Free Candy For Everyone

I’m going through my notes, and this is where I stopped keeping up with things. I mentioned a bit about the EGW earlier. Basically, the idea is what it sounds like - talk about non-mainstream game experiences. Work on games that is different and experimental. Yeah. If you check out the website, you’ll see a link to a summary that has some screenshots and stuff.

The first up was the reason I went in the first place, some folks from Harmonix demonstrating the cut Freestyle mode from Guitar Hero. The idea was to let the player get the experience of soloing, a classic guitar playing experience that they really wanted to reproduce. Ultimately, it turned out to be really hard to get it to sound good, for a number of reasons. The first problem was that it was hard to convey the mechanics of this mode to the player. There were, I believe, two types of things you could do. You could play simple samples that would pitch modulate so if you ran down the frets on your controller it would run down the notes. And if you played really fast you could trigger a canned riff to play. There were a bunch of other mechanics I didn’t even write down. Basically, it was pretty confusing. They had one of the dev team up there, and even he had a tough time making it sound convincing. He did a good job though. There were also design and technical challenges getting enough of these samples made (per song! that’s a lot), and also mixing them into the rest of the track. It was ultimately cut because of these inabilities getting it to sound good. The PS2 didn’t have enough DSP power to do what they wanted. It was pretty awesome though, and the guy demoing it went all rockstar and smashed his guitar controller at the end of his performance.

Next up were a couple of guys from Gamelab. This is a company that makes casual games, but they try to be inventive, and aren’t looking to just churn out another colored square puzzle game. They believe this is a space with untapped potential for exploration. They showed the evolution of a game called Downbeat. The idea was to make a beat matching game (in partnership with VH1) like Parappa and Guitar Hero, but in the downloadable casual space. It was an interesting talk, since I like those types of games. They talked a bit about how beat matching games are inheritently hard, but the type of people who play them are willing to suck for a while and then get better. But casual gamers will just drop a game if they aren’t good at it right away. They demo’d some games that ended up looking nothing like what they ultimately ended up with, which was a game where you had to get dancers onto matching colored dance floors. It wasn’t a game that was interesting to me, but iterative process of getting to that end product was intriguing. Room to play around with a design based on such a thin concept - music + casual - was cool.

Next up was Squirrel Eiserloh (I just used his name because I liked it enough to write it down, sorry all you other speakers with non-memorable names) talking about the Dallas Game Jam. This was in lieu of someone talking about the Indie Game Jam, which didn’t happen this year for some reason. The idea behind the game jam is for people to get together and in VERY small groups (sometimes just 1 person groups even) make games in a four day period. Out of this you get a lot of crap. But you also get some cool ideas, and everyone ends up thinking about games in a different way then we do everyday in the industry. The Dallas group was just one larger group making one game, so apparently it wasn’t as successful as the Indie Game Jam usually is. But this, to me, was the highlight of the conference. Everyday, I come to work. I worry about schedules and the publisher. I worry about what 50 people are going to think about the deliverable we have next month. I worry about making sure all my programmers are on track. I worry about the minitua of a particular game design feature. But I almost never get the chance to think outside the box. I never just think about something entirely new. Work on a big project is entirely bounded by about, oh, a million constraints. There is room to innovate, but it’s a small amount of room. The idea of making something completely different and crazy is wildly appealing. Even if this is just something you do over a long weekend, there is a lot of value in these game jams. I think we can really get our enthusiasm back if we do this. For those of us who have become a bit jaded and lost some enthusiasm, of course. There’s a large enough community of game companies in the Boston area that I think I’m going to look into having a game jam out here. If anyone is interested, let me know. I’ll start thinking about it.

Wow, my paean to the EGW is getting quite long. I’ll wrap it up. Next up was a guy named Jenova Chen. He was showing this game called Flow that was really intriguing. You’re kinda in the ocean, and you’re this critter, and you eat stuff, and what you eat determines what you become (sounds like the first phase of Spore, actually, not sure if that’s where he got the idea…) He talked about how there were different ways to play the game, and no one way was the “right” way. Cool. Next he showed Cloud, which is a game made by 6 USC students. I’m sure there’s a lot of info out there on it, it seems to have been a big hit. And I took few notes on it, so go search for more info. The main thing I wrote was that they said the media latches on to these basic elements in games: Violent, addictive, stressful, comedic. Their goal was to make a game that was the opposite of all of these things.

Also cool, but I’m out of steam: Braid, a 2d platformer about time manipulation. You have an unlimited rewind ability. So you can’t die. It’s all about quirky puzzles involving your time manipulation skills. And time flowed differently in different worlds. Everyday Shooter, a game that was an “album of shooters”, where each level was a different kind of shooter. Ocular Ink, a game by Pistachio Productions, in which you are a giant eyeball and you use a brush and gestures to cast spells (sounds a bit like Okami).

That’s about it. This was an exciting session that got me thinking about games in a new way again. I’m looking forward to the chance to make some small different games myself now. We’ll see what I have time for (darn WoW. darn Xbox 360. :))