Molly Warner - GDC 2014 Notes

Post date: Mar 29, 2014 12:36:16 AM

(Wednesday March 19th - Friday March 21st)

        This year at GDC I only had an Expo Pass and not the Main Conference Pass that I had last year, so I wasn’t able to go to any talks. I spent all my time going between the Career Pavillion and the Expo Floor - where all the game companies, visual tech companies, schools, and sound tech companies were showing off their stuff. There’s always a huge assortment of companies to be found on the Expo Floor, but this year I was pretty disappointed by the lack of companies at the Career Pavillion. Half the floor was blocked off because there were so few, and there were only a handful of recognizable big companies there. The main ones included XBox, Playstation, WB Games, Insomniac, Riot, and Obsidian. The rest were smaller companies I hadn’t really heard of, and half the floor was filled with indie companies showing off their projects as well. So overall, there weren’t too many portfolio reviewers and recruiters to talk to. Every year there seem to be less companies showing up, maybe because every year there are more job hopefuls and big companies are well-known enough that they’re already overwhelmed with applicants without having an expensive booth at GDC.

        One of the things I tried out was UE4 at Unreal’s huge booth. They had a theater where they were doing tech demos, but I sat down at one of the computers they had lined up and tried out all the default maps for awhile. I talked to one of the environment artists who worked on the levels and he answered all my questions and showed me cool new features in the program, and I was pretty impressed overall. There was a huge variety in style and types of games, and it even comes with a mobile level, platformer, side-scroller, and strategy game default levels you can start off with. It looks like they’re really trying to eliminate Unity from the competition by having all these easily accessible game types developers can work with. I’m pretty excited to get it for myself and start making some levels in it.

        I also tried out the Oculus for the first time, and went to 3 different booths that had them. The first was an indie game similar to Skyrim in style, and the Oculus user sat through an on-rails roller-coaster through a medieval underground cavern. It was definitely really immersive and felt like you were a lot closer to the environments, but it also made me pretty dizzy afterwards. I had the same dizzying experience with the other two, one of them being an Italian veranda style house on an island that you could explore. On the inside of the house though, when walking by and looking out the open windows, I consistently got a really intense feeling of vertigo from the parallaxing between the inside and outside environments. It seriously made me lose my balance and almost fall down because of the dizziness and loss of spatial awareness, which is pretty disconcerting. The last Oculus I tried was a simple sci-fi room with steaming pipes and robots moving around, and they were showing off the sound tech they had where as you looked towards some things and away from other things, the surround sound would accurately come from the right directions and be louder or softer depending on where you were looking.

        I also tried out Portal 2 on the SteamBox. The controller is a bit weird, but I think I like the owl-eye pads more than normal joystick controllers. They’re more comfortable, and sensitivity and control was more precise I felt like, and more accurate to mouse sort of control. One of the Valve guys at the booth said that the SteamBox can play any game on Steam, so I asked him how you would play Dota 2 on it (which requires extremely quick, precise point-and-click movements and a keyboard to play) and he laughed, admitting that you couldn’t. He mentioned however that there are different control configurations you can set up as defaults for each game, and download other people’s configuration set-ups to try them out. I think the system works well for FPS games, but so far I’m not sold on other genres and how well they control. The graphics look comparable to PC though.

        I also met and hung out with a lot of Ringling alumni, which is always cool. Walking around the floor at GDC I bumped into a lot of familiar faces, including Maxis people and other EA people I’m friends with. Even though they already have jobs, they still go to GDC to look at what people in the industry at various companies are making, and to network and meet with friends they sometimes only get to see at GDC. It’s pretty amazing how small the industry is and everyone somehow knows everyone through one connection or another.

                                                                    Maxis Studio Visit

    Right now, Maxis is in lockdown mode due to the secrecy of their upcoming projects. Because of this, I can’t talk much about what’s happening inside. Maxis has two separate studios even though they’re the same company all under EA. At the Redwood Shores location, EA’s Headquarters, is the part of the studio that works on The Sims games exclusively. At the Maxis studio in Emeryville, they mainly work on Simcity, though they’ve also worked on Darkspore and other Maxis titles.

The studio I visited is the one in Emeryville, though I have visited the Redwood Shores location a couple times. The location in Emeryville is an unassuming brick building, one floor, long and without many windows. It’s shared by many businesses, some more publicly visible than others. In one corner of the building is Bucci’s Restaurant, a nice Italian place (though a bit expensive), and on the other side of the building is a children’s medical care place. The building is also shared by F’real milkshakes (which stops by Maxis every once in awhile and hands out batches of milkshakes to the employees) and a few other eclectic businesses.

You wouldn’t know Maxis is in this building unless you walked inside and down the hall to their front glass doors, which have their logo on them. Peeking in, you intentionally can’t see anything but a large white wall ahead, filled with Spore characters. This blocks the rest of the office from being seen. In order to get in, one must have an EA access badge. The office itself is pretty large, probably taking up most of the building. The vast majority of it is a maze of cubicles (with varying amounts of nerdy figurines), each set up in sections based on what people do. One area in the back corner is for all the artists, another area is for the programmers, marketing and PR are near the front, game testers are in a separate glass room in the back, and so on. Art Directors and other lead roles get more separate office spaces as well. Along the side wall is a series of rooms for meetings and discussions, each with their own name like “The Kiln” and “London.” Light pours in from the ceiling’s windows between the rafters, so many people have plants or umbrellas to block the sun on their desks.

The atmosphere around the office is not too serious, though it’s always pretty quiet, too. This may in part be due to the fact that most people who work there are at least over thirty, most of them having families already. This means they’re generally more mature, but also less competitive and laid back about games and pushing what they can do into next-gen. Many of them seem complacent, especially since they’ve worked at Maxis for so long, and don’t know much about games outside of their studio. Even games they directly compete against like Tropico or Banished which use many mechanics, art styles, and elements that they could take inspiration from, most Maxis employees just ignore. Extremely low-poly budgets are a consistent hindrance to artists despite computer power being much better than what it was years ago. These constraints are said to have been put in place because of the strain a simulation-heavy game like Simcity puts on machines, but they hold back what can be done with the visuals. Leads also emphasize meeting minimum spec requirements (minspec) for legal reasons, but it’s unfortunate that the tech is tying down the artists so much.

Everyone in the office has been split up into teams depending on which project they’re working on. Their projects are essentially in Pre-Pro stage, called Gate Zero. They have to prototype and mock up everything to show to other EA executives on a certain deadline before it’s approved. If a project is approved at Gate Zero, it continues on to a series of gates. At each gate the passed project can fail and repeat the gate (gaining another 5-6 weeks of working time), or the project could be potentially cancelled. Similar to Pre-pro, it’s rare that the first attempt will pass. Many iterations and changes are made over a short period of time, and because of this there are lots of meetings all the time. These planning stages are extremely important, as they dictate how the whole project will be carried out and what is needed/discarded.

Information on any of their projects won’t be released for at least a year, so until then they’ll be working hard on their secret titles.