I feel like writing a blog post about my experience at GDC this year is necessary to my recovery from it, something so that I can continue to get work done and restart all of my hanging projects.
The speed at which GDC proceeds has left me with mostly glimpses, so that is what I am going to relay here. An exhaustive minute to minute experience probably wouldn’t be that useful anyways.
Before GDC even started proper I heard a rape joke. It wasn’t even a joke, just someone using rape as an adjective in a way that was intended to get a shock laugh (I think this is a common rape joke structure). I learned later that this was someone whose work I had been pretty into, which is a bit frustrating. This wasn’t the only instance of this kind of thing happening at the conference, just the first one that I heard. I didn’t call him out on this, maybe I should have, but I let it slide.
This thing was counterbalanced by all the bits of the conference that seemed focused on making stuff better for marginalized people and non commercial interests. Yann pointed out the difficulty with holding both the 5 story posters for battlefield 4 and the talk about free indie games in your mind at once. Like GDC was using all of the indie game stuff to validate all of the other more commercial / problematic work that was going on.
Lost Levels was one of the amazing bits on the non-commercial end of the scale, it provided a great section of passionate people talking about issues that couldn’t necessarily exist within the main structure of GDC. I was totally impressed by the organizers of that thing, along with all the speaker that I managed to see. I was sliding into a low blood sugar haze during the event, but what I was present for was really amazing and I appreciated it. I am looking forward to more of this type of thing if I end up going to GDC again. It felt like a really important thing that should be part of every corporate focused gaming event. The lack of a projector was also brilliant, and forced people to rely on words, which was something that could get lost during the more visually focused main conference.
The few talks that I made it to were also pretty great, the aforementioned free indie games talk, and the rants session and parts of the experimental gameplay workshop. The rants session in particular, and Anna Anthropy’s reading / remix of Romero’s Wives was completely amazing. It summed up so much that is wrong with the culture that surrounds making games, and was completely crushing in person.
We were lucky enough to have a ton of people with us and helping this time, particularly Yann and Kristina that did the thankless work of running the booth while I sat around on the lawn. I should also mention that the most important part was as it always is, meeting new people and catching up with old friends. I don’t want to leave anyone out though, so I am just going to leave everyone out.
The game of the week was by far an unreleased two player competitive game by Harry Lee. Hopefully he will post it in some playable form at some point. It reminded me that simple could be amazing, and that there is room for academic thoughts about psychology and bluffing within high speed games.
Also my sister made her first video game that week, in a competition with Sos over who could make the most terrible game.

I just completed the third chunk of One Game a Month, more or less. This one is a game called T@XY, and it was done as part of the 7 day rogue like challenge. I have not put either this game or the one that I did for the last game a month on my website, or anywhere other than the wilds of twitter, due to the fact that I am not that proud of them. They have both been little games that while they had the core loop in them, didn’t seem to rise to the level of being interesting. I fear that my larger game projects are making me forget how to accomplish jam games, and also making my expectations for my own games rise past the point where I can accomplish them as an individual (due to the fact that I am working with a team every day). I think I am also losing sight of why to do jam games, which is to explore and prototype. If 1 in 5 jam games is alright, that is probably an ok record.
While I was working on this one, I was also felt like I should have been working on this larger project, one which is on its 3rd iteration without a public release. I think this time through I might actually have the drive to finish it though. One of the issues is that the core of that project is so big, it is hard to hold it all in your mind at once. I currently have about a third of the core in on this current iteration, but I am hoping to be able to focus my free time on it after getting back from GDC, and maybe get a playable / usable version of it out for the next GAM. “Martin vs Monty”: probably will take us into the 5th month unfortunatly, but that one is also coming along nicely, it is to the point where I don’t feel at all bad showing it to people.
Simulateously to all that, I am continuing to do Fun a Day for the entire year. I have yet to print the zine for month two, but I am putting up the photos from month three on the web as I go along. Going to the states while attempting to continue making lego scupts is going to be interesting, and difficult I imagine. I don’t yet know what I am going to do in month 4 for that, but I am leaning towards something that I can actually accomplish on the train this time around.

I have fallen back into dota 2 this weekend, after dropping it for about 3 and a half months. The last time someone asked me if I liked it, I had to say “I am not sure”. I still feel the same way about it, but I am starting to hone in on the bits of it that I do enjoy (and the ones that I don’t like so much). I think it say a bunch for the game that it took me around 30 hours of play to gain an opinion of it, or maybe it is illustrative complex the game is.
Much like the RTS games that it is descended from, much of the moment to moment play in the game is a micro management game, which comes down to understanding animation timings and clicking at exactly the right time. I enjoy this much more than the micro in star craft 2, which I find to have to many moving bits to really feel like micro management, and starts to feel like an interface management problem.
The larger macro game is a bit harder for me to enjoy, as it is quite broad in terms of the decisions that can be made. I think this is my beginner reading of the game however, I am still at the level where I don’t understand the buy orders for each of the various moving units on the field, much less how I need to balance my purchases against the other team. This may all be a moot point because I have yet to perfect the micro game, and can’t really purchase the items as quickly as I need to keep up with the level of play in the rest of the game. Valve has made this a bit better by integrating user build orders into the interface that help you decide what to buy and when.
I think that this may speak to my larger issues with the game, which is that the level of play needed to keep up with other players is so far beyond what I am capable, even after 30 hours of play.
Those thing said however, I still really enjoy playing the game, and there are a number of things that I would borrow from it for my own design. the fact that they didn’t seem to ever throw away any content. If you can think of an element for the game, it is in there. Weapons that do major modifications to the behavior of some of the heroes, but don’t do anything for the other heroes, strange item delivery systems. It seems like the design was one ongoing shit sticks session, and I really enjoy that. I wonder what got taken out, if anything. It does seem to lend itself to a game that has a bunch of breadth, which the depth comes out of. The system starts with a bunch of branches, which are quickly pruned as play goes onwards, and then converge on correct builds. The points in the game that allow for branching decisions seem to be centered around the play within a team, the hidden information around what the other team is doing, and the specifics of how a player approaches the micro game.

The final game in the set of music creation games that we did at Lucky Frame. I am sure there will be more, the next thing we do will not be as clearly connected. This game is a cross between a cave flyer and sound shapes. I am really proud of the game design decisions that we made on this one, I think it is both accessible and deep.

Wave Trip Website

I am going to try to finish more things this year. I was a bit disappointed that I looked back on 2012, and didn’t have a crazy long list of games like I did for 2011. Some might argue that it is quality over quantity (one of the 2012 games got into the igf for petes sake), but proliferation is its own reward. I also started a bunch of games last year, but never finished them to the point that I was comfortable with releasing them. This year I am going to try my hardest to get things to a state where I enjoy them, and where I feel comfortable with giving them to others.

As such, I am going to participate in 1GAM, a project in which I am going to release 12 games in 2013. I think it should be doable, I already have the first 3 lined up, I just need to come up with another 9. I am also writing 750 words a day for the month of January. Writing is one of the skills that I feel like I am lacking in the games that I make personally. It is amortized a bit by working with lucky frame, but my jam games suffer from a lack of story. I will probably post up an ebook of my rambling for anyone that is brave enough to download it at the end of the month.