It’s been a month after GDC, and things have calmed down enough here at DigiPen for me to able to take a step back and reminisce about it. It was the first GDC I’ve ever attended, and while my excitement for conventions has been dulled due to years of attending PAX East, it was still far more interesting than I thought it would be. I’ve wanted to do a “postmortem” style post for a while now, as I took a large amount of myriad info and experience away from it.
My preparations for GDC were repeatedly rushed and panicked; I had a lot of repeated good fortune, and as a result of this I was able to go to GDC for the whole week as a CA while staying with my brother in Oakland (for free). I applied to the CA program in the fall, and after a fellow student (and good friend of mine) gave me a recommendation, I got accepted. While looking for housing, I told my brother that I was going to GDC, and he replied that he was as well, and that his apartment was only a 30 minute train ride from the convention center. After realizing that I was indeed going, I hastily spent an entire week producing business card designs, and finally came up with one that I liked quite a bit. I spent a large amount of money getting them shipped to me as fast as possible on good card stock, and immediately after that, I was off to San Fransisco.
Being a CA was an awesome experience; I got to meet a lot of awesome people, and the work could barely be classified as such; I oversaw a lot of panels, scanning badges and briefing speakers at panels I would’ve attended anyway; being an audio engineer, I mostly attended audio panels (as there were a lot), and got to see some really awesome tech displayed. I also attended some leadership-centered panels, and a few about statistics, data gathering, and psych applied to game design. I got a lot out of my GDC experience, got to talk to a lot of crazy intelligent people with a lot of experience, and thoroughly enjoyed it all.
That’s all I have to say about what I did, and now I get to talk about the various things I took away from the conference. I’m not going you give you details on the tech shown at the conference, because I’d have to understand it completely to be able to teach you about it, which would be rather difficult, and I’d also ultimately just be plagiarizing from them, which is kind of illegal. I’ll mostly just be sharing work tips, fun facts, and interesting ideas that I got from panels or from talking to industry professionals. First things first;
Evolution and natural selection are both concepts that people are extremely familiar with; as time goes on, entropy causes all things to change their form. From species to structures to ideas, all things gain complexity. In natural selection, the change best fit to the situation is the one that stays alive, and thus prospers. This can lead to some extremely strange evolutions in certain circumstances, and as time goes on those can become commonplace.
This principle stays true in the evolution of games over time; one could posit the idea that a game like Starcraft 2 is the evolution of Starcraft, which takes ideas from Westwood Studio’s Dune 2, which takes ideas from Herzog Zwei, and so on, until we get back to games like Chess and Go. From Starcraft, however, we also get potential mutations in the form of custom maps, such as Aeon of Strife, mutating again in Warcraft 3’s custom game creator into DotA, evolving into Dota 2 while at the same time mutating into different versions like League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, and Smite, all entirely different takes on the MOBA genre. Again, however, natural selection plays a part, and Dota 2 and League are currently the most popular models. And indeed these “mutations” have become extremely commonplace, with Dota and League both dragging in new players and new interest in an (arguably) far greater magnitude than Starcraft 2. Read More…
(This is the first in a wave of transferring some of my personal writings into blog posts!)
(Also, this is somewhat rant-ish, and is a lot of personal opinion, so reader beware!) Read More…
