Izel's GDC 2019 Debrief

Post date: Apr 06, 2019 4:21:22 AM

• 1. One interesting section of GDC that I attended that sort of broadened my horizons was the Alt.Control.GDC area at the entrance to the Indie side of the expo. It essentially featured games with alternative control methods beyond just a keyboard or gamepad. While many there would be impractical for mass production (shipping a game with an exclusive controller isn’t very cost-effective or worth it unless it’s an assured success,)  but the exercise of exploring alternative means helps innovate on concepts that are normally taken for granted and create memorable new experiences that open up games to audiences who might previously not have been interested. One interesting game was Hell Couch, a game in which three players take cues from lights on the floor in order to sit and stand in a specific order to complete the “sacred butt ritual” and exorcise the demon from the couch. Played on an actual, physical couch, this simple game is hilariously fun because it’s so ridiculous, and it was cool to see industry professionals and students alike brought together by it. It also brings up the very possible future where games can be played in our general surroundings (what with smart objects and Internet of Things becoming the norm,) and vice versa, where mundane actions are made more fun by gamified elements. Thinking outside the box like this is key to riding the innovation wave of the future.

  2. In a related but different theme, I also got to attend the Experimental Games Workshop, which is a pretty open-ended showcase of any game that is considered “experimental.” All of the games featured were incredibly intriguing and got a lot of audience engagement, and in the interest of figuring out what exactly was the source of this, I examined them a little further. Each game presented was very different but they all had one common thread: some sort of twist where a well-established concept was turned on its head. The main categories where there could be a twist seemed to be: medium, systems, or content. It was the unexpected that elicited laughter and surprise from the audience and set each game apart. An example of a medium twist is Edible Games, a collection of games all played with food, where eating is usually a featured mechanic. The systems themselves are generally traditional, where you do puzzles or bluff your way through to get points and ultimately win, but the fact that food is the vehicle for the game made it fun and fresh. Some examples of systems twists are Plus-Minus, a game where you control the polarity of objects and use magnetism to solve environmental puzzles, or Lucky Me, where the object of the game is to be the last man standing but the twist is that every other character in the crowd copies your movements exactly. Finally, an example of a content twist is What The Golf?, a game where the system remains the same the whole time (your typical golfing game controls,) but the content changes to increasingly get more and more hilariously bizarre (you start off trying to golf a ball into a hole, you end up as a hole golfing itself towards a ball, a ball golfing a man into a hole, a house golfing itself across streets and around cliffs, a soccer ball golfing itself around as people try to kick it, and more.) This paradigm of thinking when generating new ideas helps give some guidance on areas of innovation that have had success before.

  3. I also worked the Ringling booth this year, demoing my VR thesis game, which was a valuable experience with several important takeaways. The main one was about making an expo-floor game demo, which is arguably different than just making a prototype or a vertical slice of a game. I chose to spend a couple of days before GDC implementing a bulletproof, extremely granular and hand-hold-y tutorial, with big floating text that draws your attention to exactly what you need to be doing at any given moment and takes you to a satisfying success state in the simplest steps possible. I also included a Skip Tutorial button, for the cases where an experienced VR player came along and felt comfortable feeling the game out for themselves (and also to save my sanity while debugging and testing the game.) For a bit I worried that the tutorial was too much, but I quickly came to realize that in an environment where you have exactly 3 to 5 minutes of someone’s attention, and you have people from wildly different backgrounds and skill levels playing your game, it’s entirely necessary. Instead of me having to stand there shouting into their ear when they get stuck, I eliminated all chances of them needing my help, barring extreme cases. This meant that not only was it a smoother and more enjoyable experience for the player (people are embarrassed to admit they’re stuck/ask for help,) it also frees me up from the job of walking the player through the demo so I can be drumming up interest with passerbys or discussing the game with the people waiting to play it. If you’re going to take a demo to a place like GDC, especially if it’s something relatively new and different like VR, it’s definitely worth it to invest some development time in a robust, foolproof tutorial.