Having all of these developers together makes networking easier than at any other event.  This ca n lead you to find a new team member (temporary or permanent), discussions about how to solve problems in development, or even long term friendship.  I’m not lucky enough to be in a city with any significant game development meetups, so being able to meet so many great developers at GDC was fantastic.

I started out the week in the Level Design Tutorial.  While most of the talks didn’t apply directly to what I’m working on, I feel as though I got a good deal out of some of the lessons, specifically, how to think about level layout.  Despite focusing on shooters, many of the concepts apply to any game in which you need to concentrate your player’s focus, specifically if they are controlling an avatar in a 3D world.

On the second day of the conference, I attended the Unity track, which was like a mini Unite conference.  Despite being all about the engine I use, there were a lot of topics covered that weren’t important for my current project (mobile, art, etc.), but the presentations were mostly well done.  It would be nearly impossible for a set of talks this broad to be perfect for everyone.

Wednesday, the conference really began with the Keynote from Satoru Iwata and Reggie Fils-Aime.  After thinking that the conference was hectic through the first two days, I realized just how much crazier it gets for the full conference with sessions scheduled all day and enough on the expo floor to keep anyone busy for the remainder of the conference.  From the huge Unity booth, to playing unavailable handhelds like Xperia Play and the 3DS, to the new UDK reveal, the Expo floor was incredible.  I haven’t been to any of the other game industry shows, but I imagine the show floors are quite a bit more hectic. The GDC Expo floor was certainly busy, but save for a few big demos (3DS), everything was accessible even during the busier times of day.  Although I wouldn’t want to miss the sessions, there is easily enough to do on just the Expo floor to keep an attendee busy for all three days.

Before the conference, I spent probably too much time trying to determine which talks to go to at what times.  I realize now that isn’t too important considering the all access pass grants access to the GDC Vault where you can catch any talks that you miss.  That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy a great number of the talks, but I am glad I spent a bit of extra time on the Expo floor and I can catch the talks now.  Some notes on my favorites:

The Post Mortems were great, though I didn’t learn a lot other than making games early on was a completely different process.  Back then after deciding the genre, constraints really defined your game.  Now, the bigger constraints are budget or deadline, not graphics or performance (this is becoming more and more true even on handhelds).  For Marble Madness, Mark Cerny spoke about how the arcade board he was given really determined how he created his sprites for the art.  For Maniac Mansion, Ron Gilbert spoke about how despite having too many characters and only one tester without any sort of test plan, the game has relatively few dead ends. For the Pac Man talk, Toru Iwatani spoke about how the simple, easy to grasp mechanics made for a great game and how he had to fight with his boss to get 4 different colored ghosts. I highly encourage anyone interested in game development to check them out at the GDC Vault.

The Indie failure talk was incredibly interesting.  5 drastically different lessons from how to grow an Indie studio to design mistakes by small teams applicable to nearly any project.  Most of the lessons came down to two important instructions:  figure out what is fun about the game you want to make, and iterate on that.

Two of the most entertaining talks I attended were Jeremy Bernstein’s Minimizing Exposition and Dustin Browder’s Starcraft 2 as an e-sport.  Jeremy is a freelance writer that explained how to cut, control, and hide exposition to make the game’s story more interesting to the player with examples from his experience on Dead Space 2.  Browder is a lead designer on Starcraft 2 who described the painful choices they made that affected nearly every facet of Starcraft 2 in order for it to be played as an e-sport.

The final day of the event includes talks about breaking into the industry to compliment the student passes which are only good for that day.  I attended the last two and most of the information was of the form: know what you want to do and do more of it so you have something to show when you apply for jobs.

With all of that activity during the day, it is important to note that some of the most important business at GDC gets done over lunch, dinner, and at the parties thrown by nearly every major company in attendance.  It was a struggle to get up for the keynote on Wednesday, but going to the parties at GDC is a must for networking.  It’s pretty incredible to see entire bars full of people with a passion for this industry and being able to talk to nearly anyone in the building about gaming and development.

After all of the activity at the conference, I was exhausted.  But I’m already looking forward to next year and trying to get even more out of the conference.

The first example of this came when my colleague decided to mock-up a martian landscape.  We had been discussing using a martian landscape with a space station as the main setting for weeks.  Seeing the basic landscape allowed me to consider the finer details of the scene instead of just the big picture.  It also assured that the picture in everyone’s mind for this space station was nearly identical, rather than the unlimited possibilities we leave open by simply discussing it and not having any visual representation.

The second major breakthrough came when I was able to convince my boss that having controllable 3D characters was a perfectly reasonable possibility for this game.  At one point, we were debating having much of the story happen through comic strip-like interludes with text possibly supplemented by movies.  But with Unity, I found it was not much of a challenge to put together a control and camera scheme for any 3D model that we have.   I thought perhaps my boss was simply more fond of the movies/comic idea than having controllable characters until I showed her a demo with a controllable character having a discussion with an NPC (non-playable character).  She then informed me that she previously was concerned that controllable characters would have taken more time than we would be able to allocate.

Giving visual representation to ideas can serve two purposes in software design (games or otherwise):

1.  It gives your team a unified representation of the visual object you are discussing.

2.  It proves that the idea can be put into action.

In creating the dialogue between the playable character and the NPC, I presented a basic paragraph about Mars (borrowed from the wiki entry), then presented the user with a question and the ability to offer 3 answers, each with its own response from the NPC.  While the code for this would be quite inefficient for a larger dialogue, I have proven that dialogue between characters can be done in a short time. While I’ll need to tackle the dialogue problem in the near future, this prototype demonstrated to my boss that player controllable characters can be used to do nearly anything we require in order to convey the story.  With only a few hours of work, I was able to settle a debate we had been having for months.  Even if this wasn’t what we wanted, having this decided for only a few hours of work is certainly worth the small investment.