GDC 2011 Diary: Day 2

Decidedly less lectures today. Lots more hands on type activities and a little more faffing about on my part. Spent the entire day at part two of the game design workshop. But before I talk about that, I wanna show and tell some of the neat little things I'e experienced at GDC so far.

After I signed in on Sunday, I received a bag full of what I'll generously call "swag." Most of it was garbage trash, but inside it was a single blue square. On the back of the square was a note informing me that it was a pixel, and I needed to put the pixel in its designated place on a mural at GDC. Everyone attending GDC got a pixel, and we're all going to put them together to create on giant mural. It's actually a fun and neat idea, I thought.

The work-in-progress mural

I'll take another photo of it towards the end of the show when it's complete. If you get close to the mural you can see silly things that people wrote on their pixels. Actually most of them were just plugging their websites, but whatever.

Another neat thing going on is what's being called the GDC "metagame." The jist of it is that you go to the booth that's running it and they give you a hand of cards with the name's of various video games on them and question cards which ask things like "Which game is more educational?" and that sort of thing. Anyone wearing a metagame sticker on their GDC pass is playing the game, and you can challenge them with a question and a game card. They then take a game card from their hand and play it against the card you laid down, and the two of your debate for two minutes about why you think your game fits the question better (even if you really don't!).

A winning combination, for sure

After you debate, the bystanders judge who made their case better and declare them the winner. The winner pulls a random card from the losers hand, and the game continues on throughout the show. At the end of the show, whoever has the most "holographic" cards (that is, the ones with the stars in the corner) gets some fancy gift certificate or an iPod Shuffle or something. I forget. It's a pretty fun way to break the ice or just have an interesting discussion about video games.

Some more of my cards

I also spent about thirty seconds playing my very first 3D game. I haven't even seen a 3D movie yet so it was quite an interesting experience. I walked up to a demo station running Fable 3 on PC, popped on the glasses, and was washed away by dimensions I barely knew existed.

In all honesty, I haven't been big on the whole 3D gaming thing, but now that I've tried it, I think it might not be a total waste of everyone's time. I don't think it's possible to actually use the 3D as a gameplay mechanic, but there was a marked improvement in visual clarity and depth perception with the 3D, even if the glasses I was wearing did turn everything grey. If there's ever a cheap, glasses free method of making this the new standard, I don't think that would necessarily be so bad. Provided they work out the kinks. The 3D definitely had a hiccup or two while I was playing that made my eyes want to explode in pain. It felt like I was crossing them really hard, but they were totally relaxed. Weird stuff.

Anyways, on to the meat of what I actually learned from the show today.

The first project I did today was to modify a board game called Three Muskateers so that it could be playable with 3 or 4 players, rather than just 2, while maintaining the aesthetic qualities of the original game's design. One of the interesting things about the original game was that it was asymmetrical multiplayer. In other words, each player had different moves and abilities at their disposal, rather than a game like chess or checkers in which both players are identical forces.

One of the important things about the original game's design was that in the beginning, not many moves were available to either player, but slowly more and more possibilities would open up until the game finally ended. Our instructor for this activity pointed out that the game followed the arc of dramatic progression.

As time goes on, the number of choices slowly increases until reaching a peak, and then quickly dropping off

This was a HUGE deal to me. Dramatic progression is really important to me and dictates a lot of how I think of game design, but I never thought it could apply to anything but an actual narrative. Here we have a multiplayer experience whose story and narrative is basically left at the door as soon as the game begins, and yet dramatic progression completely applies to the spirit and flow of the game. Amazing!

The design me and my group ended up with turned out to be some kind of territory control type experience, and the changes we made turned it into a symmetrical multiplayer experience. In fact, as we went around the room, I found that most groups did the exact same thing. This wasn't necessarily supposed to be the takeaway from the project, but I certainly found it to be very interesting.

Asymmetrical games are very difficult to make. The key reason for this is that the easiest way to make a game fair is to give both teams the same tools for winning. But if you want to accentuate the differences between players, you'll have to spend a lot of time tweaking and refining it to balance it, and balance is a really hard thing to measure when the units of measurement are not the same.

In the end, I think the asymmetrical experience was more exciting, interesting, and strategic. It's extremely difficult to pull off, but worth all the effort. I actually felt a bit of passion for multiplayer game design stir up inside me after this project, when typically the only things I've cared to design are single player games.

The last major thing I did at the workshop was what they called a "paper prototype." Somewhat in the spirit of the case studies I do in this blog, we chose an existing game to strip down into a game played with dice and cards. The idea being that if you remove audio, visuals, and the controller, all that will remain will be the game's design, and you can learn from it easier.

My group decided to make a paper prototype of StarCraft, a ragingly popular real-time strategy game in which you collect resources, build a base and train an army to defeat your opponent. So we sat down and decided that the most important aesthetics of StarCraft are urgency, secrecy, and strategy. We constructed a card game based around those ideas as quickly as we could, and though we almost ran out of time, when we sat down to play it, I was shocked at how truly fun and engaging it was. By the end, I wanted to keep playing and keep refining it further and further.

The instructors, all successful game designers at various companies, informed us of how useful paper prototypes can be in the early stages of developing a game. Not only is it basically free, but the end result will be an invaluable tool for communicating others what you want your real game to be like. The takeaway from this project was that play transcends media. Very poetic.

After that we all blew off some steam by taking a paper bag filled with random goodies and making a game out of it in a short amount of time. Our game was very close to being fun. And with this last goofy, somewhat noneducational project, the game design workshop drew to a close.

Over the course of the two days, I met and worked with loads of game designers, many from distant countries. One from England, one from Finland, and a couple from Spain! People come so far to go to GDC, it's really amazing.

Tomorrow I'm going to two talks. One about how to start up your own studio and one about animation software. Second one might be over my head, but I wanted to check it out. I'll also be attending an award show for 2010 games, which should be fun. Also, the main floor opens up tomorrow and I'll be roaming around there talking to dudes. So staaaaaaay tuned!