GDC - Coverage

GDC: Day 1

The Game Developers Conference proper (and the Independent Games Festival where I expect to see some interesting games) does not start until Wednesday; the first two days are for “Summits,” which merely means themed panel tracks. I spent most of my time either on the Narrative track or the Indie Games track, which seemed more likely to be of interest to our readers at Adventure Gamers.

The highlight of the day, at least for me, was the final session. It was run by James Carbut and Will Todd, the indie duo who developed Thank Goodness You’re Here! pretty much all alone. Adventure Gamers reviewed it favorably, but I was surprised that the room was packed; apparently, many other people loved the game as well, despite its weird, regional British nature.

The session was titled "How 'Thank Goodness You're Here!' Does Comedy." As you might expect, they played much of it for laughs. “This started as a fun weekend project,” they said. “Six years later we launched.”

Why put funny first? “It’s all we know how to do,” said James. “We’re shit at game design.”

They studied farce as a form, and strove for constant novelty, using surprise as a key to the comedy. 

“We don’t act like other games. We have no narrative arc.”

Some of their basic principles:

1. Keep the pie humble. Meaning: don’t overreach.
2. They like incidental content, like signs, posters and short dialogs that don’t advance the game but offer quick gags.
3. No game “progression,” all dialog, just funny.

James got a little serious then and defined their game as consisting of “absurd semiotic content that provides coherent narrative beats.”

They said they had originally imagined the game as an open world, but this meant that over time, a player would exhaust most of the content and then become frustrated as they ran around trying to figure out how to solve the last few problems. So they moved to the current “beads on a string system.” Each bead has some encounters and problems, and the next bead is unlocked only when those problems are dealt with. (Navigational unlocks make this happen.) This also allowed them to look at the game and say “Hmm, this one seems a little thin, we need more stuff here.”

Responding to comments later, they said “We thought we were just making a game for our mates, and are surprised that so many other people found it funny.”

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The first panel I attended was "The Year in Live Service Games," paneled by Steve Meretzky, Dave Rohrl, and Scott Hartsman; the first two are friends, and this is a long-running panel (formerly "The Year in Free-To-Play Games," and before that, "The Year in Social Games"). Not that the actual talk is of much interest to our readers, but I’ll note that Steve Meretzky (now working in FTP casual games) was one of the original Infocom crew, and designed the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.

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Gregory Lane of Exit 73 Games talked about working on the (fake) in-game social media platform in his game, #BLUD. It’s an action adventure; the actual gameplay involves high school girls' field hockey – and vampire slaying. But holding it all together is “Perch,” the social media platform.

The tutorial has your field hockey captain explaining things to you via direct messages. Quests are given to you by NPCs in the form of social media posts. Quest progress produces push notifications. NPCs comment on your actions in social media. In all, the game involves 78,000 written words, most of that appearing on "Perch."

Lane says that as social media becomes more accepted, more games will include it as an element, and he may be right. Caravan SandWitch does this as well, but in a much more cursory way; #BLUD’s system is far more robust. They have a “trending” feature, push notifications, likes, selfies to post; it genuinely feels like a real platform. Kind of impressive, really.

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Michelle Olson of Banana Bird Studios spoke on “Meetings Make Games! Fostering Empathy and Focus in Collaborative Discussions.”. It was excellent, but maybe not of interest unless you’re a lead on a development team.

William Shen, currently working on Subnautica 2, talked about how to create compelling worlds for games.

And I met with Patrick Ferland, who was my tech lead when we both worked for Playable Worlds (the company building Raph Koster’s next MMO); he’s now an engineer at Blizzard, working on Diablo 4.

 

GDC: Day 2

The highlight of the day was the Indie Soapbox. 

Teddy Dief who is part of a group of developers in LA who made a plea for what he called a “package” of DevOps, an organization that would share resources and accounts, doing things like jointly negotiating with publishers, sharing build boxes, reducing health insurance costs by joining together, doing joint promotion and providing stability by supporting each other when contracts were cancelled. As he put it, developers tend to expand and then have to shut the doors when bad times come, precisely because their overhead has gotten too high. Afterwards, I went up and told him that what he was describing was a Rochdale cooperative, a legal form of self-governing business organization in the US and most other countries in which members control the co-op and can share in its profits (if any) while remaining independent. Land O’Lakes is a co-op of dairy farmers, for instance. A co-op of indies would be very doable.

Karla Reyes of Anima Interactive talked about her project, Take Us North, a game about the issues faced by migrants to the US from Latin America, and made a plea for “values-driven development” and a new wave of progressive games focusing on issues that matter.

Fūnk-é Joseph talked about their journey, from game-obsessed kid to game journalist to laid-off game journalist, then deciding they really wanted to make games. They started to teach themselves how to do it, mostly from online resources, but emailed a slew of people to help them with problems, including some pretty high profile developers, and were amazed at how helpful people were, and how willing to share. They decided to try to develop a game and founded a studio (Play Underground), then entered an Ubisoft indie competition with their game under development, and won that competition, earning C$50,000, which felt great and was a boost to development. They ended saying how great it was to be “a fun inventor,” the basic job of a game developer.

Chad Toprak, from Melbourne started by noting that the organizer of this session had been stopped at the border, and how horrified that made him feel. He is a designer of physical games, museum exhibitions, and other experimental games. “The world is in a bad place,” he said, citing environmental issues, the rise of fascism, and war. He said it was hard to make art when the world was falling apart. And what is the game industry doing about it?

Nothing. Silence.
Silence is complicity.

He made a strong plea for game developers, particularly indie ones, to speak up and resist.

What can we do?

The things anyone can do: 

• Speak up.
• Amplify marginalized voices.
• Write to your representatives.
• Sign petitions.
• Boycott.

What can we do as developers?

We have a powerful medium to express our beliefs.

He mentioned Liyla and the Shadows of War, Dreams on a Pillow, and a Wolfenstein mod that pops up a dialog every time you try to shoot a Nazi, saying “but what about free speech?” … while the Nazi continues to shoot at you. Also Molleindustria’s New York Times Simulator (I can point to Road 96 and Dustborn as more conventional games that do address some of these issues, but I guess Toprak wasn’t aware of them).

Speak truth to your lived experience.

We have the power to capture our stories as an act of resistance.

You are not alone. Hope lies in our collective voice and action.

 

GDC: Day 3

I started the day by exploring the Independent Games Festival pavilion (the press got to visit an hour before it was opened to the general public, making it easier to strike up a conversation with the devs). I’m not going to mention them all, but only the ones I think Adventure Gamers' readers might find interesting. (You can find the nominees here, and the winners will be posted on the same page in a few hours.)

Tavern Talk is a game in the mold of Midnight Ramen or Coffee Talk; that is, characters sit down at a bar, you make them food or drinks and chat with them, uncovering their stories. The difference here is that it’s set in a fantasy world.

In DisplaceMen, you are a broke painter in a coastal town and are searching for a vanished mermaid; it's a side-scrolling 2D game with multiple endings. A student project, but looks interesting.

Indika is a somewhat grim 3D adventure in which you play a defrocked nun in a medieval setting. It’s received quite a lot of critical attention; I tried playing it a while ago and ran into a show-stopping bug, but it's been updated, and should be worth revisiting.

Closer the Distance is a narrative adventure, set in a small town. At the game’s beginning, your sister is hit by a car and dies. The story focuses on your experience of grief and that of everyone else in the town, and your task is to try to help yourself, your parents, and the other townsfolk who are dealing with bereavement.

In Despelote, you are an Ecuadorian child; not sure what the plot is, but it is evidently narrative in nature (with a soccer minigame). It’s up for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, which strongly indicates excellence. Fully voiced (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

The developers of Consume Me say, “Being a teenager sucks, so we made a game out of it.” You’re a troubled teen, balancing school, home life, friendship or hostility with your classmates, plus the desire to land a boyfriend. There’s a time management mechanic and multiple endings. Also up for the Grand Prize.

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Other games I looked at: The designer of Detective Dotson demoed it for me. It’s a classic side-scrolling point-and-click adventure with somewhat pixelated but very pretty art and is, apparently, the first adventure game developed in India. It has a rather innovative mystery-solving mechanic, a bit of humor, and looks fun. I assured him that this is absolutely up Adventure Gamers’ alley.

At their invitation, I also spent some time at the Brazil booth on the show floor. I focused on the two games that seemed to have some narrative appeal. Kriophobia is a Silent Hill-like exploration/horror game in which the protagonist, a female scientist exploring a long-abandoned Soviet base, uncovers a story through environmental clues, books, and other such items found in the base. Nested Lands is a survival/base-building game, different from most others in that as you expand your base, NPC workers show up and help you out, so there’s a bit of an RTS sensibility to it. I thought it impressively ambitious.

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Sessions I attended:

A Code of Ethics for the Game Industry

An attempt to write a code that would:

• Protect gamers against online toxicity and "dark patterns" in free-to-play monetization
• Protect developers from harassment (harassment of devs by gamers is scarily common), as well as exploitative practices by their employers.

​See here if interested in more details.

All In: Paving the Way for Female and Non-Binary Game Entrepreneurs

A program in Sweden that has apparently had some success in helping them found companies and land funding.

Inception Publishing: The Shift to Indie Self-Publishing

The main takeaway: Start building your community yesterday, on Discord and social media. Also, there are companies like popagenda that can provide pieces of what you need to self-publish (at a fee) without asking for a share of revenues.

Video Games and Crowdfunding: Best Practices from Successful Campaigns

You’re not going to cover all of your development costs via Kickstarter, but a) you can get some money, and b) it’s a marketing channel, getting more eyes on your game.

 

​GDC: Day 4

The most relevant thing (to our readers) that I did today was sit with the developers of Aether & Iron (Seismic Squirrel) and review their game under development. It is a narrative RPG set in alternative 1930s New York in which “aether,” an antigravity substance, has been discovered, so in the 30s, we have flying cars, and indeed flying skyscrapers. The elite live in the overcity, and the slums are on the ground.

You play as a female smuggler with a sequence of quest-based missions; it’s an RPG in that you earn experience points and can upgrade your stats. Challenges are dice-based, and increased stats and some equipment boost your chances of success. There is a turn-based combat system, but combat mostly occurs in the sky as you drive your flying car through the skyways of New York; you can upgrade your car with, for example, flamethrowers. Character interactions are visual novel-like, in that you view static images of yourself and your conversational partners, with images swapped out as emotional states change. It’s 2D, and the background images are static (with some panning to indicate motion). All characters are voiced, and the music is period jazz. 

I told them that, no promises, but it looked like a game I’d like to play.

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I had some engaging conversations during GDC as well. Breakfast with Sam Roberts, a game studies professor, revealed a spectrum of quality in student capstone projects. I caught up with Greg Chapman, now leading Mattel's mobile game division, who had previously worked on Dungeon Boss, for which Chapman was the lead designer.

 

At Yerba Buena Park, I met New York developer Adam Mostel, eager to learn about my career. Dinner with gaming legends like Randy Farmer, co-creator of Habitat, set the stage for mingling at the Old Fogey’s Meetup, a gathering for seasoned devs over 50.

 

I had insightful chats with Chip Morningstar, who co-created Habitat and helped define the JSON standard; Raph Koster, my former boss at Playable Worlds, who’s on track to launch Stars Reach; and Tim Brengle, a GDC veteran. 

 

I reunited with Gordon Walton, my lead producer at Playable Worlds, and connected with Hal Barwood, known for his work at LucasArts. Also at the table were Kenny Dinkin, my EP at Playdom, Nicole Lazzaro, an expert in game UX, and Dan Scherlis, who produced Asheron’s Call and now works on apps in the medical field.

 

Overall, this GDC trip is a blend of nostalgia, filled with memories of the great experiences we had back in the day and the games we enjoyed because of it.

GDC: Final Day

I began the day having breakfast with Elina Ollila, a game studies academic with whom I worked at Nokia Research, some twenty years ago. She is now a professor teaching game development students at Arizona State University.

I sat in on the “Evolving Role of Publishers” seminar, run by Jason Della Rocca of Execution Labs and an important figure on the business side of indie gaming. Other participants were John Buckley of Pocketpair, Snow Rui of Hooded Horse, Steve Escalante of Digital Bandidos, and Matt Charles of Cooldown Games – all indie game publishers. They take different approaches to deciding what games to back, but the major takeaway is that while they like innovation, they look for factors to mitigate risk – experienced team, established communities through Discord and social media that have expressed interest in a title under development and the like. There was general agreement that the maximum amount an indie publisher will invest in a title caps out at around $2 million.

I then attended the last half of the "Experimental Games Showcase" (it ran for two hours). It’s been running for years, and is always a fun time; the projects shown are all non-commercial, goofy things. 

Basilisk 2000 is ostensibly a level editor for a non-existent game. It contains several different scenes, and allows you to do such things as place art assets, and rotate and scale them. In other words, it’s kind of a modding tool for a game that doesn’t exist.

Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival is a “pumpkin-carving MMO.” It runs only in the weeks leading up to Halloween, and first started in 2020, during the pandemic, when the real-life Halloween festival in the developers’ home town was cancelled, and they decided to create a virtual one. Your avatar is a ghost with somewhat customizable facial features, and you can carve a pumpkin and place it in the world. Each year they have added new features – a guessing game, photomode, a hedge maze, selfie mode, an escape room, expanded town, and a ghost dog. In 2024, people carved 20,000 pumpkins.

Kakakompyuter Mo Yan apparently means “That’s what you get for using the computer” in Tagalog. It’s a collection of 20 interactive art projects by Filipino artists, of quite diverse types: a karaoke game, an exploration of queer identify, a personal abortion journey, all curated by Chia Amisola.

A Solitaire Mystery is a collection of 23 Klondike Solitaire variants, some of them very odd indeed. For example, one lets you “fork” your tableau, so that one line of cards breaks out into two lines. Another is “binary” in the sense that all cards are either 0s or 1s – but you can combine them. For example, taking a 1 card and putting it atop a 0 card makes it a 2 card (10 in binary is 2). You still must build up your foundations in numerical order (1 to 2 to 3 etc.), so you have to construct the numbers you need, and to win still means clearing the tableau.

In Found in Translation, you use cards to translate Octavio Paz’s poem "Piedra de Sol" from Spanish into English – but you need to make decisions about whether you’re striving for literalness, or attempting to preserve the meter, or need to modify imagery in the original poem to be more comprehensible to English-language readers. No knowledge of Spanish is necessary; the cards in essence propose possible translations of selected words or passages.

Alistair’s Magic Box by Alistair Aitcheson is a modified version of a Sega Genesis emulator that lets you do goofy things with Genesis games. For example, if playing Sonic, you can have Sonic swap directions every time he collects a ring; or add new geometry to the scene every time he collects a ring; or sort all the colors on the screen from left to right, completely subverting the designed level space. Very strange.

That evening, I attended the Game Designers' Workshop dinner, which is not affiliated with the conference, instead organized by Noah Falstein, whom readers may know as a longtime LucasFilm Games (now LucasArts) employee, designing the Indiana Jones games for them; he also designed Sinistar, back in the day. Before sitting down, I had a conversation with Jesse Schell of Schell Games and an instructor at Carnegie Mellon. At the table, Nicole Lazzaro, an expert in game UX was to my left; to my right was Rich Dansky, one of the leading lights of narrative design for the game industry; and across the table was Eric Goldberg, one of my oldest friends, and co-founder (with Raph Koster) of Playable Worlds. This was the first time the dinner was held at the chosen restaurant, and unfortunately, the room was tiled and the acoustics terrible; you had to shout to be heard, and I wasn’t really able to talk to anyone else.

The next day, I had breakfast with Tadgh Kelly, a longtime game industry consultant and an old friend. And then hauled my carcass to the nearest BART station to take the train to San Francisco International Airport, and thence back to New York.

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I enjoyed my time at GDC, as I always do; this is the first time I've attended wearing (figuratively) a games journalist hat. I've previously attended as: a game developer employee looking for publisher funding; an unemployed game developer looking for work; a CEO running a game distribution channel meeting with developers; an entrepreneur looking for funding; an employed game developer just looking to reconnect with friends. Each of these is, as you might imagine, a somewhat different experience. The main difference this year was that at the end of my day at the conference, I needed to spend an hour or two in my motel room writing copy (the results of which are summarized in this article). But I was still able to reconnect with friends, and you know, learning and talking about games is always a pleasure.

There was a pervading sense of angst, even fear, at the conference; attendance was down from prior years (no surprise, given that more than 10% of game industry employees have been laid off in the last two years), and there's a sense that AI may result in the elimination of many art and design jobs. But as a longtime champion of independent games, I was heartened to see that indie games are thriving.