#gcap17

[jordan-dines]

Working Title: Kung Funk

I recently decided to create my very own solo project! My idea for the game is to create a side-scrolling beat-’em-up game set to hip hop music for mobile. Let’s hope it gets to the point where I can start making phat beatsies for it. So, after having gathered the inspiration from GCAP ‘17, I decided to start prototyping. I immediately got halted with touch controls. It took a little over a week but I finally got touch controls working!

It’s nothing but functional. It leaves me satisfied knowing that I finally got it to work, so I’m happy.

[jason-crawford]

GCAP Loading - Keynote

Speaker: Felix Kramer

Twitter: @legobutts ‏

Felix Kramer was the keynote speaker at GCAP Loading, the talk was based around marketing your game and could even carry into marketing yourself, but let’s just stick to the game. So here is my short summary/takeaway from the talk, Others would have gained different ideas and thoughts.

 - Marketing should be planned, it needs to be a process just like pre production, production, business planning, financial planning. Without a plan marketing will not be as sufficient. When it comes to planning out your marketing, plan it around your production milestones.

- Eg. Alpha you could possibly release an early teaser trailer, if not even before alpha if you had made a vertical slice. This will allow a seed to be planted which you can now nurture to grow your audience

- It’s important to have a clear timeline, this allows you to know when trailers need to be completed, or when that advertisement needs to go live. The last thing you want during production is to make a really horrible trailer because you didn’t plan for it.

- Ensure you’re marketing towards your intended marketplace, if you do this I can only assume(because I haven’t had to market a game yet) that marketing your game will be a little easier, and perhaps even financially cheaper due to knowing your target market, rather than marketing to the masses.

Some other hot tips from this talk, which could be obvious, but just forgotten are:

DON’T DO IT ALL BY YOURSELF

- If you can spend the money, hire employees or contractors to help you out

- Have a support group that can assist you when times get tough

IF YOU DO TAKE THE ROUTE OF DOING IT ALL BY YOURSELF

- Ensure you don’t burnout

- Create achievable goals

- Do one thing at a time, not all at the same time

- But most importantly take care of your health.

[jarroddesign-blog]

GCAP17 Summary - Day 1

So GCAP17 has come to a close, and being my first time i have a lot of thoughts about the experience as someone that is trying their best to find a place to start.

[WARNING LONG READ]

As a whole i managed to get around and meet some really cool people, and the talks were so inspirational. I’ll do my best to go through summaries of the talks that i went to over two days as a way for me to decompress my thoughts and take away’s from each. 

(A quick disclaimer, my notes were a bit haphazard in places so if i miss crediting anyone for a talk please let me know and i will update it) 

Opening Keynote  

After registration was the opening keynote got underway with Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja started us off a talk getting us thinking about this years theme, the ripple effect. The basic premise of which was about the connections you make in your life as a dev and how over time those connections turn into a network as those people scatter to the winds with their connection to you with them. 

Main take away’s

Make connections so that you can make connections that make connections.

Apply for jobs even if you think you aren't qualified as you never know where they can lead.

Nobody can do this by themselves, get help from your peers.

Design Hindsight's From Long Running Games

This was the first of the many design talks i was planning on going to in GCAP. Emilie Poissenot gave a fantastic speech about long running games or games as service as another way of putting it. It covered things like how documenting everything is ten times as important in games that you need to keep working on for five plus years and how the industry changes so quickly that it is impossible to plan for it, so plan that your plans won’t work.

Main take away’s

Plan for mistakes due to industry changes.

Readjust to those changes by making informed decisions with as much current relevant data as possible.

Creating A World And Making It Stick

Following on from one design talk to another this time with David Gaider talking about the creation of the Dragon Age universe and the pitfalls that it fell into. The talk was a very interesting look at what kind of diverging paths your team can naturally go down if you don’t touch base and make sure that your team is working on the same product. Again this talk went into the importance of documentation and how even if you have written an encyclopedia full of information, if you don’t have the cliff notes somewhere no one will read it.

Main take away’s

Don’t work in a bubble making assumptions about the work of others.

The lore and gameplay should serve into each other, they are not entirely separate things.

You are writing a guide for your team, not an encyclopedia.

You don’t get to decide what statements your decisions make. analyse what statements you could potentially be saying and ask yourself if you are okay with that.

Designing Ethical Interfaces

Onto a talk very close to my heart, accessibility. Alayna Cole and John Kane were fantastic in getting into the nitty gritty of the issues to do with not only what we traditionally think of as accessibility such as colourblind options, subtitles etc. But also the kind of accessibility options that not having push people away from your game such as representation of queer people in your media that when done poorly puts those people off of your game. It went in depth into how all of these things you should be talking to people that the options are for so as to make informed decisions on how they are implemented.

Main take away’s

There is no excuse for not thinking about accessibility for your game

Act early, with language especially as there are many design impacts that easy to implement early but hard to put in after the fact.

Consult with people whenever possible, get a wide range of perspectives for you game.

If you offend someone use it as a learning opportunity.

Tackling The Fear

Moving away from design talks for a bit and onto some business, Producing. Emre Deniz from OPX talked a lot about pitching your idea and how getting funding for your studio is not straight forward as it took 5 months of iterating on how the game presented before the idea was sold. It also touched on the idea of planning for failure and having contingencies in place that helped OPX adapt to the declining VR market. In amongst this were the themes of cultivating a healthy and rewarding company culture.

Main take away’s

Pitch a business that you would invest in

Pay people properly so they can focus on the work and deliver a better product in the end.

Think about how your going to defend your idea.

Stress is corrosive not explosive, avoid burnout by taking healthy breaks from your project if needed.

Positioning - How To Discover And Amplify What Is Remarkable About Your Game

This talk AKA “why should anyone give a F###”, was one of the most applicable talks i went to as an aspiring indie/solo dev. Marla Fitzsimmons, Felix Kramer, and Chris Wright talked about how to position your game for widespread appeal by mainly standing apart from the crowd and understanding what makes your game special.

Main take away’s

Think about your potential competitors and how you stand out from them.

Elevator pitches should:

What is it about

What makes it special

Described in easy to understand terms

Should create intrigue that leads to deeper questions about your game

Do as much research as possible to find out what is remarkable about your game and how you can push that.

Day 1 - Final Thoughts

At the end of the first day i was just so overwhelmed with information and inspiration. The speakers were all so amazing and i would like to thank them for their time and effort in making a fantastic day of learning. I will be collating and posting my summary for the second day in the coming days, as i have so many notes to go through so i will be taking my time with it as i let it all sink in.    

[wgoddard]

via Twitter https://twitter.com/WillGoddardAU

[jason-crawford]

Failure, it’s okay.

Being a student is hard, you don’t know your place in the industry, you don’t know what will happen in the future, you don’t really know how to program that game or create that art piece and you don’t know where this industry is going. It’s okay though because you're not the only one that feels this way.

That was a lot of assumptions and I apologize for that but in the grand scheme of things I’m sure we can all relate to something like those points once in our lives. It’s a scary thing but that’s okay. Because being a student is the best time to allow yourself to fail and learn from it.

Something I noticed at GCAP17 in most of the talks I attended not their main focus but mentioned in one way or another was don’t be afraid to fail. The more you fail, the quicker you’ll learn to adapt to situations or know not to do it that way again. Failing and learning is how we grow as individuals and how the industry will keep on growing.

So without further ado I would like you to stop thinking of yourself as a student. I feel it may be used as a word to provide a shield that covers up the fact if you make a bad game or fail at code, that it’s okay because you’re not a ‘professional’. But it’s time to embrace those failed creations or situations to learn from it, just like the ‘professionals’ do.

I would like you to ask these next questions out loud to yourself.

Have you made a game?

Have you made assets for a game?

Have you coded for a game?

Have you written a narrative for a game?

Have you worked on a game as a producer?

Have you done quality assurance on a game?

If you answered yes to any of those Questions, your a Game Developer.

Congratulations, you have leveled up!

The main point of this post is to explain to you that it’s okay to allow yourself to fail because everyone does and also to accept that you’re a game developer even when you’re not creating your best work or failing daily. Just because you may be a student doesn’t mean once you graduate you never fail again, it would be a dream of course but then what would be the challenge of creating games.

So if you can bare reading anymore, I’d like you to reread the first two paragraph in this post but replace the word ‘student’ with Game Developer, you may find yourself relating to this more closely.

My experience in failing:

Currently I am in the process of acting as the role of producer in our final year projects at AIE. It has been a pleasure so far, extremely challenging and stressful at times but enjoyable for the most part. I’ve failed many times during this project, from over scoping, balancing the workload throughout the team and not keeping on top of task tracking. Every time I have failed (Yes, I get annoyed at myself but that's only human) I look at the issue and try to resolve it and then sometimes that even fails,  in the end I know I will eventually fix the issue and learn from it.

“Failure and iteration” is always going to be there in the future and it’s always going to be something that needs to happen for myself to learn, adapt and become a better problem solver in the future, so I’ve begun to embrace it a lot more throughout the last year and will carry it into my future.