Josh's GDC adventures in space.

Post date: Mar 29, 2014 12:57:51 AM

GDC this year was pretty good in terms of the talks. Alot of information was giving about Art, Design, and Play. One of many interesting talks that I want to this year was the Robh Ruppel Talk about art direction and why it isn't just about googling images. He did a quick talk that was to the point and probably one of the more impactful talks on how I started to view the creation of current and future projects. He talked about 4 things to help create and define your world. Somethings that you would normally glance over or not even think of. He took some aspects of literature and applied it to film and games in a visual sense. The 4 things that he talked about were Symbolism, Alliteration, Allegory and Iconography. 

For symbolism he said that we have thousands of years of symbols at our disposal and we should use them to invoke a message or a mood to the viewer. Skull + helmet = Dark Vader. The Lorax is a symbol for over develpment and Citizen Kane is a symbol for innocence. Allegory is an extend metaphor which has to purposes, literal and symbolic. In a film that i did not get the chance to write down he talks about how these houses and sets are designed black and white even down to the fish. The houses are exactly the same saying that they are all just cookie cutters of each other with slight differences. In the other film Raise the Red Lantern, we never get to really see the owner of the house. He is always distant to the viewer and the people in the house. 

Alliteration. The repetition of shape. In the matrix the world is set up into two worlds. The Matrix world is very fake and a way to establish that is through the shots. Alot of the shots in the matrix are set up in a grid like fashion. In contrast to when you step out of that world it becomes a very organic world. Iconography. Icons like symbols carry a very important significance. I wish I got the last part of this talk down on notes but unfortunately i did not write it down. Was blown away by this talk by then.

Why gone home is a game was another interesting talk that I saw. The creator said that it's what the game asks you to do with it and you (the player) decide what you want to do with it that makes it a game. It made the player feel like they are not alone without the aspect of pigeonholing you. Variability of player experience. The player steps into the role of the person experiencing this world and they start to interact and inhabit the role that we give to the player. For example when ever you point something down, in the early stages of the game, the object would be thrown at the wall. It took the player out of the experience saying that they would not chuck something back, but instead place it down gentle like placing down a cup of water. It was an interesting talk for me to see his process and thinking of what he defines as a "game" and how to elaborate on my own exploration. 

Another awesome talk was the Negative space talk by epic. Apparently there is a squint tool in UE3 that i have never heard about or seen and would be/ is really helpful tool to see your values, shapes, and pretty much anything that is important ever. With the squint tool the small meaningful patterns start to form similar groups of images to create an overall tone much like the palette knife feature in photoshop. If that image is very ambiguous that ambiguity can hinder the players experience. If you are not conveying the clarity of the space, it can hurt the player in the realms of the game and can take them out of it. Even the shift of tone and color can change the perception of the space. It can also change the navigability and play. In his closing he said two statements that really hit home for me for this talk. The first was Good Design is about removing not adding. Lastly in the context of where games are going in terms of how much shit we can put on the screen because we can, he said do we really need all that shit to really push gameplay?