Game City

This years Game City was very interesting, not only due to the game's that had been produced but also in the way that they were discussed. I really liked the discussion's around the game Thomas Was Alone, because it was more of a Pod Cast style lecture similar to the Ricky Gervais show. I prefer this format because I find it more interesting when I hear people having a conversation about a certain topic instead of someone just asking questions after questions with no real back and forth discussion.

Now there seemed to be a bit of a theme when it came to the games and it was that all the games seemed to mainly feature shapes for example Thomas Was Alone which the character is this Rectangle that can be manipulated throughout the game, although I haven't played it myself but that's what I got from it when I saw the small trailer. The point of the discussion about this game was so that the designer of the game could talk to the other industry professionals who were also doing talks at the event about his game. He spoke about the game on three different occasions, the two that I caught were the one's about story and gameplay then there was one on the art side.

Then you had the game Hundreds which is based on using circular shapes to accumulate enough numbers to make 100. Now at first I didn't understand how the game was played at all from the first video clip that was shown, however I was interested in the actually design of the game as I would never have thought of it myself. Personally I wouldn't have been interested in playing the game, but the concept was most definitely the interesting part of it. One personal note and that is the presentation could have done without the dull mood setting backing track. The purpose of the talk was for the designer to show the production of the game from pre production to production and then finally post. Which was interesting as he also spoke about having to work with people from all over North America, not only that but he mentioned how many things they had to rethink in terms of level designs. He even went onto mention how they had taken much longer than had hoped to taken which would make you think that sometimes even if you go over your pre determined timeline, it can be good but only if what you have stumbled upon is actually gold. 

My final example to be is the game Super Hexagon which was my favourite from the whole week. I can probably say we could have just spent the entire lecture just watching him play it over and over again, which would have probably been better as the person who made the game clearly wasn't comfortable with the whole public speaking aspect of the lecture, which was definitely apparent when he was being asked questions. I think what was more shocking about the lecture was that he went through all the other little games that he had made and how much little time was actually spent on making them, but the quality was brilliant. Now the actual design of the game itself is pretty simple and the audio for the game was one of the addictive parts of the game, he even said it was just a random coincidental success in terms of the music fitting so well.

Probably one of my favourite talks was by Anthony Johnston who was talking about the importance of having proper writers in games and how comic books are a better reference material for making games and making cut scenes for games than films are. Not only did he make this claim but he definitely managed to demonstrate this by taking a cut scene from a game and by using comic book techniques he managed to cut out a lot unnecessary content. I also liked his comment about how games and comics are in a sense an outcast media, which in a sense is true because I used to look down on comics myself probably until that lecture. I guess it's one of those things where if you don't really understand it and just judge it by the stereotypes then you're going to have your nose up to it, like most people do to games. Until you realise what actually goes into making them and the logic behind it, you can actually get drawn into it and begin to respect it.

What did I learn from this week?

Well I learnt that it is possible to make a very effective and addictive game just from using your most basic shapes. Now I can safely say that most the people on the course were thinking of more extravagant game designs when it came to the 2D game that has been set by Chris, but I think by going to those talks people will definitely have a different frame of mind when it comes to designing it especially after seeing Super Hexagon not only that but ever since that talk pretty much everyone now has it on their phones. 

Now when it comes to thinking about the cut scene which I have to make, I'm going to try and take on board what Anthony talked about and implement the thought process to the production of mine.