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@wiredatgdc2014
That's all she wrote! Thanks for joining us at this year's GDC. There was way too much to cover, so we hope you enjoyed our curated selections. Look forward to next week's Game|Life podcast, where Chris Kohler, Peter Rubin and Laura Hudson will talk again about this week's adventure.
Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi discusses game production during his slide presentation in the final hours of GDC 2014.
Writer Heidi Kemps just asked Igarashi how he feels, as a designer of Metroidvania style games, about speedrunning and players who try to break the sequence of the game. His response: In order to even get to that level of destroying and speed running a game, those players must have already spent hours studying it. He applauds them for spending so much time on the game and notes that one of the good things about the genre is how it lends itself to a wide variety of play styles and approaches.
Boss balance rule of thumb: The programmer for any boss must be able to beat it without taking a hit.
From Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi's slide presentation, on boss design
Koji Igarashi, who left Konami just a few days ago, didn't want to use any Castlevania game names or images in his speech for fear he might run afoul of copyright law in Japan, so we get these handmade visual aids.
Even if 80% of people don't find the rest of the game, if I can give an awesome experience to that other 20%, it's worth it to me.
Jim Crawford, answering a question about hiding content within a game.
My favorite way to get the community involved is to give them puzzles that are too hard for individuals to realistically solve on their own.
Jim Crawford
The ultimate mysterious game is the unplayed game.
Jim Crawford, developer of Frog Fractions, from his talk about preserving a sense of discovery in the age of spoilers.
You guys? Insomniac is giving out magic 8-balls. You have like 90 minutes left to go get one before GDC is over.
Ken Levine discusses player driven storytelling during his "Narrative Legos" presentation.
Ken Levine Talks Narrative Legos
BioShock creative director Ken Levine laid out the basic idea behind "Narrative Legos," a concept for creating emergent game stories that change every time the player plays a game and react to players' choices, in his Game Developers Conference speech on Friday morning.
Levine said that his former studio Irrational Games, which recently shut down following the completion of BioShock Infinite, was devoted to creating linear stories. But, he said, a single story that contained so many opportunities to spoil players if they found out any of its secrets was a "very stressful" thing to maintain: "I don't think we ever enjoyed the process of keeping secrets," he said.
Having to closely guard your game's secrets doesn't allow for a connection with one's audience, he said, since you can't do an open alpha, for example, allowing players to try out your game before it's ready.
To "do something different" and "go back to the drawing board," Levine said, he needed "time to fail." He had to be able to experiment with new ideas without "150 people looking at you going, dude, what am I supposed to be doing today?"
With a new small team of designers at publisher Take-Two, Levine will now be working on games that have systems that allow a non-linear, dynamic storyline that changes for every player, every time the game is played.
It's not about a Mass Effect style game with a few branching storylines, he said -- not about a game with X number of stories, but "X to the Y" number of stories.
Levine stressed that he is taking a walk-before-you-run approach -- they won't try to create a game with a story that is as complicated as BioShock's but also dynamically changes in response to your actions, but instead start off with trying to "model a set of limited and believable and impactful things."
How it might work, he said, is that a game might have several different "stars" -- non-player characters that each have a list of passions, things they want to accomplish in life. As the player does things that helps or hurts those passions, they'll start to like or dislike the player more.
As these passion bars go up or down, they will start affecting larger "macro-passion" bars that control bigger aspects of the story. These, Levine said, would be the professionally written and scripted major elements of the story, but might not appear for all players and all iterations of the game.
What Levine hopes this can create is scenarios where the players like certain characters more, want to spend more time with them, but end up screwing those characters over because they see a gameplay advantage to being friends with characters they like less. But since there are multiple passions for each character, it might be possible to adroitly play both sides.
"Your ability to play off one another, your ability to keep people happy -- betraying friends they had, false friends, leading people on, betrayals, reconciliation… you could, if you do your job right, end up simulating something like this," he said, showing a slide of the characters from Game of Thrones.
If a game had cooperative multiplayer ("this is not a promise," he added), you could find yourself wanting to ally with the computer-controlled factions in the world versus your real-life friends.
Levine said that he wants these passions of each character and the relationships they have with you to be as transparent as possible. He wants players to be able to see, understand and consciously know what they are doing when they take certain actions that will have an effect on the world.
A structure like this, Levine said, would allow developers to add more content into the game -- adding another faction or more scripted events would be possible, he said, rather than having to create a totally separate piece of short-form story content that is separate from the main game.
Ken Levine's presentation is so complex that I'm taking lots of notes for a separate story to be published later. He's laying out how his "narrative Legos" system of tiny pieces of story and interplay between characters can create games with many different outcomes for players -- not just X different outcomes, he says, but "X to the Y" outcomes.
If your headline includes 'Levine reveals new game,' you've written the wrong fucking headline.
Ken Levine, opening his GDC session with a blunt warning about what it will not contain.
Game|Life contributors Bo Moore and Ryan Rigney sit in on the podcast this week for a Game Developers Conference special.
It's the final day of GDC! Are you ready for one last round of stuff?
Even though it's a truncated day -- everybody checks out at 3 p.m., which after five days of straight conventioning is probably what they'd do even if the conference went longer -- there are still some major talks happening.
BioShock creator Ken Levine will discuss "Narrative Legos," the game design concept underlying his next, small-team project.
Later, Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi, who recently bailed out of his longtime employer Konami, will talk about the independent games he's going to create from now on. (Spoiler: They'll probably be very Castlevaniaish.)
Stay here on the live blog for the news as it happens.
If I knew what it looked like, I'd be dead.
Zork creator Dave Lebling, after being asked what a grue looks like.
Just had my first VR experience, playing Couch Knights on the Oculus Rift. It's a simple 1v1 3D fighter, where you control a pint-sized knight doing battle in a virtual living room. The twist is that through the VR headset, you view yourself as a human avatar sitting in said living room. You can jump your knight all over the room -- behind your opponent's human avatar, for example.
The game itself is fairly crude, but its a great example of the virtual living room "game within a game" possibilities that can be built with VR technology. Another example is the indie horror game Alone, where your human avatar plays a game within a virtual living room, and is then subjected to various creepy situations as the game-within-a-game starts extending beyond the in-game screen.
I can't wait to see more developers take advantage of this intriguing new gameplay model.