants your cock. Don't bring that sort of thing to GDC. Treat people like the fellow game developers they are, not by what gender they identify as.
From the rant alone, I picked up these bits of advice:
Work smart. Be efficient, and minimise your damage.
Share with others! It's a small industry, so your mistakes could be someone elses' success.
Make games for the players, and know your audience. Make games to be inclusive and for god's sake, have fun with it! It's not about the money.
From GDC, I learned:
Don't be afraid of people. It's not as hard as it seems to go up and start a conversation, but try to feel natural about it. Sometimes talking to one person will lead you in the path of others, and well... Network naturally.
Don't miss any potential opportunity! If you even have the remotest inkling that you're going to regret not doing it, do it.
Follow through with communications! If you see someone who gave you a portfolio review walking around, go up and say hi! More continued contact will make sure you remain in their sphere of knowledge.
Party hard, party smart. It's a far more natural environment to talk to and meet people, so get out there and try not to drink too much.
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