Steam Dev Days 2016
Steam Dev Days took place in Seattle this week. The any-time-Valve-feels-like-it conference was packed with big names and small. As with the same conference in 2014, it was one of the best produced, most professional conferences I’ve ever been to.
Dev Days is equal parts sharing of knowledge and wisdom through the form of talks, and meeting amazing game and software and hardware developers in the industry. I’ll start with the talks and knowledge gained, then talk about my honest to god fan-boying upon meeting Tarn Adams.
The Keynote began with Greg Coomer from Valve talking about what this conference is and is not. This was followed by Steam Business update with DJ Powers who proclaimed Steam’s China territory gains of 500%.
Valve and "Open” VR
After that, Joe Ludwig of Valve talked about Valve’s philosophy of VR. Joe talked about how Valve embraces the open platforms, allows anyone to create their own VR devices without asking for permission, and fostering a creative, experimental community of developers to test the waters. This was great because Oculus has left a sour taste in all our mouths after a year of their terrible business practices.
Then, they threw in this for a surprise:
That’s right it’s the prototype Vive controller which straps to your hands and frees your fingers. This seems way more natural. They had a booth demoing this but the line to try it was quite long. You can read more about this new controller, see videos, etc at UploadVR.
Tim Sweeney and Unreal Engine, VR
Tim Sweeney from Epic then gave an extremely high level talk titled “The Future of VR and PC Games”. He pretty much swept through the history of interactive entertainment and landed at what he dreams virtual reality might one day look like. Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of meat to his talk in my opinion, and while many of us in the audience share his ambitions, the talk didn’t bring very much new things besides “Epic’s working on cool stuff”.
Afterwards, I spoke to colleagues and some of us agreed that Tim has a much bigger vision for VR than games, and that sometimes it seemed a bit disjointed to other audience members because this is Steam Dev Days and Valve’s really focused on games, rather than the whole of computing. In my opinion his talk would be great at TED, rather than Dev Days.
Steam Marketing 101
Tom Giardino from Valve gave a talk about how to best use Steam’s tools to promote your game. There was a lot of basic stuff like making sure your games’ capsule image was legible, and having a good trailer that starts right away. I did have some notes that stood out:
You can do everything right in marketing and sales, but if your game does not delight the player then your game will never be successful.
As a developer you need to define your goals. Ask yourself what does success look like, for me?
Trailers can also be planted a narrative, a reason to keep watching.
dodistribute.com is a resource used to verify keys are sent to press.
Advice from Successful Game Developers
This next talk I thought was worth its ticket to see. The talks will be posted on the Steam Dev Days website in a few weeks so be sure to check there if you’re interested to watch them. You lucky person.
Nathaniel Blue of Valve reached out to several game developers with successful games on Steam and asked them to give us a sentence worth of advice to take home. Here are my notes:
Be honest with your work. Figure out your strengths and focus on doing that.
Pay attention to your release timing. You are not only competing for a players’ money, but also their time.
Be part of your community. The community is a valuable guide, but you can’t please everyone so don’t kill yourself trying. Also, updating often shows you are listening to your community.
Don’t be a slave to a timeline. Bugs are ok, but your game needs to be fun.
Build the game you can afford.
Make your game obviously fun. Can you communicate the game effectively? What are the core unique aspects? Can you describe your game in one sentence?
The whole equals the sum of its parts. I can’t remember what the hell this one was about.
On User Generated Content
Jeremy Stieglitz known for ARK: Survival Evolved gave some advice on UGC. My take away was this:
When creating UGC, make it “stackable”. In other words, allow players to combine mods that try not to conflict with one another.
"Map Extensions” can be added to your game to build map mods, for example weather systems that can be modded into your game.
The best mod support is asynchronous mod downloading from within your game.
Games as Service
The next morning Joost van Dongen and Robin Meijer of Awesomenauts talked about Games as Service. My history with games as service, especially multiplayer games, is pretty rough, so I’ll skip my own commentary and simply give my takeaway notes:
Constantly update your game
Games as service makes sense especially when
your game has an endless mode
there are ways to generate revenue post-release
Favor player count over revenue
this is especially true for multiplayer games
You can do a post launch kickstarter, this is fine.
There was a repeated message here and it’s that you’re competing for a players’ time as well as money.
The Early Access Panel
Later in the day a panel of game developers whom Valve invited were asked about their experiences in Early Access. On stage were: Tynan Sylvester (Rimworld), Alden Kroll (Valve, moderator), Aurther Bruno (Crate Entertainment), Russ Clarke (Payload Studios), Will Turnbull (Klei Entertainment), and Tyler Sigman (Red Hook Studios).
There was a question on how often to update Early Access, when to do it, and how to frame the updates. Some references were made to Robin Walker’s amazing talk on engaging your community in Dev Days 2014.
I felt some of the questions about how and when to update your game were a bit out of context since many of these developers had entirely different audiences. For example there were developers on the panel working on multiplayer games which should be handled entirely differently from single player games.
Tynan Sylvester brought up a great point about a class of updates that are dangerous and risk angering the player-base. This sparked a topic which identified several risky things to do when updating an Early Access game:
removing things
given the choice of releasing an unready thing and removing it later vs not releasing it at all, it’s usually 100% better to hold off on releasing it
difficulty spikes
nullifying players’ time investment
including items they farmed that are now worthless
including players’ muscle memories from hundreds of hours of practice
unannounced drastic changes
use the Steam beta channel to release changes to small subsets of players
Communication and Creative Relationships
Valve’s Andrea Wicklund gave a great talk on how to communicate effectively between programmers and artists.
She asked us to try reframing artists as “developers”. At Valve, that’s what artists are, developers. That gets you more into a frame of thinking that the art process is part of your games’ communication.
Andrea also stressed about using labels correctly, and ensuring that everyone on a team is talking about the same things when describing things using labels.
Finally, Andrea talked about the importance of communicating visually, and directly, by using images. After the talk someone asked about the dangers of using “temp art” a`la Every Frame a Painting’s “Marvel Symphonic Universe” and temp music. She clarified that using art to communicate is great but it’s quite different to using art as placeholders to start working around.
Alright time for the fan-boying. There are some seriously great developers whom I admire, knowing them only through their games, and meeting the people behind those games is such a rare treat. Here goes:
I got to chat with Tynan Sylvester of Rimworld. Sharp guy. He also wrote a book titled “Designing Games: A guide to engineering experiences”. I played Rimworld like crazy for the past two months and is one of my favorite games this year so I had to meet the mad man who made the game. We chatted about procedural characters and his ideas on generative ethics and how he’s thinking about those things on the next versions of his game. We also talked a bit about my game Cyberpunk City Simulator and he challenged me on what emotions I want players to go through when playing the game. I have never really thought about that, so.. thanks man. More work :|
At a table I approached a balding heft of a man who shyly covered up his name tag. It was Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress! We shook hands and he accidentally cut me with a greatly exaggerated finger nail. “This is for guitar”. Uh huh. The greatest guy. We chatted a bit about the Roguelike conference that was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and on matters of procedurally generated cooking ingredients. There was also someone else hanging out with him whom I didn’t get a card from so... if you’re reading this, get in touch. My memory sucks :|
There were numerous hang out sessions. To name drop: Charlie Cleveland (Natural Selection, Subnautica), apparently they’ve moved to a brand spanking new office in SF Soma district. Minh Le (Counterstrike, Rust), he is the world’s nicest developer and knows pretty much everyone at the conference. I drank next to Wil Driver CTO of Ninja Theory. Chatted with nonadecimal who is making some sick procedural narrative dev. Justin Woodward who is making a Jay and Silent Bob game. A bunch of really great guys from Insurgency.
We ended the evening with catered food, arcade games, and VR games.
I managed to gather a small crowd as I killed it in Longbow. Admittedly, I am extremely out of practice.
Closing Thoughts
IMO this years’ talks were much lighter in content than 2014. Still, I connected with so many new colleagues and reconnected with old friends I didn’t want to leave. It’s really an honor to get to attend Valve’s very own conference and I really appreciate what they are doing with building an open culture of developers who are out there willing to help each other.
