The 2017 Experimental Gameplay Workshop

[Music] Danny I'm here talking about it this is the 15th annual experimental gameplay workshop that's 15 years of experimental games that's amazing how many of you have been to experimental gameplay before yeah welcome back all right now how many of you are here for the very first time have you chose us and that you waited in the long line that was that was long thank you for getting into the session for sitting so nice and peacefully and just gathering here together it's I'm not gonna lie it's been a it's been a little bit of a tough year so far for a lot of us we we lost some people that we really love we've seen a little bit too much of some people and and when we were trying to think of what to say you know to welcome you into the session I realized that what I wanted to say is that this is the best session of GDC because it's about the community we could not have organized this year without the help of some amazing amazing people so before we get started I want Eddie and Ted to come up here and stand up on stage these two gentlemen did an amazing job organizing all the speakers getting everything ready this year and I also just wanted to say that the community is really in this room the people that love experimental games are at the forefront of pushing games to where they're gonna be and asking the hard questions about what they should be and dreaming the dreams of what they could be and it's not always easy sometimes you work on something for four or five years and it just never hangs together and you have to set it aside sometimes those things come back later and they're great and sometimes they become a painful but valuable memory and this year's show is an example like every year of how pushing through the hard stuff is better than giving up and so I want you to give everyone in this room a round of applause for sticking with it and staying game developers [Applause] we have a fantastic lineup at Danah do you want to give a little bit of a flavor of what we're gonna see you want to say anything about the show well we have a really a bunch of really good surprises this year I think and also I want to say that since there are so many veterans of eg Doherty in this room so many people that have been coming to this session for years for next year I want to start taking suggestions if you some games are never submitted to the GW like it happened this year for example recurse and other games just fly under a radar so if you find a game that you think is a good fit for this session just send it to me or Robin in whatever way you find most comfortable but just get it to us so we can consider it for next year yes we really like to expand the reach of experimental gameplay and to have lots of people from all over the world all walks of life all kinds of ways of being to be up here on stage and the easiest way for us to do that is to delegate that task to everybody else and so once again we will tell you all that is your responsibility to let us know about the cool out there because we want those people here once I'm representing and speaking and bearing witness to their true lived awesome selves all right with that we're gonna end the welcome and we're gonna bring up Bennett and ap to show us multi-ball hi I'm Bennett Fadi and I'm AP Thompson and we're here to show you multipole which is the world's first video game collage multi ball is a mixtape of real multiplayer games from the 1980s and 90s there been projects in the past like ROM check fail or the indie pirate cart or warrior where they make a pastiche of multiple original games but there's never been a collage made up of hundreds of existing games running on multiple hardware platforms at its core multi ball is a modified emulator named or the multiple arcade machine emulator is the biggest and one of the oldest emulators on the planet now 20 years old and now emulates practically every arcade game and every console and computer platform from history and last year it switched to a proper open-source license so it became possible to think about projects that don't run on one hardware platform but on all hardware platforms not one game but all games here's how it works it loads a random exciting moment from an old two-player game and lets you compete until someone scores a goal or kills the other player or until a timer runs out by watching the memory in the emulated computer it detects when someone wins the point and loads another random moment from a random game multi-ball now contains over 300 games across arcade platforms consoles and computers and of course it's way more than 300 good multiplayer games out there but we try to create a diverse list in terms of gameplay art style and country of origin each state is designed to run for about 30 seconds before it produces a win so sometimes are just naturally perfect for that format Outlawz symmetrical and short so we simply monitored the score and see who gets the first point but some games need to be saved at a particular moment for instance after beating the final boss in Double Dragon if both players are still alive they then have to fight to decide who gets to rescue the red guy's girlfriend in some cases we change the rules to make a moment more exciting as in this case where the players guns are disabled to turn dodonpachi into a pure game of dodging when you start playing multi ball it's a pure test of video game talent who can figure out the mechanics and form strategies the fastest because it has a lot of a lesser known games nobody has played the majority of them before but once you've been playing for a while it becomes more like a test of pure video game knowledge now not every game lends itself well to competitive play especially in thirty-second slices in life force if you make the players compete for points it's very hard to see whose bullets are hitting the enemies and if you play to survive it's just way too easy fundamentally the problem is that each player can't affect the other players performance the solution we found to that is to have compound rules like score more points but don't die so here at player can decide to be more aggressive flying closer to the enemies but that carries a risk of colliding with them sometimes the game itself has rules that can be harnessed to make an interesting 30 second challenge in timber the point for cutting down a tree goes to the person who hits it last kinda like in League of Legends so we picked a state with just one tree so there could be a standoff players try to avoid doing the second last hit and sometimes you need to invent entirely new rules like in rampage where we challenge players to avoid touching the ground of course we can't make multi ball available publicly for legal all right let's do a demo now [Applause] can we get rich and Robin up to to plate down down front can we switch the video feed please [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] features a pretty sweet fireball in this fireball Robin's player 1 which is player 2 [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] reach is going to get this [Applause] [Music] thank you thank you that was totally amazing even though I lost it's just because I pretended I couldn't play Tetris under pressure all right so next up we have we have someone coming up to show a game but before we have them come to show a game I would like to ask for eight volunteers who would like to play a dance game to come up and stand where the man is waving his hands over there eight eight people only how many we've got one two three four five six I think seven eight I think that last person here does all right we're good thank you okay so next up we have Ian Thompson showing us four cursed hi my name is Ian Thompson I'm an independent developer from Scotland and this is request request is a puzzle platformer game and by puzzle I mean logic puzzle there's three types of items keys that open doors blocks you can stand on to reach high places and treasure chests which manipulate reality okay I'll drop in and show some levels I'm actually looking at it down here so excuse me if I mess this up okay so here's a simple level we need to jump up and get that crystal we can't jump high enough so we need to unlock the door and get the block first thing we find out is that when we're holding the key or any item we don't jump high okay the second thing we find out is that you can throw out horizontally like this slides us to get a block and finish it though so there's restrictions on movement and throwing and jumping there a lot of the levels to be so imbued with logic problems anyway that's all just sort of puzzle platforms though I'm sure you familiar with that [Music] so those treasure chests here's a treasure chest if I jump into this I go to new room now this room has a key and two doors so it seems impossible it's not impossible because there's a subtlety to the chests that I haven't mentioned which is when you exit them oops and re-enter the room resets back to the default state which means the doors back and the key is back okay how does that help well we can take this key leave the room re-enter the room and it's reset so we have the key and the key from the previous instance we can open two dots is one key so items can be duplicated and remember rooms are items okay so it seems like a positive but there are downsides too in this level we have some blocks a whole stack of them and in the other chests there's crystal there we go so if we try and do it with one block we see we can get it we need two blocks so now I can exit go get another block and come back but what I find when I jump back in my blocks gone so I'm limited to only bringing one item into the room but we need two blocks okay well it is a puzzle game what what happen do we bring well we bring this room into here like that and jump in here here's our infinite stack of blocks now this room doesn't reset because I never exited it I just went into a room beneath it okay there we go so far so simple on don't worry it gets so much worse right so that's how our chests can restructure the world in a basic sense let's look at this level okay here we have a choice of a key or a block we can't jump high enough to get back up let's get the key we can open the door and we find out we need the block to jump up so let's jump in the chest to see where we end up oh it's back in the same room but it's a different instance of the same room so if I exit here's then since I was in before with the unlocked door and this is a new instance but because it's the same room it has another chest which of course leads to another instance of the same room as far as you want you can recurse as much as you like and you can do that and you find out that that's actually not the solution so I'll leave that as an exercise okay right in the next song there is a water mechanic I'm not gonna show it but when you jump into a chest that's underwater the rooms underneath the room you enter is flooded so it's like stateful and that makes things a bit more confusing but we don't want a bit more confusing we want a lot more confusing which is this mechanic that's introduced in the fourth area yes in this area we have enchanted items this block and its key are in Chinese as you can see from the green stuff I'll probably call them green Isles in China dimes are not affected by the reset mechanic they are a unique and I can't get I can't jump out there can't jump high enough so if I leave them there on the left-hand side and I exit and re-enter they're still there they're not unique to the room instance two unique to the room type it's a subtle difference okay so how do we get these items up here well let's look in this chest and see what we have nothing it's an empty room but rooms alright so an empty room is like an empty backpack so let's oh there we go let's dump this in here and let's dump the key in there [Music] okie dokie so now we have our enchanted items stored in this chess but I still can't jump high enough with the chests that just however is not enchanted it's just a regular recur style so if I exit and re-enter it's up there now because it's been reset [Music] yes and I can get the key and that is the answer to that one okay right so keys and blocks are simple even when they're in chanted they're not too bad chests or also items which can be enchanted which makes them unique so on this level we have an enchanted chest and if I jump into this chest it's also recursive so now I'm inside the chest in the room in the chest which is also the room the chest is in no bother but I move it over here and then exits a chest because that chest is unique to that room that's what it is right yeah no okay let's jump in a few times I want to tell it's broad enough now I can throw this chest I'm here and that's that's somewhere I can't jump - that's too - Little John and because I'm inside that chest I can then jump out of it and now I'm up there but I'm still inside the chest so I can pick it up again and throw it and now I can leave the chest and get the crystal right I just yeah so that's a small taster with the enchant chest the problem space kind of explodes you can get an enchant an enchanted chest that's inside itself but exists nor else you can create recursion with them wherever you find them you can use them to move through solid walls using the flooding mechanic and probably worst of all you can enter an enchanted chest then remove it from the room its in and then try and exit it so you're exiting into a room and jumping out of a chest that's no longer there which is a paradox and that's when it gets really weird so I'll leave that as an exercise for you guys it's out now on Steam PC Windows Mac Linux yeah that's recursed hope you check it out thank you very much yeah so I probably shouldn't tell you all this but his daughter sent him a picture before the session saying good luck and I hope you win so congratulations for winning experimental gameplay works have 2017 so funny is adorable I had like tons of hearts on it and stuff it was so cute ok so next up we have dance together with Tobiah Darla's are you ready to dance alright dancers come on up all right this is dance together some very simple rules everyone gets a device and headphones first off no talking no hand gestures players are only allowed to communicate with each other through dance them and one other player are gonna listen to the same song they don't know what it's going to be it could be techno could be Russian folk could be Mariachi could be tango they don't know until they have to start dancing their goal find their dance partner through dance alone when you're ready press the green button and your game should start and they'll start dancing in a moment the big shout out to Brody and Erin for helping me demonstrate over there while they're playing I'll talk to you the larger crowd about the game what's going on I made this game because I hate dancing seriously I just don't know what to do I don't have to move my body so of like you know I'll make this game it'll encourage me to go out and dance for and actually have some fun but also to take the person who loves dancing and give them that same moment of Terror when they go on to dance 4 and there's Irish jig going on and they have no idea what they should be doing I've played this games with adults with children and people of all ages I've had some players come up and first did you start moving their shoulders a little bit but then after a couple of play sessions they're just throwing their body into it and they're having fun they realize that you too could just go out and start dancing together I was inspired by this of course silent discos and also johann sebastian jalsa so they played a game i thought that changed my life i want to make a game like that not saying this is as good as that but i love physical play games i love games where you can just take your phone have a bunch of people get together and do something with their physical bodies in a room that you know it's not typically done in most digital games I actually had this idea like years ago I think like three years ago at this point but I never bothered making it I told people about it I finally just sat down and prototyped it and I just have to get her this really really simple broken version here's my first early screenshots the UI is better than this right now though not much better I tried using like cut the standard music at first I realize I need custom music to really make this work well so I commissioned a bunch of pieces because it needs to be seanrid typical you know in the first 15 seconds because most songs you don't really think about this when you listen to it they have kind of a 30 second to a minute attack before they really kind of get into it and I really need a song to know that if trance versus dubstep versus mariachi you know that first few seconds so I got a 60 seconds loop that they play through that are drawn or tickled right away and right now this is only one game mode which is what I described where there's one other player listening the same song and they have to find that person but I have tons of ideas for this game on ways to do different game modes of course teams would be cool where maybe an eighth player game there's four versus four I've played tested is up to sixteen but I'm really curious of what the upper limit might be you know there's only so many songs I can include with this before it songs are scared getting too similar to each other to be able to identify it so I'm thinking about making them a music category system like there might be a techno song and a folk song and an old dance on or something like that and do some kind of programmatic way to make sure the songs are unique enough for each other as I add more and more over time what I'm most excited for is a spy mode it might be cool so imagine a player game there's eight people dancing only one person it doesn't have the right song and the goal is to not be noticed the trick they don't know there's a spy when the game starts you just kissed music and you don't know what to do I also think this game could scale up really well not just with more players but maybe audience participation you know maybe you as an audience could be judging these people and trying to figure out which player was dancing to which music and make this kind of a massive multiplayer game you know played at conventions and lastly I really feared a future together I really need to work out the UI you have to figure out you know how you actually choose the other player I have all sorts of ideas and how to figure out that which kind of leads into my next point um I need help finishing this game I made this simple prototype and I was submitted indicate I got selected indicate submitted the egw I got slightly Egwu so there's something interesting here but I need help finishing it so if your UI UX person you want to come help me out please contact me if you're a musician an audio engineer contact me I instead of trying to sell this game there's a couple different ways I can make money with it but I decided to be cooler to make this open and I want to see this at all sorts of conventions I wanted to see it played in the halls of GDC next year so it's open source it's available on my github right now and I just want people to contribute to it and help me make it but I also know believe people should work for free as a general statement so if you don't want to help me for free which you probably should it you can also throw money my way I just set up a patreon patreon calm slash to Bioware you can throw some money per update I promise not to be updating too often because I do have a full-time job but if you do that a hundred percent of the money will go towards paying other people to get those assets polish this and hopefully you'll see a much better version at GDC 2018 alright that stabbed them together you can find more advance to get it out today and I run out here we can play in the hallways Thank You dancers thank you very much okay so that's a really awesome thing right I mean it's kind of experimenting with the idea that games need to make money which is I think there's a word for that it's called art like doing art thank you make it and then you just give it to people because it's cool so we got a lot of submissions this year for VR stuff and we weren't really sure how to do these sort of VR seeing justice because a lot of stuff is still pretty new and Isaac here has agreed to give us a little showcase of some of the things that are new and weird and experimental in VR that means not necessarily just a game form that we already know being translated into VR which is the most common submission that we get is a submission that's something like we've already know it because they put it in a new context like you're bananas you know know without further ado here's Isaac to give us a vr overview from 2017 cool hi I'm Isaac I go by khabib on the internet and this is a talk called previously considered experimental so I've been experimental WebGL experiences like universe of sound and enough for quite some time and I still do a lot of web work but like many of you I heard that pipe pipe in hypetrain of VR and I hopped on board I've been doing that for about two years now and I wanted to tell you bit about what I've learned about experimental VR games and the way that VR is actually influenced my views on experiment experiment allottee in general it's definitely going to be a lot of stuff for 10 minutes but we're gonna try to show some of the games over there afterwards um obviously there's a lot of people here but we'll also have phone conversations and stickers so come through and say hi last thing I want to say before we really get into it is that these games and 'we obviously represent the totality of experimental gameplay in VR because all of VR is experimental and I know that sounds like the ultimate sound bite from that hype train and rest assured it is but I also think that there's some truth to it games have had so long to develop to build this universal vocabulary that with our shared vernacular we can describe these massive undertakings these entire universes with just three letters using terms like FPS RPG RTS MMO we have the ability to communicate so efficiently so clearly but these crystallized explanations leave little room for flexibility they can breathe brittle almost stifling VR obviously on the other hand doesn't have that much of a shared vocabulary yet this means that it's tougher to describe a lot of the work but with that ambiguity comes room to experiment in a medium that doesn't even have a cohesive vision on what it means to move experimentation isn't just desirable it is vital it's a bit sad to see that already in this medium which is so new we see this tendency towards crystallization the desire to use what has already been created instead of exploring and discovering what has never been to manifest mechanics out of the ether but even for games that tend towards the monolithic vocabulary we see experimentation thrive take cosmic trip which is made by a studio called funk tronic labs for example this is a FP RTS a first-person realtime strategy which has a core loop that's extremely similar to a press plethora of previous easily definable experiences Starcraft red alert etc but it literally changes your perspective on RTS 'as take their menu system for example you eyes have been using the current form are these displaced objects which are not part of the same universe as the rest of the game but in cosmic trip the menu has physicality legitimate weight instead of falling into the rut of developmental efficiency using the already normalized point-and-click of a brutally defined UI vocabulary funk tronic took the time to explore it's the same thing with their teleportation system and movement in something that VR has been struggling with for a while rather than the typical ballistics which so many games now unceremoniously implement the bootless unique system that would fit their game by pulling up the columns and stepping through them they created a cohesive world that was so different from any before it it became hard to describe using the current vocabulary it may be that in the distant future this weighty user interface or possibly the column transportation system but become one of the TLA s three-letter acronyms that we will all know and love but it will be because of those brave possibility space explorers over at functional clubs and many other Studios went out and tried word after word after word until a few finally made sense and they could let us experience the thrill of understanding something for the first time and I think that's why a lot of us are here that moment where we get to grok one of those untranslatable words and it becomes part of our vocabulary part of our reality games have an inherent ability to do this to take the unfamiliar and make it familiar to take the unknown and make it known and has been doing so since its beginning Tetris pong breakout were all once unfamiliar but once played and understood they become part of the vocabulary transition from experimental to canonical they created a word and this word ceman thing is everywhere in VR even I tried to do myself and also came up with a word blarp now it's gameplay is only as deep as its name and its artistic polishes you know equally amateur but I can safely say that there are no TAS that describe its mechanics I've tried describing how it works and I actually fail quite often so I wanted to let some of the reviews from Steam try to do the same as person guy says you spin these things above your head like a stretchy lasso and try to toss them out of randomize target Bassem on the other hand argues you Corral an ever-growing number of floating eyeballs in an ever-growing room twirling them around like bolas or a bunch of yo-yos perhaps the most articulate is cyber who claims blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp blarp couldn't have said it better myself but blarp is confusing to describe because it wasn't a word that could exist before VR it requires a room scale hm d to be able to quickly spin and dodge it will be impossible with how without hang controllers to pull the floating eyeballs on that stretchy lasso and without the floating point trigger you couldn't be so delicate twirling and spinning in some ritualistic dance of cord tangling delight this is not of course to say that blarp will become a classic like Tetris or pong on the contrary it is the unfortunate fact that many experimental games never become part of the vocabulary because they are ignored or even worse because they might get in tension but are considered too far out for popular consumption besides blarp isn't a very good word it might be fun to say goofy and non assuming but in the end the thing that it is pulling from the ether though a novel mechanic doesn't really say anything that could not be said before it's just creating a new mode of entertainment it's just making another feedback loop that scratches that itch of scoring a point scoring another point losing and starting over again knowing that this time this time will be the time that I win and prove my worth with quantified score but there are other words out there difficult words that try and say delicate things that try to describe emotions that might have been impossible to describe before take nebula hands which is a prototype that might Tucker has been working on it lets you be alone in the darkness exploring the physics of these tiny particles letting you feel like a solitary God witnessing the sparkling iridescent light in the abyss or cave carver by fernando romay Oh where you slowly sculpt away layers of your cocoon until you discover the infinity in which you reside or irrational exuberance the first V RPGs that made me cry in it you travel through this universe gently tapping rocks to reveal secrets and as they crumble on your hands you sense this feeling of time passing a sunset that must dissipate you grow crystals the sounds to clean your ears that you marvel at your ability to create into wrecked conversation with your entropy based destruction of the level before it's mysterious ambiguous paradoxical and also delightful as usual the steam reviews show it meta visuals says this is there aren't really words it's beautiful existential and I know that steam reviews are a bit of a silly way to prove a point because some of them are equally as banal as the above was put poetic roms such as this one which I got for loon amusing a neat for about ten minutes not recommended loon a accidental creation that came from trying to implement a GPU based cloth sim is an architectural haiku whose thesis is very difficult for me to describe it's the only thing in VR which I have made which I know says a word that matters but it is a word that requires somebody quietly and calmly going through the experience I tried it myself and felt that emotion but didn't know how to communicate it and and what had even men until they read this review by 60fps I was a sobbing mess muttering to myself alone in the bathroom mirror and disbelief at how squarely this dev had hit a certain emotional nail on the head the tritone nail of beauty ah and boundless love and I say this not just the flat my own ego even though it is the best compliment that I will probably ever receive but more to say that is okay to try and say these words even if we fail at saying them in the process the attempt to say a new word will win many times result in gibberish like blarp or Waka Flocka Flame clan but when we find something that can say something more we must try to say it I believe that people are hungry not just for novel mechanics but for those novel mechanics to say something else to make us remember that our reality is so much more than we thought was possible before that in a place where no word has ever touched their lives meaning and I want to very very very adamantly add that this is not unique to VR but I can already see the same pattern emerging where so many tender and nuanced emotions are explored but only the ones that are catchy or palpable enough rise to the top this is not to say that those games have those catchy games have any less importance I really really really do love blarp and I really really do love catchy games but rather that exploration must be valued at its core I don't know exactly what attaining this value looks like it could be something like the stuff that David Kanaga has been talking about with the GPU it could be something else totally different but the point is not just to be trying to find these new places these new kick places these new games these new planets that have unobtainium or platinum or but to explore because that curiosity that desire to expand the understanding of the worlds we live in is a big part of what makes us human because in the end I hope that we are not exploring just to find the palpable words that can be financially successful to make games that will be considered PCE but rather to acknowledge that we as creators have the ability to find new words that shape the very language we use to describe our reality and with that description we define that reality thank you awesome all right so as he mentioned there will be games up here at the front of the session when the session is over and they will be games that you can play physically with your body which is hopefully not in this rough shape as - after four nights of three hours of sleep and so next up we actually have Bastion gorson and Pauline more yay to talk about pen optic okay hi everyone we are part of Infinite Jest and we are making fanatic my name is prima here and I am the object of the game for the purpose of the presentation I'll be inside the VR headset and hi I'm Bastion I'm one of the designer developers and I'm the composer for the game and so what is Panoptix well it's an a symmetrical VR game in which a small character played by me here on this laptop has to avoid detection by the huge mass that you see in the sky and that's played by Pauline using the VR headsets so my goal is to reach the end of the level without getting shot by the office fear while of course our goal will be to find where I am in the level and just shoot me down before I reach that goal so it's really some kind of hide-and-seek game in which I have several options I can take it very very slow and slow and be methodical and try to blend in with the all these little guys that look exactly like me or I can just break into a run and try to use like jumping and sprinting to avoid the shots from the over sphere so as you see like the core gameplay is very simple but we did have to iterate quite a bit to get to where we are now and we are actually still finding out some of the things that make the game design click one thing that's fairly evident from and that was like fairly obvious for a while ago was that the game is that it's both fun when the two player are interacting when when the VR player is really hot on the heels of the PC player and where this relaxed tension in all the movies you do as the as the PC player so that's really one of our main goal in the game is to like provide those kind of situations and improve the time both players spend on each other's like heels but so to show you how we arrived at that at that point let me take you back to the very beginning so we started by testing out the basic concept of the game so basically we had a regular-sized player and we just scaled up the VR person like 30 times and we spent way too much time doing just that like picking up the player and trying to get him to stay on the controllers and like for preventing him to fall you're not getting away now and yeah I obviously not because when you're so big in VR your hands move way too quickly for the PC player to ever complete so basically we decided that that was maybe a bit too overpowered and that was probably out as a way of interacting between the players but of course we still needed a way to stop the Challenger from reaching his goal so we were thinking about what's really fun about the game and we found that that actually just looking around was a lot of fun like you have all these smooth structures and you see like the little character and all that and it's a bit like when you look at model train or Legos or you know dollhouse it's stuff that people like to examine so we we said okay we might like find something to work with in that and we we've said okay what if you could shoot a laser from where you are looking at felt straight forward and so we went with that and like almost immediately we knew that there was no avoiding a comparison to like Lord of the Rings and the Eye of Sauron kind of deal so instead of trying to dodge that and be like or all artsy about it we just owned it and we put as a visual feedback for the overseer we just put a big spotlight in front of its face of evolution before and we like up to the contrast between the level and and the light just to have like real like the big bigger effects visual effect and yeah it basically clicked if result of giving my ring anyway back to back to the the game itself we what we found out was good about like the this light mechanic is that is it's sort of a couple purpose so not only was it a good way for the VR player to aim and to like know what is was going to shoot at which is like the functional part it was also like a good way to communicate to the PC player what was going on without like for example right now I'm looking at the at overseer but if I'm working and trying to be able to sneak a like and get noticed then I still see if the overseer is watching me and I can make informed decision as to whether I need to stay in formation not just like break into a run and and try to avoid what the in today's of the overseer so that that was a nice a nice fine we made about that mechanic then if you have that light as a way to to aim and as a an interesting effect we had to design the levels to make use of that as much as we could and one of the first thing we decided is to actually place the level on the outside of the room scale play area so it's basically a 360-degree level all around so that means that the overseer has to turn it is all her head just to find a busy player and it makes for like a good searchlight effect right but also the fact that the level is outside of the play field means that it acts as own very very own chaperone system which also eliminates the need for any locomotion system so no normally nobody should get sick from paddock tech is what we hope and since we had all that back surface to play with with all the walls and stuff it's it made us do some fun things with Heights so there's like a part of the level of the meaning that's very close to the ground and that's ended up looking for a fun like photo opportunity if you see somebody who's like lying on the floor craning his neck in a weird way to try to see to a building with the VR headset on you probably know the playing pad uptake and since they don't know you can just have pictures and it's like but it was also a challenge because as I said before we want to keep the player close together as much as possible but if that works kinda with a linear level we also wanted to try some more open levels so here you see like we just have like four four spheres and there's a lot of open spaces and I could go as a PC player in any direction and the over still don't really know where I'm going so we decided that we could if you wanted that to make more very varied levels we probably needed to bring some tools to the fully overseer to locate the PC player and so one of the things of being like experimenting with is giving back some hands to the VR player because let's face it it's still fun to have something to do with your hands when you are you are in VR and we made those kind of lenses that probably know as honor honor controllers and that she can use to basically see roughly where I went come here come here to run every design you you know will you know and so as we see like the trail of particles it takes a while to appear and that means I cannot stay really stationary I have to I have to continue moving yeah so that's that's like one only one of the approaches of of course like to try and solve this balance issue but yeah we really think this like some some good ideas that can come from just having the very different scales for the two players but anyway I think that was panoptic in a nutshell we obviously like really like talking about the game so if you're interested just come find us after and yes thank you for your attention it's so cute so devilishly cute I will get you I will pick you up okay so the next speaker is Tim Garbus and he is going to talk to us about keyboard sports he also has the rainbow keyboard which is so cool my favorite thing okay ready to go hi just gonna check the audio [Music] yeah hi I'm Tim tapas and I'm gonna be talking about keyboards horse a game that uses every single key on the keyboard and I didn't make this alone so some of the other people around now and but I'm just gonna start playing so first a little bit about alternative controllers because I'm really really excited about alternative controllers and every time I come to GDC it's the new it's the big thing and I love them but when I get home I only have my laptop so this is not a project to set up but to see what we can do with just ordinary controllers [Music] yeah and this is master forty and you heard the young apprentice and he is gonna do some nice keep on here so you can enter my house and here comes the trick I'm gonna press inside please sit down in the cozy space pressing space would you mind getting tea for me pressing tea and then you sort of see that you can walk around on the keyboard like this so we're gonna give him his tea yeah and when you live on a tiny keyboard you can shift between rooms so I press the left shift shift over here [Music] here comes the first challenge because now you need to use the number of Archaea usually don't know that much use the boxing games you also get to use your windows key feels really weird so let's say I wanted to exit his house I'm gonna try scape here you can enter my house a game I again use escape to get outside so I'm not gonna press escape that's totally okay in this game so now we sort of know the basic movement and we can move around on the keyboard so let's see what we can do with this [Music] [Music] oh no the game is caps left Epsilon so now we know how to move and we can avoid some things and then we try a few different things we can do do with this movement so I'm guys just going to shift through some different games we have the same boo-boo yeah just with a little bit of action add it on top but now if I hold on one of the keys goes down I'm just gonna play off a little bit here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so next up we have some position this one is pretty straightforward [Music] and I'm gonna jump down here and skip to the next scene [Music] so here you force down on all the windows buttons and space and everything [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so now he's shown a few next few examples of what you can do with just one key at a time on the keyboard but the keyboard will support more than one key at a time so now we go for two keys [Music] so I still move around same same time press icky but if I hold down that key pressed secondary King [Music] then I get a pretty huge multi-directional [Music] so I'm just nice to just target and just pay for it [Music] [Applause] [Music] yeah that's people's boss thank you whoo thank you next we have Anita Tong and Casson cooker here to talk about chard [Applause] hi we are here to talk about the cooperative two-player game shard shard was created and conceptualized by Roger Hannah Moorish he was the programmer game designer and built the underlying game engine from scratch I'm Anita I joined Roger as the game's visual artist and became significantly involved in the game's narrative and design hi my name is Katherine Kruger I worked with Roger for many years at Harmonix and then actually on one of Robins SF Indies picnics I met up with Roger again and of course he had his laptop and immediately showed me a early version of the game and so I joined right in the spot to write music and do the sound design so for those of you who did not have the fortune of knowing Roger he and his wife Val tragically passed away in January at their home in Berkeley feeling a mixture of both joy to be here in front of you and share his game with you and sadness at their passing it was really his dream to be able to show a game like shard in a room full of these amazing innovative designers so thank you to eg W for having us of course Roger was one of the most fiercely intelligent people I've ever met stressed on fiercely and he really just wanted to make progressive thought-provoking games in addition to shard I worked with him on rock band franchises and Dance Central he also made a chrome and Native Client of port of Bastion he was the lead engineer on last year's amplitude game and he worked on about 15 games in total he was also an avid game player as well as game maker and he consistently just wanted to joy every game that he you know that he played he was consistently on the top of the leaderboards for amplitude and he was the first person to speedrun roger was incredibly devoted to finding ways to push game design into new realms and unexplored themes for five years chard was his passion so he wanted to speak a little here to celebrate his life and his game chard began as a visual algorithm for breaking down images Roger had previously made a music visualizer that took advantage of the triangle based nature of GPU rendering and started to think about ways to use aspects of that experiment in a game we use an offline process that takes in a raster image as a PNG and uses a learning algorithm to describe the images using using triangles making a game entirely out of particles opens up a lot of opportunities for really weird interactions without having to animate anything by hand also visually the amount of triangles correlates to how closely the generated art will resemble the original art which allows us to use different levels of abstraction for different areas of the game this approach coupled with his custom coded game engine made the game's rendering highly efficient and easily executed on any platform this is just a transition animation from a really early build of shards showing the way that things in the worlds form from the triangles the theme of breaking familiar things apart in order to change them is something that is carried into multiple parts of the game the algorithm takes a pre-existing image and abstract sit and we wanted shard to continue that abstraction in its non visual aspects narratively it starts as a hero's journey but along the way the world breaks apart revealing new dimensions this makes the world itself the center of the story and the players shift focus to an exploration of their broken world mechanically they start with familiar run and jump platformer abilities but after the world breaks many new interactive options become available in addition to the unique aesthetic of this triangle based system it allows for scaling the resolution of the game easily and quickly as a tool for imparting game state health or other mechanics beyond the custom engine and unique gen Anam system that sort of drives the whole initial prototypes of the game start with so much more than that um Roger really would describe it as a fractured platformer with local cooperative multiplayer gameplay Roger and you know myself really felt strongly that the game needed to you know have an overarching philosophy of being inclusive and cooperative and it's a social game and something that's really easily discoverable we wanted to represent different races and Jenner's identity in the game it's not the focus but we wanted to have that be a part and it's really about the co-operative aspect of the game we wanted to social experience where the dialogue between the two players in front of the computer really was essential to making progress and with the two players we wanted to make sure there was a low barrier of entry no tutorials everything was very discoverable and very important that players of different skill levels could sit down and play together even if they didn't know the basics of platformer but I think the most innovative aspect of the game was this fractured element playing on this system of being able to generate these triangles and break things down low-res to high-res really meant that we could also break other things in addition to the graphics we could break the physics at any time we could break the narrative we could break you know standardized platformer mechanics and really play with those and embed them inside the narrative using this tools allowed us to build environments and look for really interesting combinatorial mechanics that led to unique gameplay experiences here's some footage of the most recent build of shard from leh last year the players the two players have six unique abilities that increase and complex the they're presented as skilled skills that the two players share the players cannot use the same ability set and so but they can switch at any time between them so this is the prompting of the dialog between the two players to coordinate how they're going to overcome these different environmental obstacles as the game goes on they they're given new abilities that allow them to change the properties of the triangles that make up their character forms and have effect on the triangles surrounding them in the world these abilities progress as the game goes on in power but also in abstraction and then as the gameplay becomes harder the two players really have to coordinate these abilities to advance there are we have built a number of different environmental levels you see some here just as prototype beds to be able to sort of you know flesh out the look of the game but also experiment with the combinatorial aspects of these abilities to yield mechanics and what I you know in in demos we were really seeing a lot of emergent gameplay [Music] there's a moment that we haven't built yet in the future of the game where the item that grants the abilities and powers to the players breaks and force them to adjust as adjust to a new level of abstraction the character forms end up breaking down completely and although the game responds to input it might not be in ways that are completely expected after this moment the players have to deliberately restore a degree of order to the world on the audio side as an audio person I was always working with Roger to try to explore some audio aspects of doing the same thing and so we had to come up with this great system that I was really looking forward to implement and hopefully we will in the future of the game which would be the ability to both D res the audio basically fractured the audio in real-time scaling it from full fidelity all the way down to highly compressed and thereby very artifacting to sort of play along with the same scaling up and scaling down of the triangle system so just before the end of 2016 we had finished our first vertical slice and began working on the horizontal slice of the game but then the sudden passing of Roger in January obviously has halted our progress and so we don't were currently working through all the emotions to be surrounded by such an amazing community of gamers who have supported him has been really amazing and Anita and I and those close to Roger are extremely passionate about the future of shard and so you know our goal is that in a few months we'll be able to formulate a plan on how we can complete and release shard in a way that honors Rogers legacy so until then here are some ways you can continue that to a follow us up online thanks so much to the whole egw team and especially to San Francisco indie developers for your support I want to leave you with a quote from Roger which he once wrote in response to the question why do you play games if something can be imagined it can be created in a video game in that regard that's the ultimate form of freedom of of ideas and games today touch on a large gamut of that dread euphoria desire fear rage compassion order chaos logic beauty in all its forms thanks I just wanted to take a moment and acknowledge the fact that the community came together very well and a great amazing loving moment when Rodger passed and it was his dream to present this game here and to be able to do that it's one of the greatest things of my life it's my greatest regret that he didn't live to see this moment I just wanted to say that he loved you all very very much thank you [Applause] and with that one of my most favorite people Jen sander Kok and Josh are here to show us edible games all right hi everyone I'm Jen Santa and I'm talking about edible games what do I mean I mean games where one of the cool gameplay mechanics is eating and I'm not talking about food as a reward I'm talking about like somehow eating changes the games somehow why am I doing this I'm doing this because I love to bake I really like real world games and I like designing games this is a bunch of games that I've worked on over the years so by my powers combined yay edible games so in the beginning one of the first games I did was called the cookie baking game in the cookie baking game you compete for ingredients and then you eat the cookies that you bake at the industry as a reward but the thing was the gameplay was kind of little mini games to compete for the ingredients and you didn't really interact with the food particularly much and it wasn't really cohesive as a whole so the big question I needed needed to ask was what new game play mechanics are only possible with edible games and cannot be done with any other type of game basically I was asking what does food give us food gives us a bunch of societal norms hidden information with your taste buds allergies personal preference and messy germs all of these things so because I'm doing a series of games I'm going to talk to you about six of the games that I've got that I think are pretty solid right now so the first one is gingerbread friends gingerbread friends is set up with a board with lids on top it's a slow game about making friends there are hidden prizes inside which the gummi bears and then there are also pieces of paper the pieces of paper a minesweeper like and tell you where to find a gummy bear you earn the right to eat a lid by guessing other's answers to social questions so for example you when it's your turn you might ask the group would it be a relief to realize you were ordinary know better or worse than most others and then you guess if everybody will say yes or no and then you might get a lid next game master taster in master taster it's about memory and tastebuds there are a series of rounds and each in each round you find out the taste preferences of the two main characters then you must eat one of the items with your eyes closed as you're eating it you need to work out what flavor that is and it might be a combination of flavors to you then say whether the characters can or can't eat it by putting thumbs up or thumbs down if you're correct you stay in the game information is never repeated and information builds every single round next game flavor roulette in frame flavor roulette there are four players with four morsels one of these does not taste like the others it's probably pretty close you take turns eating and then you have to pretend like yours is normal so this is my friend Owen here so would you believe he actually has a normal one he's trying to convince everybody that they should vote for him so once everybody's eaten you then guess who had the bad one the next game is flippin stick in flippin stick there are a grid of peanut butter covered crackers you choose a square two hits for example d5 and you try to aim for it and hit if you miss there are more points for everyone else and such chocolate and if you hit it you need to flip up and upside down your square and see what sticks you get as many points as whatever sticks to your square and then you get to like throw a bunch of chocolate at the table so that some more points for everyone the next game is called a wobbler and this is a tray of what I call jelly you guys call jello with gummy bears hid it inside you have 10 seconds to try to wobble to get the jawbreaker to land on top of one of the gummy bears if it does you then get to eat the square now there's a big hole in the board which your jaw break is very likely to fall into so I'm going to now do a deep dive on a game called the order of the oven mitt the tagline is do you have the appetite to join the Knights of the oven mitt I did this for the global Game Jam in 2016 and where the scene was ritual I did a bunch of failed prototypes where there was too much thinking not enough fun and definitely not enough eating it's a two team game and you move just like a chess knight on the board so in an l-shape there are two types of squares the sacred squares which are the dark squares and the common squares which are the light squares if you land on a sacred square you must consume it according to the sacred ritual as laid out in the sacred tome of the oven mitt this is what some of the rituals look like once you have consumed that square you then have a hole on the board and you can't stay on top of a hole so you have to push the squares around that might push you it might move the other player as well and it will mean that perhaps the other player might not be able to get the candy you like if you land on one of the common squares you can't eat the common squares the because that will Sully you so the game is over when all of the sacred squares have been eaten the rituals are really about it's fun performance for players and absorb observers it's creating a sacred space where you're allowed to be totally Salim the initial feedback I got on the game was that I could push the rituals to make them even more embarrassing for people there's kind of two different sorts of play styles that you can play because the game itself doesn't really care who eats the sacred squares they just have to be eaten you can either compete to see who gets the most or cooperate and help each other both get the squares that you want there are unique place strategies because people have food preferences so for example this is a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup many people like these many some people don't but if you both like them you might compete for them and go hey I'm gonna not let you have that but you might go oh if I let you have the jellybeans will you let me have the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup there are unique challenges for demoing this I've showed it it indicated last year and I spent days baking I had an army of helpers helping me it was amazing I'm now going to try to do a live example so we're going to switch to I've got a camera and I have some volunteers over here say hello to everyone so we've got Josh doing the camera but six people so I've got two teams we've we set the board up earlier so that they started playing before the session began and let me see is that sue sandy and Pat Stern currently all right so would you like to they are playing as the dinosaur kangaroo object at the beginning of the game you get to decorate your piece so that it becomes more like you with edible pens of course the pieces are the whole board is entirely edible so they are moving and they're going to learn on top of the candy corn so we can see on the side there's a little legend the candy corn is number six so I pull out the sacred tomb of the oven mitt and I look up ritual number six okay pick up the sacred square now everybody gets a sacred square so if you're playing with more than just two people people grab them from the extra supply that I have hold sacred square high above your head with both hands look at the sacred square squint squint against the grandeur move the sacred square to your mouth with your hands consume the sacred square [Applause] so when they are done consuming they again then get to push things around on the board so hopefully we'll be able to zoom in and see what they're doing you have to push everything so it all hits up against the edge um so that might move you and in this case it actually moved their eyes into a position where the other team can reach it so I don't know do they want the funny candy eye things looks like they do alright so that is ritual number eight all right let's make sure I get the right one okay pick up the sacred square everyone's got one close your eyes do a 180 degree turn so that no one will see what happens keep your eyes closed think of your most embarrassing memory it's not like anyone's watching you right now place square in your mouth and consume when you are done consuming you may turn around keep thinking about that embarrassing moment yay and so now they would get to move stuff on the board if they want to finish their turn you switch where they're going to push it they're going to go that way so you always have to end up on top of the square so we're now gonna switch back to the slides hopefully somebody brilliant all right so what's my next stage I have a bunch of half-baked ideas literally I just couldn't resist there's obviously a bunch of scalability and delivery issues with this style of games it takes a really long time to make these boards they you know don't last forever I don't have food handling licenses some people have allergies and can't eat these things but I'm planning to do an edible games cookbook a baker's dozen of edible games so it'll have like the recipes and the rules on how to play I have flippin stick that peanut butter cracker game available to play after the talks are over over there so come and join me and if you're interested follow me on Twitter or sign up to get my newsletter [Applause] [Music] thank you Dan that was delicious okay next we have a fold apart and if I make this a little bit bigger I can actually read the names off of the thing so this year is new can you see how smooth it is it's so smooth everything just happens there's there's another group of people that we haven't said thank you to yet which I think we should probably do right now and that's the a/v staff for this room who are tireless and helping us assemble the session so let's give them a huge round of applause they they work with us to practice these talks they let us come into the room several times over the course of the conference and work with our schedules and our wierd hardware and all the little things that we want to do including stuff like that camera and they make it happen and it wouldn't happen if they weren't here and they weren't dedicated to their jobs they also made everything else work at GDC so for that we'll give them a second round of applause thank you once again [Music] so in introducing mark and stephen i actually asked mark how do I pronounce your last name it's Laframboise but he said it's the Fram boys because then you have the Fram boys and the Fram girls and I was like oh damn that's really funny all the time it no doing a little bit of extra stuff alright so show of hands everyone in the room how many of you are game designers all right how many of you are artists all right how many of you are sound designers musicians okay writers all right producers all right how about the people that raise the money how many of you are raising money right now all right you do you do hard work I appreciate you now much more than I ever did before how many of you give away money oh-ho you suckers know where you're sitting okay I'm how many of you had your hands up more than once all right thank you that's what makes games awesome is that a set of hands it's the fact that there are so many people in the community that do more than one thing which is a good thing to do I'm trying to think if there's anything else I can talk about I was just going to say that I'm not going to talk about things that as for a shout out right before the shout out and the indeed um well hockey tell you a joke all right we're gonna bring the next person up but I'll still tell you a joke icon the joke is why do giraffes have long necks because their feet stink my friend kyun made that up when he was 8 and it's still the funniest joke in the universe okay so the next speaker we're gonna go a little bit forward is vomit Hamish Todd Hamish Todd I always do it wrong every time and he's presenting virus the beauty you oh my gosh look at that never mind we'll see him in a minute without further ado here's supermarkets [Applause] [Music] [Applause] laptop just died all right good afternoon GDC so I'm mark and this is Stephen and we are the co-founders of lightning rod games so we're going to be talking about our game a fold apart so before we start how many people here have been in a long-distance relationship at some point in their lives I'm quite a few of you okay this is great so you guys will probably get something a little bit of extra of our presentation today so we're gonna get into our gameplay pretty quickly but I just want to do a little brief overview of the game the inspiration for the game and how we arrived at the mechanic that we're using so before I started lighting rod games with Stephen I was working in California at Disney Interactive and my wife was still living in Orangeville Canada and so for a year and a half we were in a long-distance relationship and it sucked you know there's a lot of emotional ups and downs and it was a very very trying time for both of us now the good news is we've been back together in Canada for over three years but whenever I look back at that time when we were apart and the emotions that we went through I always thought that would be a very interesting story for a game his long-distance relationships really aren't something you see in games or even other media like film and television all that often however we wanted to make a game that didn't just have a story about long distance relationship about mechanics to help enhance that feeling of being apart from someone that you loved and we didn't really know how to do that at first and it was until after a GDC when your actually it was after an experimental gameplay workshop that Steve and I were brainstorming ideas for game mechanics that we thought would be interesting and we hadn't seen before in games and the idea of folding paper came came up like origami or the back of a Mad Magazine and we thought it was cool but we didn't really know how to turn that into a fully fledged game and it wasn't until a few months later that I realized that folding paper is actually a really good way to represent a long distance relationship because if you have a piece of paper and you have a character on one side and a character on the other they're in two entirely different worlds and it can't get to one another but if you fold that paper you can merge those two worlds together and create a way for them to reunite I thought this was this is a good representation of how it feels when you're in a long-distance relationship your two worlds and just match them together and be in the same place so that provides the basis for our game a fold apart it's a puzzle game about a long-distance relationship in a world made out of paper so there's two characters an architect and a teacher and they're separated across the desk and the only way for them to reach one another is by folding and manipulating the papers that lie between them so throughout the game you're gonna be able to play as both characters and you're gonna be able to experience the unique perspective that both of them have the other thing is you're also going to be able to choose the genders of both characters we're still in the process of establishing art style and iterating on it so I wasn't able to unfortunately be able to show it in the presentation today but as a studio we believe love is universal we want that to be an option for every player to play our game all right so we'll stop thank you [Music] all right so I'll set up this level a little bit i steam in place so we're going to start this off the architect has just started his new job in his new city and he's gonna go for a walk and start exploring so he's gonna walk out of his office and he's going to go into some of the papers that are adjacent to it and as he walks along he's going to get to this retro movie theater and he sees a memory of a time when him and the teacher were happy together and he goes and collects it and as he continues along he gets to this paper and now all of a sudden you can't cross it there's no way for him to get that to get across to the next area but because the worlds may have paper what we can do is we can turn that paper over and on the back you can see there's a platform now that he can walk across all the way to the next area so it gets to another puzzle here so that's what he you can see that there is a platform on one side and there's a little bit of a platform on the other but it doesn't go all the way across so what we can do now is actually fold the paper and we can merge those two platforms together creating one single long one that he can walk across the next area [Music] so the other thing we can do with the paper is we can move characters and objects from one side of the paper to the other so here you can see the exit door is on the back side of the paper so we have to get the character over there somehow so first thing we can do is fold the paper so we emerge DC platforms kind of like we did in last puzzle well now what we can also do is unfold that paper so that elude the characters to the back side to where the door is so a lot of you have been in long-distance relationships you know the most important thing when you're that far apart from someone else is communication so that's one of the things that we're experimenting right now with how to tell that story and so we're using like the memories where the characters can react to moments that they remembered from the time when they're happy and we're also exploring telling a story through these love notes on the puzzles we're one site where it's a conversation that goes back and forth we tune to these two characters and it's not only nice because it tell them to tell a story but it gives a presence to the character who is absent in the in the puzzle as well so they're able to show their support as the other characters trying to traveling across the desk the other cool thing is that we can actually fold in any direction so and this puzzle here we actually fold diagonally so which will move when we move on there we'll be able to move up to a higher level so we're in level with that door that's on the other side [Music] all right so this was pretty happy we all know long-distance relationships are not always happy so that's another area that we want to explore the game so there's a lot of times when you're in a long-distance relationship and you feel terrible if you feel really alone you know just you feel like the other person isn't always there maybe you're out of sync maybe you're in a different time zone and there's times where you just need them and they're just not around and so sometimes you can message them you don't hear back right away because either they're busy they're sleeping and you just wish that there was a way to be with them and you just can't be [Music] so that's a little bit of an overview of our folding mechanic so what we're working on now is kind of iterating on our art style and our story it even in gameplay we really want to push this idea of paper folding and the world be made out of paper including things like environmental effects or you know ripping and tearing things like that which we feel kind of helped emphasize this idea of traveling through a world made of paper [Music] it's one thing that we're really interested in is hearing from other people who have been in long-distance relationships because it's always a unique story and there's always different emotions that everyone goes through and so one thing is we really like hearing from other people so absolutely if you want to talk to us after tell us about your own story that's awesome because it always is inspirational to us for things to add into the game so please feel free to contact us if you talk to us after the talk our contact information is up here as well so we're looking forward to hearing from you and telling you more about the game thank you [Applause] thank you for reminding us once again why it's so important that the AV staff is so talented so next up we do have Hamish Todd talking about virus the Beauty and the Beast I don't have any more jokes it's okay I think I'm ready all right Thank You Robin yeah I'm Hamish I used to write for Action Button dotnet anybody would remember that web site and this guy in the front row also did all right I also wrote a bunch of articles about game designing my most famous one was about Medusa heads in Castlevania and I made some Oh brilliant and I made some games that nobody played and actually I sort of left the games industry to go into biology this is me at the International Rice Research Institute they cured one they cured world hunger once but the population increased so nobody noticed it not that there's anything wrong with the population increasing and so we're gonna think about some biology so this thing on the left here is polio and on the right is a young man whose life is made worse than it ought to be by polio and shorter than it ought to be as well this is hepatitis B probably notice it infects your liver this is one that you probably don't recognize it's a Ugandan virus called Rift Valley fever causes a lot of suffering but one thing that you might notice about the viruses is that they all have patterns on them and there is actually a close connection between those patterns that I'm going to illustrate now so on the left here we've got polio again and on the right here we've got something which I'd like you to stare at until you've convinced yourself that it looks like polio it's a bit abstract but if I hold it like if I hold it like this maybe you can maybe see that there's two shapes on the front facing us and but what do we do with this though well I've got button here I'm gonna open it up because that lets us sort of see the whole spherical pattern all flattened out in front of us lets us see the whole pattern at once and it also allows us to see that the pattern on polio fits very nicely into this pattern of hexagons let's so what well if I grab it and increase its size and then wrap it back up again well now we have a new shape and it just so happens that this shape is precisely the pattern of hexagons that you get on Rift Valley fever in fact you can make almost any other virus this way and this is a model used by actual scientists you can make about 60% of all viruses this way and since 90% of all organisms on earth are viruses pretty much all like the majority of organisms on earth are some variation on this pattern but not all viruses are sort of well behaved like this these are three viruses that are a bit more weird geometrically and here are the shapes that we use to talk about them as biologists and I've got a different thing to show you now well very similar actually again we've got a similar sort of shape and if we open it out we've can see it flattened again but now I can grab these maybe move them a bit take that one as well and now we've got a different shape and because of the way this thing is set up that shape could well correspond to some virus out there is a virus from before there's the shape that it corresponds to if I grab this maybe put that it doesn't look great does it maybe from that angle okay if I had a bit more time oh if I put it like that and wrap it up well now we have a shape that corresponds to this virus over here that thing kills more than a million people every year that's HIV and that's actually one of the best pictures that we have of it it's extremely difficult to get pictures of HIV and now I'll show you the context in which players will see this Zika virus has an extremely peculiar pattern on it and as part of a group of viruses that all have subtly related patterns on them they have to be understood using this quite particular model and you can try it out now now what you're seeing here may not seem very much like a virus at all and so we are going to take a closer look at this particular virus called HPV a very nasty virus which is known to cause cancer so if we take this x-ray of HPV and we increase the contrast on it then we get a bunch of point globes and it just so happens that those white blobs tell you exactly where HPV s proteins are now proteins are connected together and so we're going to draw lines between those proteins that have a connection and this gets us something that can be made in the model if you feel like challenging yourself now you can try constructing HPV and there's a link from the previous guys by the way the algorithm that's used to wrap up these shapes I actually took it from a bunch of origamist s-- so I don't actually do this as my day job I've actually left the games industry like I say so I'm biologists really on the Left I'm working on virtual reality lecturing virtual reality molecular fitting and it's really exciting to be working with the new hardware virtual reality it's not it's not what a lot of people say it is but it's pretty cool but as I'm getting used to the new hardware I'm acutely aware that there are so many things that are possible with the old hardware that we never even touched thank you [Applause] Thank You Hamish this is very interesting the idea of experimental games being used in education and this education can become more and more accessible through virtual reality and ways of the Internet's maybe we can actually start sort of finding the viruses before they find us yeah so last up we have John to talk about the alt control showcase are you ready please come up to stage alt controllers wait you're not controllers you're people what saying not responding right now awesome thanks for your patience hello everyone the alternative controller exhibit all controlled GDC doubled its boot space this year and gave away its first award Wednesday night providing a huge well deserved visibility bump to the dozens of teams crafting unique tangible and unforgettable experiences the exhibit thrives thanks in large part to your amazingly positive feedback so I want to say thank you so much for your support the exhibit is the brainchild of Simon Carlos EVP of GDC and Gamasutra and myself John Paulson your friendly neighborhood humblebundle publishing lead I took my somewhat unhealthy obsession for Konami music controllers and countless other peripherals and my love for showcasing and organizing awesome devs as I've done for mine Khan and the mix and channeled those passions into finding and showcasing the most alternative of controllers for the past four years at GDC bringing us to the showcase today we spent a lot of time talking about how games games touch people I'm thankful we get to celebrate here the converse how people touch games studies say touch is the first sense to develop my own study says that when I first touch and learn new controllers I developed some of my strongest memories coupled with extraordinary sensations learning new controls often becomes a mentally gratifying game by itself sometimes we can create really different ways to touch games and this brings hundreds of millions of new people to play experiments to change how we play don't always happen in the halls of huge companies though sometimes all it takes is a tiny team here are five such teams featured at the all control GDC 2017 exhibit handpicked by the egw committee y'all go ahead and click for you hello everybody hi buddy my name is Jonas Bloch I'm a media artist and creative technologist from Vienna Austria I'm here to present the project called vanilla OS it's a joint project collaboration I did together with Joseph who who is probably currently wrapping it up at about control GDC booth let me just check my notes yeah it's a project we developed over the last year and a free time and we're calling it an alternative controller device are too unstable console if you wonder what device art it you might want to check it out you might like it it's pretty cool Japanese media art singie but we talk about vinyl OS vinyl OS is enables you to play games video games on turntables and this works by firstly we're projecting onto the 20 onto the onto a white record so we're using the record as the screen and secondly there is an audio track timecode audio signal actually on on the record and as you toy with the record as you play it back as you spin it or scratch it this audio gets played back and it gets played into the computer and the computer listens to this signal and therefore it can tell the speed the record is turning and the direction it's a system actually used for teach the DJ's to control mp3s for DJ's who use digital systems whatever so yeah that's the two kind of things needed to make this work can we have two videos play actually so we so far we developed two games for this setup one is a circular shooter so you so you turn the record and you scratch the record like you scratch you make a scratch move like DJ and you scratch to shoot your enemies and the second one is kind of defend your base like game where you swing a pendulum and have to kick out objects of the after record virtual objects of the record to do the wife kind of who has who is actually seen it who is bladed who knows what I'm talking about okay cool all that many people great yeah I can't show you anything anymore I guess okay so thank you alright hi everybody I'm Taylor I'm up from DigiPen Institute of Technology which is up in Washington State up in the Redmond area part of teams I light the 16 plus team that has bought built this project Sam garden up there is a picture of most of the team just to give you an idea of the kind of scale of everyone involved with this project and also the initial prototype of our sandbox so to give you an idea of what the game actually is saying garden is a game where the idea was to make a game entirely out of a box of sand so the only controller is that box of sand and more than that we just we wanted it to be an actual game with objectives so how the game works is we take a Kinect if it's mounted above the box of sand we take the height map from that we crop it I'm going to do a little bit of post-processing and then we plug that directly into a unity strain component from there the actual gameplay is we spawn a bunch of houses on the map and then each one wants to be at a specific height some of the more interesting things about the actual design of the game were that trying to break down the space of a sandbox into just simple actions so we tried to Center the entire game around building Hills and making holes in the sand that way we could communicate to the player how to interact with our controller in the most easy way and from there we built our entire game thank you very much for your time hello my name is Anders Carlson and I live on an island in Sweden where I study game design every year there is a project called theme park there where the first year we'll make a game with an unconventional controller it could be controlled by anything from pair of backpacks to a bookshelf so I got together with my amazing team and we made a game that we like to call Samba crawler and they're supposed to be video into okay yeah our video plays [Applause] and disappointed are you satisfied with your performance you just have to try a little bit more oh you would just ruin my day I hope you feel good about yourself I'm among undergrad from design technology program at Parsons School of Design my teammates Jane Charak max Magnus and I created Victor the loser and seemingly an old school intelligence test machine Victor reveals his true colors when it feels threatened by the players imminent victory and tries to sabotage the players progress and mock their testing failure so we don't have that much experience making games and we just came together to this course called the new arcade in our school and we started out thinking about different kinds of people that who play games and one of the things we learn it now was this idea of a bad loser someone who really wants to play with you but start to get a little upset when they start to lose and sometimes you just have to let them win little bit in order to prevent the drama so what are you really trying to accomplish what play was victor our game attempts to redefine what it means to win and especially because Victor only cheats when you're winning it puts an emphasis on binges okay being okay playing a game and Victor provides an alternative experience focus on the journey rather than the results a journey that is unexpected and kind of becomes a negotiation and actually this game also combines two of my biggest fears one is intelligence tests that I had to do a lot of a lot of them when I was younger and the other one is that I I'm really bad at playing games in front of other people so this game gave me making this game give me the message that being feeling bad about yourself actually is okay and it can be fun and in the end we would like to thank our teachers bye and hairy and if you have employed with Victor yet stop by the all control section in the afternoon and see how Victor can ruin the rest of the day hi my name is Martina hang wine I come from Argentina I'm really glad being here well they asked me to do this presentation like a couple of days before GDC so you'll have to excuse my artwork so let me introduce to do the making of dougie tug of war it's a game about pulling string and playing against a dog some of you might have played it so yeah well I'll tell you the story right because I'll skip the video well I was walking down the street right that's me on the left and I found a printer on the sidewalk right so I took it it was like in this state sort of yeah so I remember I had this idea like for an art game like it's imagine this it's a boat with a crystal glass on it and it's all broke to the dock so if you pull this on metaphor for human relationships right so if you pull too hard the glass will fall and break but if you like just leave it it would drift away that was the original concept right so we started messing up messing around with uh without the printer and well without do you know and all that well finally I said instead of just seeing numbers on the screen wait don't put a video and synchronize with it and I looked at give Jaffe that count for to find a buyer video on and for all the rest of the programming parts I mean it's magic and I'm gonna explain it just happens and finally the the result was this game you know you pull against the duck and well let's get their videos so thank you for listening and thanks a lot to John Paulson for organizing this and for emails they're answering all my emails and again no real force coming in the booth with me thanks we're gonna try to run a zombie crawler video real quick all right mind the rewind do except I don't know what this big black bar is doing here let's just cut that out so basically the game is two wooden frames on top of each other that with a sort of treadmill on so it's made to simulate you crawling through a corridor as a zombie yes and in the way there is furniture in your way that you have to smash with the two buttons that is on the side of sides of the controller and the goal of the game is get to the end seconds yes that will shoot at you and you will have to and you will have to tilt the entire controller from from right to left to avoid that being common brush of bullets so so so the goal will be to get up to this person and then just go nuts and just claw their eyes out correct Wow that was intense someone just clawed my eyes out in front of the entire egw folks well okay so thank you Mike yeah that was that was intense so there's always one one presentation every year that doesn't quite work out but it isn't because we don't love games and it isn't because we didn't try it's just because sometimes things don't work out the way you expect them to so let's have a loud round of applause for everyone who presented and let's have all the presenters come up on stage and all the staff that helped out if you are a judge and you're in the room please come up on stage if you helped set up please come up on stage if you help to act out a game please go up on stage you donated food please come up on stage if you loved Roger Hannah please come up on stage I'm not lying seriously your friend or close loved one someone who worked with him anyone who had a chance to work with Roger please come up on stage indie games is a community we're strong because we love each other our heart is so huge for all of you it's like gigantic there are games up here please come up and play the games please come and tell us that you love us and please come give me a hug I love you we'll see you next year [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 39,695

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game design

Id: Y4cCCgOXcNU

Length: 119min 23sec (7163 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017