GDC Experience 2015

Post date: Mar 16, 2015 1:15:52 AM

This year, I had the opportunity to go to GDC as an IGDA Intel scholar, a new scholarship program by the IGDA that was initiated after Intel gave the IGDA funding to increase diversity within the industry. Throughout the week I was fortunate to be surrounded by wonderfully perseverant women from various professional, cultural, and religious backgrounds who were extremely passionate about contributing to the game industry. Our program started on Sunday. We gathered near Moscone Center, where we finally got to meet each other after about 3 months of preparation. We set off for our first dinner with our program coordinators. There, we got a basic rundown on what our week in the program would be like and what speakers would come visit us each day. This was the first GDC for many of the scholars, so this meeting also became a Q&A session with helpful tips on how to network at GDC and how to handle situations professionally in and out of the conference.

Monday:

Our week started with our first speaker, Kate Edwards. She's currently the executive director of the IGDA and spent 13 years at Microsoft creating their Geopolitical Strategy team. She also evaluated and managed geopolitical and cultural content in games like like Star Wars II: The Old Republic and Dragon Age 2. One of the biggest takeaways from her talk was learning the difference between localization and culturization. Localization refers mostly to language, writing and linguistics. Culturization refers non-linguistic cues, so hand gestures, body language, and so on. Developers have to be extremely delicate when working with content that'll be distributed across the globe. One misuse of of a hand gesture or visual symbol, and your game might be taken off an entire country's market.

We had speakers that were invited by Intel to chat with us during the afternoon at the Intel booth. Our first Intel talker was Melissa Pierce, a journalist and documentary film-maker who talked to us about self promotion. To summarize, she fiercely told us to get out there, find communities, contact people, be tenacious and don't take no for an answer. Appeal to people's visions, their egos, and treat your audience as if they were very smart. It was empowering. Very. I'm glad she was one of the speakers to kick-start our week.

Monday was also the day when the Art Director's Bootcamp took place. Out of the many talks, the one that I found most enriching was No Man's Sky's Art Direction talk, and how they used procedural technology and algorithms to art direct 18 quintillion planets. He created a "Blueprint System" workflow, where the artists would create the base template for the art, and the computer would generate variation. For the generative process, he would layer rules over rules (generating clumps of scattered rocks rather than having the a basic algorithm that would scatter them uniformly). Lastly he had to teach the computer about color theory in order for it to generate consistent custom palettes, which would be the building block for its color theory system. It was pretty mind boggling to hear a successful attempt at art directing a number of planets with too many zeros for me to grasp. And that makes me even more excited to experience their final product.

Tuesday:

Our morning speaker for Tuesday was Mark Kobrin, the Art Director for the XBoxs Avatars at Microsoft who was previously employed at Weta Workshop working on films like Avatar and The Hobbit. He talked to us about his experience working at Weta (and the 60-100 hour crunch-time cycles), how to recruit talent for your projects, how to travel out of the states for a job, and other topics. 

The biggest takeaway on Tuesday was assisting the Indie Soapbox. This was a panel of ten indie developers  who each had 5 minutes to condense and deliver their message to the audience. The speakers included individuals like Jenova Chen, the creative director and president of thatgamecompany who spoke about making games that can enrich our lives, and Ashley Zeldin, a good friend of mine who spoke about how her game's failure was a stepping stone for her growth as a developer. Many other inspiring speakers took the stage with powerful talks, including Mike Bithell who spoke about how important it is to hire people outside of your friend/academia group and of different backgrounds for the benefit of the company and Rebekah Saltsman, a CEO at Finji and fulltime mom who powerfully spoke about how mother developers exist, and should be included within the industry with the same amount of respect and benefit as any other member. All the talks were inspiring and powerful. I do suggest checking them if you have access to the Vault

At the end of the talk, Ashley introduced me to Jenova Chen. Words fail to describe how powerful that encounter was for me. I have a great deal of admiration towards thatgamecompany and the games they have made, more so than any other company to be frank. To meet the president of that company was something I never saw happening so soon and was, by far, the most emotional highlight of my GDC experience.

Wednesday:

Biggest takeaway this day was from the Art of Firewatch. The talk was divided into the following "hot tips"

1. Spend money to buy tools that'll save you development time- Firewatch's art direction places a heavy use on color. And to color is heavily dependent on lighting. To speed their process, they created their own tool to generate procedural skies, and are using Marmoset Skyshop for image-based lighting, which creates dynamic lighting in Unity that matches the sky.

2. Develop your custom tools to the strength of your team to minimize dependancy- Their key art and lead concept artist is Olly Moss, a fantastic graphic designer who's created awesome fanposters for many movies and videogames. In order to recreate Olly's strong shape language designs in a 3D world, they used colored atmospheric fog to create layers of colors. When used at a high intensity, it would give the world a very stylized look.

3. Having a color script helps the developers have a better idea of the player experience- I found this one extremely important. Like animated films use color scripts to understand the mood and transitions throughout the film, so should games. They did this early in the game's development, and took the most iconic moment in the environment in order to enhance it with the color script.

4. Make a small number of modular assets that are versatile- Keeping the number of assets low makes your life easier since you'll be handling less data. It's also less assets that you'll have to go back to and correct.

5. Use style to your production advantage. Embrace your limitations- Self-explanatory

Our Intel speaker that day was Ross Perez, a strategic sales executive whose managed internal and external production and design for publishers such as Microsoft and Electronic Arts. He talked to us about how to work in the state of "flow" and build momentum within your work, but also how to step back at times and appreciate the things outside of work (not becoming a workaholic). As someone who has a tough time getting (and staying) in that "flow" state, I was very grateful to be able to have a speaker who could go in depth on the subject. The key seems to be to have clear goals that you can visualize, and mentally enunciate your actions to become more aware and focused on the action you'll be executing.

Thursday:

This day consisted mostly of running around the Career Pavilion, where I was able to get a review with High-Voltage, Sony, and Warner Bros. I bumped into the Art Directors from Techland and Firaxis, and I got reviews from them too. Most of the feedback was strongly positive, but I do need to work on higher quality materials and keep improving on lighting.

Friday:

I was able to go to their demo on Friday and try out Firewatch on the PC. It's coming out very nicely, and has some great character interaction that keeps you engrossed and curious to understand the world more.

I also went to the third part of the Art Director's Roundtable. Here, the group voiced certain points that were of a concern to most art directors within the room, and we separated into pods in order to come up with solutions for these questions. Our team had to tackle time management during production. Usually, hiring and reviewing portfolios were the last thing they'd do. And we reasoned that, because it was the thing left for last, it would become a stressful task, and that energy might even manifest itself within an interview. Many companies are bogged down by meetings, so we suggested trying to condense as much meetings into one meeting (the least amount possible). There are programs that are used to keep track of tasks. Some of the mentioned ones were Gyra, Shotgun, and Handsoft (mentioned by lead artists and art directors from Sony, and Ubisoft, and Blizzard). Gyra seemed to be better during production, but it was not all that useful during preproduction time (Shotgun seemed to be the most comfortable one for preproduction). Also, 10 min morning meetings helps get everyone acquainted, boost morale, and increase communication within the team.

And that's a snippet of one heck of a ride. Many thanks to Intel, the IGDA and GDC for making this such an amazing, thrilling, and empowering experience. I never thought this second GDC would be so impactful, but it was that and so much more. Here's to the next one~