GDC Vault 2016 Recommendations - Part 1 (Patreon)

I've attended GDC twice as a member of the press, and I loved it both times. Great conversations, amazing people, and you see John Romero buying a coffee in Starbucks and you're just like "huh, it's John Romero".

But if you can't make it out to San Francisco for whatever reason, you're not left out: the GDC Vault offers a treasure trove of information on everything from design to AI to business to narrative - and a lot of it is available for free.

All of the talks from 2016 went up on the Vault a few days ago and I've been binge watching them like they're a hot new Netflix show. Some have given me new ways to think about design, some have been fascinating post mortems on games I love, and others are being earmarked for future GMT episodes.

And I thought if I was going to go through the effort of watching them, I might as well share the ones I enjoyed with my favourite people in the whole world - my patrons! This is the first batch, and I'll be back later in the month with some more.

The focus is largely on design, with a few other bits in there. This stuff is mainly going to be of interest to people actually making games - but even if you're not a designer have a gander and see if something interests you. 

Let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments, or share anything interesting you learned with the others!

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Free - 30 minutes)

Red Hook's Chris Bourassa talks about the importance of a strong, unerring creative direction when making a game. Everything from art style to design choices to marketing must reflect that direction.

It touches on the idea of designing around a core idea (like my video on Ico), and also not going with the design choices just because they're trendy or expected from the genre - let the creative direction decide.

Investing early in a strong creative direction for our game, and understanding it, articulating it, and referencing it in every discussion that we possible could gave us a lot of confidence and made our journey a lot easier - Chris Bourassa

Game Design and Mind Control in SUPERHOT (Free - 30 minutes)

You'll find plenty of parallels in that talk to this micro post-mortem of SUPERHOT by Piotr Iwanicki. In the first half, he talks about how everything in the game was influenced by that one idea of time only moving when you do.

That influenced level design, the situations, the flow of the game, and the other mechanics to create something new. For example: a fight scene in an elevator, which would be almost impossible to do with any elegance in a typical FPS.

Action Games Without Borders: Making Platinum-Quality Games For The World (Free - 1 hour)

This talk from Platinum producer Atsushi Inaba is a little slow (especially with translation process), but it's a reasonably rare look into the design practices of Platinum, so worth watching for fans of their games.

It was super cool to see parallels between my Vanquish video and this talk in the way Platinum Games work on different levels of accessibility and depth.

The talk also touches on character design, pacing ("bombarding the player with constant action and excitement becomes numbing"), replay value and more. Good stuff.

Advanced Environmental Storytelling in Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon (Paid - 30 minutes)

Man, how have I not done a Game Maker's Toolkit on environmental storytelling yet? I love this stuff.

Randy Smith goes in deep on how the narrative of Spider 2 can be inferred and interpreted from stuff littered about the game. Some good thoughts on how environmental narrative is strong because players choose to opt in, and end up having more ownership.

I'll definitely come to this topic on my channel. Everyone loves Fallout's skeleton stories, right?

Balancing Accessibility Against Depth in Assault Android Cactus (Free - 40 minutes)

This is a really good talk about depth and difficulty settings, that touches on some of the same points as my Vanquish video, but puts it in the context of an indie game made by a small team.

They also talk about the way they encourage the player to be reckless and aggressive, with a system about recharging your ever-depleting battery by killing enemies. And about hiding a "game within a game" using the combo system.

Plus, Sanatana Mishra and Tim Dawson talk about explaining stuff to players. That includes smart decisions like showing tips on death screens, specifically tailored around stuff the player might have missed (if they never used their secondary weapon, show that tip).

Overall it's a really great talk for anyone interested in, or making an arcade-like game. And while I haven't played the game in question, I'll have to check it out - sounds like it's full of smart and thoughtful design.

Be Spiky: A Decade of New Ideas (Paid - 40 minutes)

Once again, a developer advocates for focusing on one idea. Jamie Cheng of Klei talks about how Mark of the Ninja was so focused on stealth, that you couldn't even do hand-to-hand combat with enemies.

He also talks about not falling into the traps of genre (Invisible Inc was a stealth game in the tactics genre - a genre usually thought of focusing on combat) or best practices (Don't Starve will wipe your save after hours of investment, while best practices say permadeath games should be short).

There's also loads of talk about process and business that means nothing to me. But the first 10 minutes offer strong, straightforward advice for designers - from a studio of proven hits.

Choice, Consequence and Complicity (Free - 30 minutes)

Alexis Kennedy of Failbetter Games (Sunless Sea, Fallen London, Dragon Age: the Last Court) has lots of smart stuff to say about choice, consequence, complicity and branching narrative.

If your players feel like your game is paying attention to them, if it's listening to what they say, then it is validating their expressive choices. And that is the most effective thing you can do to engage your players' enthusiasm - Alexis Kennedy

Darkest Dungeon: A Design Postmortem (Paid - 1 hour)

More Darkest Dungeon, this time with Tyler Sigman. There's lots of good stuff in his "what went right" section (breaking design rules to throw players off balance, for example), but the juicy stuff, from 38 minutes in, is about "what went wrong".

Sigman breaks down the fan reaction to a significant gameplay tweak (the addition of corpses) that was released during early access. It seems sensible, fixing a dominant strategy in an elegant way, but players went nuts.

This fundamentally changed my view of early access. I thought early access would be a time to experiment with gameplay mechanics. And now I don't know that that's really true - Tyler Sigman

After a lot of negative reviews, soul searching, and personal attacks, the team decided to keep it in (with a menu toggle if you really hate it) but Sigman offers some good advice for those using Steam's early access:

[Adding] content is always good. For substantive gameplay changes you want to have community management in place, you want to warn players of the changes, push new features in a beta branch - Tyler Sigma

You can get the slides for free. And unless my plans change, I'll be quoting this talk in my next video. Ooh, you tease Mark!

Design In Detail: Controlling Land Sliders (Free - 30 minutes)

Luke Muscat of Prettygreat goes into great depth on how his small studio designed a semi-unique control scheme for their mobile game Landsliders. It's an interesting, rollercoaster ride of how one seemingly simple mechanic can lead to so many headaches.

Also a good chat on the choice of, well, providing choice - should a game called Land Sliders, where the entire gimmick is that you slide the land, offer a mode where you slide the character?

Designing the Anti-Platformer: Mushroom 11 Puzzle Systems (Free - 30 minutes)

When Itay Keren was first developing Mushroom 11 - a puzzle game about erasing bits of a gooey green blob so you'll regrow in other directions - a festival judge said they were sceptical that the mechanic could lead to many interesting places.

Challenge accepted, says Keren. In this talk he shows all the different ways that he used the environment - like moving platforms, minecarts, sticky walls, water, and more - to come up with dozens of unique challenges.

It reminds me of Jonathan Blow's philosophy on looking for all the possible ways to mess with the game world, then present the consequences in the form of puzzles. Plus it reminded me that I really liked this game, and can't wait for the upcoming iPad edition.

Distilling A Franchise: A Lara Croft GO Postmortem (Free - 1 hour)

Square Enix Montreal thought Lara Croft GO would be a simple reskin of Hitman GO. They quickly realised that this was not the case, and would need to tweak art, story, and mechanics to match Tomb Raider-style adventure.

One part I especially liked: the team wanted the player to feel a sense of pressure and danger, but that's not exactly viable in a turn-based world. But by theming the mechanics to evoke danger - like panels that shake under your weight, and lizards that nip at your heels - they found that many players would swipe a lot faster than necessary.

A good talk, about a really good game. Check it out if you've got an iOS or Android gizmo.

Fighting Latency on Call of Duty Black Ops III (Free - 1 hour)

This one's probably not relevant to anyone but I've been playing loads of Black Ops III lately and was curious about this stuff.

Turns out fighting latency is a bizarre dance of predicting the future game state (i.e. where an opponent is going to run to next) while waiting for the Call of Duty server to send the official word on the next few milliseconds of play.

Basically, registering a headshot in a fast-paced game of COD requires some NASA-level tech and coding. The whole thing is fascinating and basically incomprehensible to a layman like me!

Level Design Workshop: 360 Approach for Open World Mission Design (Paid - 1 hour)

Open world mission design is obviously quite different from making levels for a more linear game. Philippe Bergeron from Ubisoft Montreal explains how they tackle it in Assassin's Creed and Far Cry.

Essentially, instead of thinking about the level as a line, you think of it like a series of concentric circle, with easy zones on the outside to plan your approach, and more dangerous areas as you get closer to your target.

From there you can pick ingredients (obstacles, enemy types, etc) that are complimentary to the type of mission you're making, and then distribute them judiciously throughout the different zones.

The talk is only there for those who pay up, but the slides are free.

Level Design Workshop: Solving Puzzle Design (Paid - 1 hour)

Jolie Menzel from Ubisoft San Francisco gives a nice overview of some good practices in puzzle design, like teaching new concepts slowly, staying consistent with rules, and providing feedback.

It's a little hazy on how you actually come up with ideas for puzzles - that's on you, I guess - but once you've got that, this all seems like sound advice.

The talk ends with a bunch of recommendations for more talks and articles on puzzle design which I'll check out and pass on in the future.

Again, the talk's paid but the slides are free.

Polishing the Boots - Designing Downwell Around One Key Mechanic (Free - 30 minutes)

In one of my favourite talks, Downwell creator Ojiro Fumoto explained how each awesome idea built on top of the last one, as he looked for ways to enhance the game's stand-out mechanic.

Which was, of course, the gunboots. The idea for those, by the way, came out of the limitations of the interface. Ojiro couldn't have too many virtual buttons on mobile - but realised the jump button could double as something else if pressed while in mid-air.

Plus, the gunboots could be both a weapon and help you manoeuvre - hitting that classic Miyamoto quote about how a good idea is one that solves multiple problems at once.

From here he designed the ammo system - where you reload when your feet touch the ground - by striking a balance between endless blasting (from unlimited bullets) and conservative play (from having a limited stash).

And from there the combo system and the level design. He uses the word "encourage" a lot, explaining how his designs were there to nudge the player into experiencing the game in the best possible way.