This year, I attended my first GDC. I had no idea what to expect, so I put on some decent clothes, packed my bag with a laptop and a few business cards¹, and set out with hopes for the best.

Long story short, GDC was insane. For the entire week, I was basically running around non-stop from 10am to 6pm. Wednesday was the worst: I didn’t even have time to get lunch, so I subsisted on a bag of veggie crisps throughout the day, sneaking a munch here and there between talks. Whenever I had a couple of minutes of free time, I snuck over to the GDC Expo and hung around the IGF booth. It’s amazing how much time dilates when you’re trying to be in three places at once: spending 15 minutes running to the GDC Expo and then back to Moscone West felt like half an hour!

I was originally terrified of introducing myself to developers (what would I say? why would they want to talk to me?), but I forced myself to do it over the course of the week. Sure, my conversations mostly consisted of overeager compliments and generic smalltalk, but it was still amazing to rub elbows with some of my heroes. Unfortunately, I barely had time to actually play any of the games, but from what I’ve seen, I think Fez and Spelunky will be standout hits this year. (All of the finalists were great, though!)

I’ve cordoned my notes into 3 sections below: The Talks, Random Observations About the Industry, and Lessons Learned.

The Talks

Sword and Sorcery (multiple talks). I attended probably 3 or more talks covering the development of Sword and Sorcery, the phenomenal iOS adventure game slash interactive EP. Although the developers weren’t as public as some of the more prominent indies, they echoed a common theme at this year’s GDC: the best games involve tons of struggle, sacrifice, and suffering. One of the slides showed how after the excitement and productivity of the first GDC demo wore off, there was a long lull that spanned almost half the development time in which the team was demoralized and unsure of what to do. Then, there was another spike of enthusiasm towards the end that brought the game to completion. The team survived by wholeheartedly believing in the project and having faith in each other’s abilities. Another interesting bullet point is that the developers aimed for a niche market right away, knowing full well that their game wouldn’t be as popular as Angry Birds. In the end, they sold over 350,000 copies! And here’s a fun factoid: Craig Adams (superbrothers) mentioned that the game is in some ways a loving homage to the Apple aesthetic. (Which is why it’s probably never coming to Android — from the horse’s mouth!)

Controls You Can Feel: Putting Tactility Back Into Touch Controls (Zach Gage of Unify, Bit Pilot, SpellTower). We all know that most touch controls suck, and Zach Gage delved into a few specific reasons as to why that might be. What particularly interested me was his idea that a control needs to work 100% of the time in order to create that buttery-smooth direct manipulation feeling. This is the reason why virtual buttons and sticks don’t work very well: since you’re not looking down at the controls most of the time, it’s easy to move your finger to a dead spot or even to another control and break the immersion. I tried to pay attention to this while playing some iOS games recently, and it’s incredible how often it happens. The talk also made me realize that you’re supposed to play Bit Pilot with 2 hands, and I’m amazed by how well it works! We can learn a lot from this unique control scheme.

Cubes All the Way Down: FEZ Technical Postmortem. I’ve seen bits and pieces of this talk before, but it was great to hear it all coming from the sole programmer on the project, Renaud Bédard. I was very surprised that this was Bédard’s first commercial project (IIRC), that he stuck with Phil Fish for 5 years, and that he kept reiterating that this was Fish’s game, not his, to the point of almost completely taking himself out of the picture. That’s quite some dedication! The music tool he wrote for Disasterpeace was pretty interesting as well, with options like scales and modes, multiple clips, timing parameters, tonal sound effects, time of day, and more. During one of the Fez demos, a bit of the puzzle solving music was demonstrated, in which the main theme (possibly ornamented in different ways with each iteration) was interleaved with randomly selected ambient music for a random number of bars. It worked surprisingly well, and hinted at the world of possibilities in scripting music rather than just writing it linearly. (And! I just found out that Bédard has a development blog. Definitely worth a subscription.)

The Failure Workshop. Scott Anderson gave a scathing talk on what exactly went wrong with Shadow Physics. His presentation consisted of a carefully prepared in-engine demonstration of all the problems that his game ended up having, from glitchy collisions to uninspired puzzles (“Braid envy”) to an over-reliance on gimmicks. The overview gave some fascinating insight into what is surely a common but often unspoken of end result of game development.

The Indie Composer Speaks. Of all the people I encountered at GDC, the composers seemed like the nicest and most approachable people. Laura Shigihara (best known for Plants vs. Zombies) talked about something that I’d been thinking about for a while. She pointed out that older game music (Megaman for NES, in her examples) was actually quite complicated compositionally due to the limited tools that composers had access to, and she added during Q&A that modern composers might be too spoiled by the vast amount tools at their disposal, resulting in less compositionally interesting music. She also mentioned that her new game Melolune would involve some interesting compositional techniques, including possibly counterpoint. I look forward to it!

Designing for Friendship: Shaping Player Relationships with Rules and Freedom (Chris Bell of Way and Journey). In this talk, Chris Bell discussed some of the ways he tried to get players to befriend each other in Way (alpha) and Journey. As anyone who’s played an online game knows, this is a daunting task, and I’m impressed that the two games seem to pull it off so well. In both games, two anonymous players meet to solve various tasks. Neither game lets you communicate directly through voice or chat; instead, in Way you get a gesture system, and in Journey you can communicate through music. What fascinated me the most about this was the psychology behind it: if we take two players, make them anonymous, give them a basic but non-representational means of communication, and then provide them with a common goal (or at the very least an incentive to stay together: in Journey, you can travel alone, but travelling with someone else makes you move faster and even lets you fly), they are likely to become allies. I suspect that even in a game like Counter-Strike, if in the middle of a round you were to suddenly eliminate guns and communication and provide everyone with a common goal, even some of the more trollish players would help out (if only out of boredom). Once you eliminate the ability to behave confrontationally — which, I think, is the easiest and most primally enjoyable way to behave — you’re left with no choice but to help out or find another game, and one of the two options is a good deal more fun than the other. I also love how removing the ability to communicate directly actually strengthens your relationship with your partner. Your impressions of the other person are entirely formed by how they behave within the reality created by the game: you have no idea if the person on the other end of the line is a bored 12-year-old geek or a 60-year-old professor, and there’s no way to discuss things like whether you are, in fact, a n00b. The game is a walled garden against the outside world, and thereby allows the participants to communicate on a more intimate level than was ever before possible. Games as a simplified universal language: now that’s worth thinking about.

Tetris Battle: Creating Multiplayer Games for Social Platforms. Did you know that the non-friend portion of Tetris Battle is asynchronous?! In other words, your opponent is a pre-recorded play from a database, with only the sent lines getting added dynamically. I never would have guessed!

The Indie Soapbox Session. Raigan Burns (metanet) talked about how we’re too fixated on polygons, and how we could create much more interesting worlds if we used different building blocks for our games. (Accompanying his talk was an intense demoscene video featuring fractals and CSG that proved his point. It kinda blew my mind, and I’m still trying to find the name.) Hanford Lemoore talked about maintaining a folder for inspirational images and how he peppered the images throughout his everyday life (screensavers, pinning them up) in order to prevent them from gathering dust. (I do the exact same thing! The screensaver technique sounds like a great idea.) He also started a subreddit where people can post inspirational images of their own. Two of the speakers (Ben Ruiz and Mike Boxleiter) talked about issues that I suspect were addressing some of the IGF drama that was happening behind the scenes: Ruiz talked about canning your ego, and Boxleiter talked about how winning the IGF isn’t as big of a deal as some make it out to be.

Interesting Decisions (Sid Meier). Sid Meier’s talk was really, really interesting. He talked about some very high-level game design topics, and although on the surface they seemed fairly obvious, it felt like every single one of them contained some marvelous nugget of insight. After each of his slides, I remember thinking “Hey! I like game so-and-so for exactly this reason!” Just following his bullet lists while making a game is sure to give you a ton of ideas.

Why I Hate Women in Games Initiatives (Mare Sheppard of metanet). Mare Sheppard gave a great presentation on women (and general diversity) in game development. She talked about how even though she sees herself as a game developer and not a female game developer, she’s often treated with less respect by her peers on account of her gender. She then told the story of how she helped start a workshop for women who were interested in game development. Even though it was successful, she was never entirely comfortable with the idea because she feared it gave the games produced a boost in popularity on account of the fact that they were made by women, which was at odds with her ideal of an equitable, meritocratic game industry. Her talk was earnest and non-confrontational and made me reflect on my own position of privilege. The game development community is currently very insular and dominated by white middle-class males, which causes us to miss out on a variety of fascinating perspectives. Changing this is especially important in a brand new artistic medium such as ours, where an influx of different approaches could be integral in shaping its future.

Landing On Mars: Our Rocky Path to Inventing New Gameplay (Tiger Style of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor). A great overview of the many prototypes it took Tiger Style to arrive at the final version of their latest game, Waking Mars. The changes they made while prototyping were numerous and sweeping (to the point where they even considered removing the player!), and it was interesting to see how bits and pieces of the old versions were eventually morphed and merged into the final product. I often think of game development as a more or less linear (if iterative) process, but the development of this game was very organic and showed how game design can happen when there’s no firm idea to begin with. I was also surprised and happy to hear that they used the book Our Universe as inspiration, whose crazy sci-fi art also inspired me when I was young.

Build That Wall: Creating the Audio for Bastion. Bastion had one of the best soundtracks in 2011 (other favorites: Frozen Synapse, Jamestown), and it was interesting to see how it was put together. The composer, Darren Korb, mainly talked about how he overcame his very limited resources to produce professional-sounding music and effects. In brief: he wasn’t afraid to use his DAW’s presets and plugins, tastefully applied distortion to make processed samples sound better, made sounds with his mouth and then processed them in various ways to make some of the effects (not an uncommon technique, apparently!), and recorded Logan Cunningham’s (Rucks the narrator) lines close to the mic and with compression. Logic Pro was his DAW of choice, and he even opened up the project file for one of his tracks during the talk. (It was really interesting to see what the innards of a production-grade track look like. First impression: lots of clips and channels.) From what I understand, he actually decided on the genre for his soundtrack first (“acoustic frontier trip-hop”), then picked different elements from the comprising genres when composing a new track — much like an artist using reference photos.

Art History for Game Devs: In Praise of Abstraction. Another brain-stretching lecture. Maybe it’s because I was a bit drowsy at the time, but I didn’t quite grok John Sharp’s overarching point. Nonetheless, some of the things he covered really resonated with me. He pointed out that the “language” of games was action; mentioned Scott McCloud’s triangle of realism-representation-abstraction; theorized that punk was an abstraction of community and that Islamic art was an abstraction of faith; and showed a clip from a fascinating film called “Pina“, in which dance is superimposed onto real-world locations. That last bit in particular was really interesting to me, and reminded me of my experience playing Jason Rohrer’s games. When I have time, I’d like to go over this talk again and think about it some more. (Incidentally, this and several other talks at the GDC made me think back to one of my favorite experimental indie games, stdbits, which is a uniquely abstract experience. I strongly urge you to check it out!)

BURN THIS MOTHERFATHER! Game Dev Parents Rant. Manveer Heir did a very angry, amusing, off-the-cuff rant about how we shouldn’t waste our time talking about what is and isn’t a game. (I don’t entirely agree with him, but it was exciting to watch.) Frank Lantz suggested that game developers weren’t thinking big enough — that cities are built around sports stadiums and presidents play poker, but we only want to get as far as Citizen Kane. (“Don’t let chess lap us!”) This brings to mind an interesting question that I’ve been thinking about: is there a fundamental difference between a game like chess and a more narrative experience like Mass Effect? Many developers seem to think there isn’t, that any game is still a game, but I don’t think you could make a game like chess that also works as art — even if the end result lasts a thousand years. (Perhaps a topic for another blog post…)

Ask the Experts: Professional Programmer’s Panel. I was surprised to hear that these programmers didn’t consider college experience to be important on someone’s resume and that they didn’t place high priority on code samples. They also heavily implied that they expected fresh applicants to have personal projects on their resumes. If this is the prevailing opinion in the industry, it’s a miracle that I got a job at all!

Experimental Gameplay Sessions. I didn’t see this one to the end, but lots of really interesting ideas were presented here. Steve Swink showed off Scale, a game in which you can change the scale of in-game objects. I’m not confident that the fun factor is there, but it looked really neat as a demo. Vlambeer talked about Glitchhiker, a publicly showcased game that gained lives when people did well and lost lives when they died. As the game lost lives, it started to exhibit various glitches, and once it reached zero, it died — permanently. (As in, the online database it was using was rendered inaccessible.) I’d heard about this game before, but it was interesting to hear Vlambeer describe the reactions that people had to it. One girl left in tears, and one of the last players kept playing for hours to win as many lives as possible. In the end, the game was killed by a “drunk Canadian”. The talk made me think about how people can form emotional attachments with inanimate objects, and how we could perhaps leverage this more in games. Daniel Benmergui presented Storyteller, and though the game wasn’t really on my radar before, the demos blew my mind a little. The screenshots might not look like much, but the design is tight: you get a snippet of story (something like “two lovers break up and kill each other”) and then have to arrange characters and attributes in the panels provided to arrive at that end result. Each combination dynamically generates a comic with a coherent plot. It looks as enticing as those old pre-release Scribblenauts demos, if you still remember the hype.

Indie Game: The Movie Screening. This movie was brilliant and completely deserved the standing ovation it got. The narrative pace was intense and could rival any big-budget drama; the research branched out beyond the three main storylines and delved into tons of background material (with more coming in the special edition); the character profiles were thorough and left us with a good understanding of each developer by the end of the film; and to top it all off, the whole thing was beautifully filmed.

Random Observations About the Industry

Most of the leading innovators today are incredibly young. As silly as it may sound, at 23½ and with just a year of game development experience (professional or otherwise), I feel like I’ve wasted years of my life. Watching people who are just as old or even younger than me who can not only speak eloquently about game design, but have made handfuls of games or even started their own successful companies, was humbling, frightening, and ultimately very motivating. At the end of the first day, I was depressed and wondering if I should be in this industry at all. At the end of the second day, I whipped up FlashDevelop and started to work on my first FlashPunk project. GDC was like a shot of adrenaline to my system, and I felt more motivated than I had ever felt before. I just have to figure out how to keep that feeling going now that the event is over.

Most of the indie crowd seems to know each other. And I don’t just mean the leading developers, I mean everyone, from the hobbyists to the composers to the big shots. It’s intimidating and makes me feel even more like an outsider.

There’s a lot of drama behind the scenes of the IGF that I wasn’t previously aware of. In particular, some people were annoyed or even angry that Fez was entered into the IGF a second time, even going as far as blaming backstage cliquiness. This surprised me, because I always naively assumed that the indie community got along well. (Or indeed, that there was a single unanimous indie community.)

There currently seem to be two types of game experiences: big, blockbuster, and cinematic, and small, experimental, and indie. All of the top indie games I’ve seen have tiny teams, from 2 to maybe 10 people. I agree with what Jonathan Blow said about large teams diluting game design, but I can’t help but wonder what an experienced indie developer could do with a multimillion dollar budget and a team of hundreds. After all, movies and animated features manage to do this while still retaining the spirit of the auteur, so why not games?

There are a lot of game developer hipsters. Fedoras everywhere!

Lessons Learned

If you want to get to know people in the industry, start making games right now. It might seem blatantly obvious, but for some reason I never really thought about this much before going to the GDC. I figured I’d just make bigger games every half a year or so. But your game portfolio is how people start to care about you in this crowd of 10,000 (actually, 20,000, by the latest count!) — so make, release, repeat, and people will start paying attention.

Game jams are almost unequivocally a good thing. I fear being a slow programmer and I like making excuses for my fears, so I always justified avoiding game jams by saying that there are too many short, unfinished games out there. But game jams have several positive traits outside of just making games. They help you meet people. They force you to finish your projects. They boost your understanding of game design. And they make you a better programmer. Even if you were to delete your code after a game jam, you would still profit immensely from it. I’ll try to go to more of these in the near future. Apparently the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View is worth checking out.

I came into the GDC thinking that the technical talks would be the most interesting part, but this turned out not to be the case. I barely attended any of them. Instead, hearing developers talk about their experiences (especially where design was concerned) was far more educational and inspiring to me. (But I’ll be sure to check out all the technical talks I missed in the Vault!)

Game design is both the most interesting and most difficult part of making a game. I’ve been worrying most of all about building up the tech for my games, assuming that everything after that would be much easier. But that’s not the case: most of the developers who spent years making their games took a relatively short amount of time to make their engines, even if they worked on them throughout development. The Spelunky engine programmer mentioned that he cobbled the engine together in a month, with no Xbox programming experience and only a single engine behind his belt! If I want to be a good game developer, I need to stop fearing, dive into the tech, and get it over with as soon as possible so that I can actually focus on the game. (Why is this so much harder than it sounds?)

Creative professionals are intense. I’ve never been around professional artists, musicians, or designers before, and to have so many of them around me was a revalation. The sheer amount of focus, dedication, and thought that shone through in every talk was unlike anything I’d seen before. Everyone was supremely confident in their chosen craft, and probably rightfully so. I felt very small.

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In short, what an insane week. I don’t think I’ve ever had a longer 5 days in my life.

I’ve only ever known game developers through the games they made, so finally seeing them in the real world was shocking and exhilarating — like I was walking around inside a favorite book. It was really fascinating to see the living, swarming heart of the game industry compacted so tightly in downtown San Francisco. And although I’m still a nobody, for the first time, I felt like I was a small part of this eclectic circle. Hearing talks referenced in other talks and in online summaries made me feel like I was an insider because, hey, I was there! I saw that happen in person! It’s clear what the next step in my career should be: I need to make some great games, big, small, anything. And ultimately, I really want to be up at that IGF podium in a few years.

Looking at all the great designers, programmers, musicians, and artists (sometimes all in one!) made me realize that I still don’t quite know what my chosen creative medium is. I want to design games, compose music, draw, animate. I want to do it all. And although I keep telling myself that it’s not too late, I wish I started earlier instead of being a dumb teen who spent his youth playing games. Let me tell you, nothing helps you age faster than going to a conference like this.

Perhaps the most revelatory bit of the conference came out of something Jonathan Blow mentioned. (Possibly not even at the conference — possibly in one of his many recorded talks — but I only took it to heart at Moscone.) He mentioned that game developers should be striving to put more of themselves into their games. And although I always idealistically considered games an artistic medium, I never really thought about what that meant until I encountered the insatiable creative spirit at the conference. Hearing Phil Fish talk about how his struggles with Fez made him embody his behatted protagonist — seeing Craig Adams (superbrothers) tear up at the IGF podium — listening to Dan Pinchbeck discuss the meaning of Dear Esther’s story with a group of fans — all of these events and many more like them, day after day, made me realize just how personal this medium is. Even the simplest of games, like Vlambeer’s Ridiculous Fishing, have intense and often heart-wrenching stories behind them. These people are inseparable from the games they make, and as a result, their games are imbibed with the spirits of their creators. They have souls.

Here are a few bits of media mentioned in the talks that I’d especially like to check out:

• Jonathan Blow: Design Reboot (I believe superbrothers recommended this)
• Mommy’s Best Games and their crazy over-the-top style
• Daniel Benmergui’s Storyteller (winner of IGF Nuevo Award)
• King of Dragon Pass (now on iOS)
• Chris Crawford and his Dragon Speech
• “Pina”, a film by Wim Wenders
• “Glengarry Glen Ross” and other films written by David Mamet
• Carlo Crivelli, Italian Renaissance painter
• Hanford Lemoore’s inspiration subreddit
• The demoscene demo Raigan Burns used in his talk
• A talk about easter eggs (possibly from GDC 2006) that was mentioned somewhere by someone

The GDC isn’t quite over for me yet. The Vault for 2012 has just opened up, and I’ll be catching up on all the talks I missed:

• Turing Tantrums: AI Developers Rant!
• Team Fortress 2 from the Orange Box to Free to Play in Just Four Years!
• Reimagining a Classic: The Design Challenges of Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Creative Panic: How Agility Turned Terror Into Triumph (Double Fine)
• Five Techniques for Making an Unforgettable Game, Illustrated in Space Invaders Infinity Gene and Groove Coaster
• Upgrade Humanity in 60 Seconds Flat: The Game Design Challenge 2012
• Thinking In 3D: The Development of Super Mario 3D Land
• Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn’t Need One (Portal 2)
• The Art of Dear Esther – Building an Environment to tell a Story
• Depth in Simplicity: The Making of Jetpack Joyride
• Designing Over the Top – Saints Row: The Third Postmortem
• Forgotten Tales Remembered: The Games that Inspired Leading Innovators.
• Retro and Japanese Social Games on Smartphones (CAVE)
• + many more!

And in the meantime, it’s time to make some games!

1. Instead of taking my work business cards, I decided to try my hand at making my own since I was only representing myself. I’ve had an idea for the Abstract Rose logo for a while, and I thought I’d spend a few evenings prior to GDC attempting to design a first draft. It actually took a lot more effort than it might seem, and I finished the logo on Sunday with mere hours to spare for printing, before all the shops closed. I’ll still probably change the design substantially, and there’s a lot of work left to be done in vectorizing, coloring, and generally making it look professional. Here’s what I ended up going to GDC with. [↩]