Kelsey's Adventures at GDC 2019

Post date: Apr 03, 2019 1:14:7 AM

I attended the Game Developers’ Conference this year after years of not-so-patiently waiting to become a Junior, seeing photos and envying the swag. For some reason, I thought it was the key to getting an internship. I thought I could easily sway in, make friends, and finally – finally! find that position I coveted. I was mistaken. I was stepping into a convention hall with around 30,000 developers, all of which were more experienced in the industry than I was. It was incredibly daunting. 

I thought I would come out of GDC knowing exactly what I wanted to do for a living. Instead I found myself more lost. In hindsight, I should have spent more time talking with big name developers and people working for those games. Instead, the majority of my time and where I was having the most fun was the alt.ctrl.GDC portion, dedicated to students and indie developers making strange games with alternate controllers, breaking the boundaries of what video games are defined as. alt.ctrl games, personally, felt like how all games should be approached and designed from. It felt more personal and sincere in a way AAA games could only dream of. However, thinking about selling these games on a massive scale would be impossible – each interchangeable piece would have to be made, keeping some in homes would take up too much space, and probably would cost way more than the $60 price point of most games. There’s also accessibility issues and would cause a lot of waste as opposed to downloading a game to use on a universal controller. However, these alt.ctrl games would be perfect in arcade settings. I cannot express how disappointed I have become when walking through an arcade at a mall only to see a repurposed Flappy Bird on a giant screen. Regular consumers see this too, and I wonder if arcades will die out any day now because of it, only to be replaced with VR play areas. But if these student-made alt.ctrl games can get a foot in the door to arcades? Holy crap, it would change everything.

I was given the chance to talk to the team behind Mechanaria, a game about how phrasing headlines in news reports affects the psychology associated with it. The team made their own physical device and installed screens operating on Raspberry Pi. Before talking to those at alt.ctrl, I never realized how accessible it was to create one’s own container for a game. With the help of Raspberry Pi’s operating system, Raspbian, they were able to program the back-end of the controls in Python.

I could easily see this translating to UE4 with the help of a larger computer supporting it. I genuinely might try making something like this over Summer break. In passing, I heard someone talk about how their university had a physical game making class, where they learned the engineering to make their own games in a similar way to what was presented at alt.ctrl. This would be such a cool thing for Ringling to have, but I can also hear certain professors in the back of my mind yelling about the practicality of including this in the curriculum. I could see it being an elective course or something that would work well for Visual Studies or even Fine Arts majors. Just a thought. It would be cool. Seriously.

As a side note, San Francisco is a wild place crammed with so many young professionals that are strange and awesome. It seems like I would love to live one day. Sarasota felt like the complete opposite of San Francisco – here, everything is super flat and architecture is designed to fit the brand of the business inside. There, everything is on a slope (duh) and businesses must make do with the architecture already built. It was weird seeing a Target inside an older building with iron fire escapes. Having the opportunity to go tour the Concept Art House helped me realize that being in a large city doesn’t always mean that the office that one might be working in is huge. I learned that businesses will often rent out a chunk of a single floor rather than own the whole building… Okay, now that I’ve typed this out, I sound really stupid for not knowing that earlier and this is totally what larger buildings in Sarasota do as well. But it just never occurred to me before! How would I possibly know?!