Professional Engagement #NZGDC2016 (New Zealand Game Developers Conference)
I was lucky to be able to attend the NZGDC, I would like to thank Ben Kenobi, for recommending me to attend and giving me the opportunity to attend. It was a wonderful 2 day experience, 1 day to enjoy the conferences and 1 day volunteering. This was a paid event, but I got one day free for volunteering. I got too see a lot of wonderful presentations, and got to meet a lot of new people, and made new friends. One unfortunate thing was that my sickness got worse as I was volunteering, fever got to me, so I had to stay home for the next few days, putting me a bit more behind on my work schedule.
There was some amazing speakers and talks that really helped and inspired me. There was one presenter who did a talk on “ UI/UX 101 for Indies: How to push your buttons ”, her talk had some useful tips as she speaks about some bad UI/UX design out there. One quote I really like from her is “Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good design fits our needs so well that the design becomes invisible.” because I find this to be very true.
I also got to meet a game board developer from Cheeky Parrot (Lucy Morris). It was really interesting to hear what she had to say about game board packaging design. She mentions that games that are easier to pronounce, and packaging that shows what the game is about is more effective and get sold more. I asked her what advice she can give me on play testing and she suggested to go to some of these places where the community can help me play test, Board Game by the bay, Cakes and Ladders, King of cards. She also gave me the advice that adding design will often distract the players from the actual game play.
On Friday when I was volunteering, I was lucky enough to be assigned to level 9 where a Analog Game Design Workshop was happening. I got to see the process they did to come up with quick game designs and was able to join in on some of the play testing. For one of the game that I helped play test with, we had to hold our arms like T-Rexs, and had to keep them there as we collect our assigned coloured paper and put them in our box. We had to roar every time we got something in. Another game that I was involved in was a bluffing game, coincidence or what? The theme for their bluffing game was that we were space monkeys and we are trying to crack a code, each of the monkey has apart of the code, the catch is that there are sabotor monkeys who are trying to sabotage us to fail the code.
The NZGDC has been a really fun learning experience, and I would recommend everyone who are interesting in game development to go check it out.