Yahtzee and JM8's GDC 2024 Adventure!

hello call strike a light I'm a British person and I'm in San Francisco and I'm joined by another British person apples and pears we're at GDC specifically we're at the mix event where I'm going to be showcasing Starr Vagabond but that's not happening for a little while that we need to talk about some of the stuff we've seen so far on this great trip went to day of the devs yesterday and it was very very interesting it was very packed it was extremely packed but there were a ton of really really cool games there so the first one would be uh Europa the game was uh made by someone who was an artist on OverWatch and it really really shows in the art style but mostly um it was very Studio gibl like and the movement looked extremely smooth and one of the problems with these events being so jam-packed is that I wanted to play this game but I couldn't because there was somebody playing it for about half an hour straight but it looked absolutely gorgeous so that's going to be one that I think you guys should keep an eye on another game that we played uh which was extremely popular was hyperlight breaker have you seen much of hyper light Breer I've seen that it has pretty much the same color scheme as every game those developers make the the magenta magenta yes but the gameplay of it was um extremely smooth and it was super complicated with loads of different builds you could make so the characters themselves didn't have different abilities you slotted abilities into those characters and you could create different builds so they showed me um a really cool build where you could make summons so every time you kill people would summon them as Undead and you could increase the chances of how frequently that happened it's kind of has Rog likee elements um or Rogue Light Elements where you upgrade yourself over time but in you can play it multiplayer so I was concerned I was tweaking to the producer on how do you take something that is meant for Rog like things like getting permanent upgrades over time how is that going to transition into a multiplayer space I zoned out my arm hurts take the mic one of the games that I was really really impressed with at day of the devs was a game called Echo Weaver and it was a Metroid brainia like and you you have some experience with that genre it's like Metroid Vania but instead of gating you with gameplay mechanics uh you just have to know things so you can if you know all the secrets in it you can just go straight to the end but the the point of the game is to figure it out so this game is about time loops and has a Time based mechanic of these kind of sigils uh UI elements at the top that would like time down as you went and certain events in the game would only transpire at specific fixed points in that time frame so you knew uh well the fire would spread after one notch or this door five rooms over would close after the third notch and as you explore you would get um like either permanent upgrades to that time so each one you had more time to to do things or little uh little additions to the time so you had more space to do stuff in that one run and Gathering all of that information allowed you to explore more of that stuff so it sounds a bit tunick while you're describing it yeah it was it was a little bit tunick it was a little bit um like kind of classic Metroid venery you had stuff like the double jump and dashing and wall climbing or like wall jumping immediately so you could immediately get into hunting secrets and stuff like that and I was really really impressed of how smooth it was they're looking for Publishers so if you're out there check that game out it's Echo weav it's very very very good so one of the things we looked at uh all of us today was a game called jump ship it was in the most Silicon Valley office we've ever been in they had like little work booths and there was rounded rectangles everywhere but the game if you could imagine a game we played a while back on stream called Pulsar Lost Colony which was like a sea of Thieves but in space this was that but more so and it looked really good and Polished and it also had jetpacks and grappling hooks and so is therefore must be better in every way you could like grapple onto the the outer ship while it was flying around and interact with like you could be on a bazooka shooting ships down while you were like flying around the planets and it's like Mission based kind of like left for dead kind of vibes from that yeah it's covering a lot of bases in terms of gameplay pillars so you've got the spaceship that everyone's like working on someone's Manning the Cannons someone's like fixing the engine someone's piloting but then it's got sort of um FTL or slay the Spire style map traversal where you go from mission to Mission collecting stuff then you get into on the ground shooting which was actually seemed to be Destiny esque and was actually pretty good for this sort of thing yeah it's all of the gameplay elements kind of came together smoothly that some you see with a lot of games like this that the ship combat might be really good in a game but then the on ground stuff's like really clunky this all seemed extremely polished one of the things that I was concerned about and we spoke to the devs about was how the missions were going to play out over the course of the game CU they said they were all handcrafted it wasn't procedurally generated so I was kind concerned about like were those missions going to be interesting or were is it going to be land on planet grab thing come back attack by Pirates then leave and that for you know 500 missions so we'll see how that pans out it was the seamlessness I think that's made it nice seamless transitions from ship control to first person combat to jetpacking and grappling hooking it's keeping a lot of balls in the air but uh it looks like it could be like the game that in this particular genre that we haven't yet got where everyone goes that's the game that's the game that typifies this genre sea of Thieves Pulsa lethal company it's all that sort of thing if I were to say something against jump ship it does seem a bit generic yeah I think some of the visuals were just sci-fi yeah the theming just doesn't really have anything to that identifies it it's sci-fi with a capital S it's just it's they need some spice and I mean speaking of spice spice you say well that gets us to the next game we saw which was a game by funcom developers of Conan Exiles and The Secret World which is a new MMO surviv game set in the Dune Universe called Dune very boring and generic subtitle are you a fan of uh first League no what about survival no okay uh so June Awakening was a very very interesting game for me personally because I like the book um I'm not a fan of survival games whatsoever but the June universe is very fascinating to me and from this presentation that we saw it was very very steeped in Dune law the game director was very obsessed with Dune clearly and that really showed through their presentation and also the game so like using gameplay mechanics such as still suits you know the intro had the you know the Gom jaar that was the intro they had things like Hunter Seekers and um the the worms are a constant pressure in the desert and from the initial trailer I thought it was rather generic but seeing it in action in person makes it a lot more impressive to see how they've taken these in Universe Dune elements and implemented it into gameplay um not appealing to someone like yti but to someone like me who really really likes those things and gets really excited about hearing about Navigators and you know all of the mentats being uh a clash tree you know um the Benny jzer being a clash tree and how that augments gameplay it's really interesting to me so I think this is going to be a polarizing game if you're not really into the survival elements and you're not really into the Dune law probably stay away from it but for me I'll break my role of not playing survival games for that do spice arus is a test few survive it but the humans that do awaken well that was all the things we saw now I'd better get back to showcasing Starstruck Vagabond oh [ __ ] it'll be starting any second now um is that is that pizza hello you join us at the lobby of the Hilton Hotel San Francisco to discuss an issue that affects many men of a certain age oh no sorry we're at GDC I I was here for the conference on the be well damn that made things awkward we were at the mix last night W you were yeah you were showing off your game so you didn't get much of a chance to go see any of the games because you were too busy no delivering yes I was showcasing for a while and I got bored and pissed off home yeah but I did play a bit of West bastards which is a follow-up to void bastards how did you find that well you know how void bastards was um you pick SPAC ships to go to and they have like procedural like little shooter sections it was like that but you go down to a old Westy planet or something and then there's like a map screen and you got three different characters you can send in different directions and then when your turn Runs Out you go to these little shooter sections that are like the procedural shooter sections and uh yeah it's all over the place really I guess it might benefit from a little more onboarding yeah I checked out a bunch of games right next to you there was a game the first game I checked out it really caught my eye called parcel corpse it's funny they were next to us cuz uh we were like delivering packages Junction the mix both of the delivery games were put in the exact same spot I wonder if that was intentional but why it caught my eye because the developers who showed up were in like full costume yeah they put the effort in in contrast to us yeah we didn't show up in costume it's kind of a mix of Crazy Taxi and a delivery game just looking at it it was giving me bomb Rush cyber fun yeah it's really got that they were very honest about their Inspirations with the the flow of the game um I got kind of like Tony Hawk Vibes as well with like the the tricks um and the way you can Traverse and they said that they've designed the game in a way that it's all about finding the the quickest route to get to a specific areas and certain areas you can't cycle up as fast and you have to find more tricky routes that could knock you off and do tricks off of them to be faster and stuff the dudes were really lightharted they were really nice and the game is really really fun I just wanted to play more of it so much so that Nick had to come over and be like go play more games you're here working [ __ ] go play more games so some other stuff we saw was there was a game called bull walk which was a city Builder game that we managed to see and it was really really interesting because he gave me a full breakdown of how he designed the game and his philosophy while I while he was showcasing the game and he wanted to effectively reinvent the genre and have it be more about birthing cities not on grids but having them be a little bit more or organic and um the all of the NPCs do their own thing and you're giving them platforms to build on top of and how those relationships inside the cities would change based on political leanings of different islands that you connect oo so it's a Jerry mandering c yeah it's it's very very interesting and um luckily it comes out next week so um might be streaming some of that next week but it's it's really interesting well anyway uh moving on from the mix we went to separate showcases this morning I think I was at the lovely cushy Nintendo Showcase with the cated breakfast and the goodie bags for everyone where were you not getting goodie bags like a pleb cuz we were looking at uh a few things that the Nintendo switch are showcasing as third party games uh the first one we played was South Park snow day which is a followup to stick of truth and oh really uh flat fractured butth hole except it's in full 3d now you play as the new kid who's taking part in sort of Co-op RPG melee stroke shooter missions okay cuz I was wondering what the gameplay shift would be if they're they're doing risk of no more turn based it's like full on action RPG you got special abilities the activate it's sort of like a cool down like abilities thing you unlock more Buffs for like special cards between rounds yeah it wasn't much fun was the humor coming through though cuz that's where well not really cuz the sub they didn't turn the subtitles on till halfway through and it was very loud but um it's the humor you'd probably come to expect from the last two games but there's less opportunities for it cuz it's more action oriented and it was hard to follow the action cuz every character is just a little stubby thing shaped like a champagne cor so I wasn't a big fan of that yeah I I suddenly don't feel so bad about missing the Nintendo showcase was there anything else that caught your eye while you were there well we did have a chance to have it go on uh on your tail which was we took the piss out of when we first saw it saying O well that's the people who've got sex fetishes themed around '90s Disney cartoons isn't it but uh it was actually pretty interesting it's a cozy game about a goat lady holidaying in a Italian Beach Resort which is half cozy game style fishing mini games and relationship mechanics hanging out with people dating them and stuff and half detective game in a sort of dangan Romper sort of area in the demo we were in like a a cafe we had to a theft and how you did that the mechanics are actually quite interesting you had you had like a magic magnifying glass that could see the past and the present okay and you had to look for discrepancies between the past and present okay that's really interesting and then once you found them it would like add a like an event card to your deck and then to piece together the crime you have to put put down all the event cards in the correct order of what happened so like could you brute force that like could you just well you could try as many times as you want but it was a cozy game okay it's a sort of Professor Lon thing where it sort of build up build up build up build up oh no I [ __ ] up and then heed try again but it actually has like deductive detective mechanics which is what I like in my detective games and they said there's this interesting mechanic where crossing over the Cozy stuff if you've made friends with someone you can tell them to like come with you and then they come with you to the crimes you're solving and they look for and they help you find the clues hey Jeff come with me to the murder cuz we get on so well so wasting well did have that slightly oh gone I'm sure someone's going to get off on this like characters style but I might check it out yeah like I I will admit the the kind of furry style does kind of put me off a little bit but when you explain the mechanics it sounds really really interesting it was kind of similar to something else we saw today um like Crush house so yes it's about filming characters in The Well having sort of Sims style interactions and you have to please a number of different audiences so some people want to see the drama and some people want to see the plants in the background so if you can film drama in front of some plants then everybody's happy but you got to make sure every audience is satisfied with enough of the stuff they like before the end of the day yeah or the people who like the butts people who like the the Voyer stuff so you could you could film toilets but you had to make sure you had to film the right stuff and um one of them was like like film students and they just liked filming things on an angle Dutch angles they love that stuff so yes exactly like that you can hit two two of the marks if you go film a toilet with a Dutch angle yeah you're in you're in yeah Gang Busters so yeah that was really interesting and then balancing uh placing ads at certain times while trying to film the specific events ads that would appeal to the specific audiences you get and there was hints that are kind of sinister narrative through line through each season you produced yeah sort of in a um portal one uh the last worker sort of vibe they were being very uh mysterious about those narrative elements but that's the thing that interests me the most well you keep them intrigued with the mystery books you'll have to check it out so another game we saw that I was really really interesting interested in was a game called flint lock so it has a subtitle of [ __ ] okay so it's flint lock colon some [ __ ] some [ __ ] yeah some the team that made Ashen which was a in my opinion an okay um Souls like and were very upfront with that when they were speaking to us you know and they were like we we're now they're rebranding for it to be like a Soul's light and they're trying to kind of build on top of the genre ra rather than just mimicking what fromsoft have done so how they had done that um is by adding loads of different elements like um adding actual meaningful platforming the combat was based on all of these different combos to do with Like Flint loock and gunpowder weapons uh to take down all of the Gods and they were really putting an emphasis on making making the game accessible to people who weren't looking for The Challenge from like a Souls game all of the souls you would get were was a like a reputation and as you were fighting based on how stylish you're fighting your reputation goes up so there's a multiplier ah so stylish there it's like sort of Devil May Cry Devil May Cry influences and they were spectacle fighter spectacle Fighters and they were like if you are trademark y oh my God but from what they showed us it the Polish uh of the animations of the the sound looked super super clean it's probably one of the most polished uh like Souls likes or Souls light that I've ever seen um cuz mostly when I see them I go ah they're trying to do Dark Souls I don't care but this they were trying to do something unique not just with the narrative but also how they were applying the gameplay mechanics so I'm really interested in checking that out well you all seem pretty vocal about Flint knog being interested I'm super super interested in it well in the face of that enthusiasm I'm going to have to bring the mood down again cuz everything else I'm just kind of me on the other thing we saw at the Nintendo thing was a game called little kitty big city which felt like The Logical midpoint between stray and Untitled Goose game okay so it's got the cartoony self shaded look uh but you control a cutie wit or Kitty witty in a sort of stylized Japanese City and it was basically stray but with a much more freedom of movement it wasn't all contextual B you could pounce on things they had little like pounce Arc and you could selectively you could aim your pounce you could decide what to climb up on to and you like ran into other animals you had to collect stuff and uh just complete various objectives like there was one where this all made me think of Untitled Goose game the The Objective was become an artist and there's like someone had laid a canvas on the floor and left some pots of paint around and we saw the cat just SWAT their pots of paint till they fell over and Spilled everywhere and then walked in the paint and then walked all over the canvas and left P prints in it being an annoying little bastard yeah and that sounds interesting if like that you want to kind of explore that kind of being a cat in a open world city I assumed we'd see more cat stuff after stray so I guess this is this is the world stray has created maybe we're hitting that that Apex now where we're going to start seeing them because they've been in development for for a few years yeah I suppose I'd bring it up along with On Your Tail cuz that was sort of the mood of the whole Nintendo showcase it was all a little bit cozy a little bit insipid bit bit cutesy Yeah bit cutesy blood because of course of course the switch is sort of entering the phase of its existence where it's not really keeping up with other consoles in terms of power yeah so it's like really going all in on the third party Indies I think yeah which I which I don't mind like we get lots of really interesting games out that like batro and and stuff like that but it's the cutesy it's the cutesy stuff that you know it's not really for me but there is definitely an audience for that one of the games we saw was from the developers of dead cells um they were making a game called wind blown it's really interesting with this one because they wanted to do uh a rogue light that was multiplayer that you could progress by yourself but then have your friends come in and the world would Scale based on that you know we've seen like Risk of Rain 2 and and stuff like that doing this but they did a huge Showcase of the different uh weapon types in the games and how they interact with each other and each weapon you use cuz you equip two each one affects the other so every single combo of each weapon would change how you play and how they would combo together and there are also different affixes um I can't remember the name they used but different affixes and powerups you would get like in any Rogue like that are like memories of previous Heroes that would augment how those weapons worked and how everything interacted and they put a big emphasis on if we were playing together you could set stuff up on the enemies that would enhance my attacks so you could build your entire play style around helping me and vice versa and yeah it was really interesting they had a really cool Dash ability it looked incredibly fluid really really want to check that one out well I think that's everything we wanted to talk about I think so for today yeah yes one more day of GDC tomorrow oh my God now um I'm Bor P off hello I'm cardigan wearing hot dad energy and this is tattooed best wearing uh new hotness and we're still at GDC I'll actually say I think today is probably one of the most exciting days we've had because we've seen some really good Indie stuff and some stuff from previous AAA devs that are trying to do some new stuff that might be interesting we'll see if it's it's your thing yeah starting out this morning we was we looked at a game called blueprints uh which was a game that's very hard to describe when you're very tired at the end of a long day it's a sort of Rog like house planning Puzzler thing yeah the premise was you inherited a will from from someone but in the will it said that you could not have the house unless you found this secret room inside the house within a certain time frame yeah and each run of the Rog likee element was you going into the house and every room you would go into you could choose what kind of room it would be yeah you open a door you have to pick one of three rooms like it's like a card game and it's got different doors and you get different pickups for that run that can be used in later rooms to solve puzzles or to guide past locks and stuff and then at the end of the day the the Mansion res scrambles itself and you have to start all over again it was really unique yeah I'm not sure what to compare it to yeah it's super original so I'm really interested in checking that out and I like a puzzle game anyway yeah and then afterwards we went to see a game called uh knights in tight spaces which is a sequel to a game you've played by the same developer yes that was called fights in TI spaces it's like a card-based deck builder based around momentto moment tactical fights in tight spaces but this was like that but with a Medieval theme so you stab peasants with swords and things yeah and I think like the deck elements made it so that combat was always always very unique for each room it was very interesting and varied there was really interesting combos you could do with having multiple characters in your team but having all of those team members in a tight space didn't really affect how cluttered everything was it made for more interesting gameplay I think one of my only criticisms from that game is like the tactics were fun but you built up your fight and you went for it linearly and then at the end you could replay the entire thing to see how it would have looked in real time yeah but how the characters moved they would move along grids in a very like static way and then so it was like watching Rock sockum robots so having that replay looked a little bit clunky that was exactly the problem with John Wick hex yeah if you ever played that but another game we saw today uh that did the complete opposite was a game called demon School The quick summary would be to say that the developers gave a number of influences and I noticed were very deliberately avoiding mentioning Shin Mami ten so I brought up that it looked a lot like Persona and then they said yeah person you're high school kids and you're dealing with a supernatural threat there's like a time limit thing where you go from like time slot to time slot uh you gather party members and it's all centered around a relationship system you can build up your relationship with your party members to make them more effective in battle and but the combat yeah was much like Knights and Tide spaces an isometric turn-based tactical thing but instead of just playing out each move in turn you queue up your actions and then you get to see them all crack off at the same time much like swen I think saying and the way they the way they timed it so all of your actions are done in subsequent terms you have you know action points and you go through them and it's very static and um and you can like go back not happy with how things went so you take back a move cuz it's all like it's not happened yet it's all stuff you're planning to do but in the replay even though they were taking place in um a linear order they would play them in a way that they were overlapping and the combat was like happening in a like a super cinematic way and it felt like an interesting real time combat so it made that replay and you lining all that up super super satisfying which was you know what I think knights in tight spaces is missing at the moment you know that might change in full release um but demon school really did that a lot better so demon School looks like looked fun I'd say from what we saw was a touch overwritten maybe a bit too much dialogue in between the interesting fighty bits but it was just a small chunk of it we were seeing there's a lot of cool ideas in there yeah 100% and the last thing we saw was a new game by shark mob former Ubisoft guys who worked on the division who are now working on their own uh live service e extraction e shooter that they're calling exob born I had to think for a moment cuz I was about to say EXO Forge been saying that all day calling it that all day day yeah I think it's really interesting what they're trying to do so they kept saying they wanted to make it more accessible that's one things that extraction Shooters are not they're they very punishing and they mean a lot quit and there's always got like 900 different menus you have to go through before you can go to your next verow so they want to improve on the menus they want to improve on the accessibility um they wanted to add elements of you know these forces of nature these weather systems that would constantly change the map yeah the traversal for me that they showed me reminded me of the reversal in like a just cause game yeah you could you could use a grappling hook to get yourself into the air and then cancel and switch to paracho and then Glide and then use the wind to carry yourself and the different suits oh the EXO suits that you would have in the game gave different abilities so one of them had the grappling hul one had this like extended jump um one wouldn't be picked up by tornadoes because of its weight so they could use that to their advantage in battle and stuff the tank yeah the tanky character so I'm really interested to see what they do with but it's so early yeah I mean you can tell their former UB on could yeah cuz very when they were showing like going across the sand box I was thinking yep that's a Evol game yeah but they're going for like narrative based missions like uh and some kind of extended uh narrative narrative and multiplayer very rarely make for happy marriage especially linear storytelling that's why I was asking if they were had a vision for single player and they were kind of hedging on that a bit they said you can PL go into the the game by yourself you'll probably get murdered Yeah by Griefers and also forces you into a team you can't just queue by yourself you will always be put in a team and then you can just leave so it's I don't think they're trying to do that single player stuff at all which I'm not too sure of and they they explained like a crafting system of being able to make your weapons and stuff before you go on extractions and I hope that is something that gives that kind of downtime um because the weapons you take from the crafting in game you can lose permanently so we'll see how it pans out I think they is in the right place and I I see what they're trying to do but we'll see if that's executed when they get the game out we'll see we'll see we'll see we'll see well I guess that puts an end to our GDC Voyage of Discovery for another year how did you enjoy your first con for the company um I think it was really interesting it's a lot of it's been well for me making a lot of new friends in the industry meeting people that I've spoken to for years but now actually getting to see in person I think part of it as like I I love going to see all these new games and getting to see all these new ideas but as a Game Dev I also would have liked to have gone to some of the talks and stuff like that so maybe next year that'll be something something we do but next year we'll have to bring on another new employee who's never been here and then we can both be the grizzled [ __ ] veteran to them there we go who will it be we shall see could it be you oh my God no definitely not you you're scum bye everyone bye everyone have a good time this

Channel: Second Wind

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Id: 9JafZaPNhHQ

Length: 31min 8sec (1868 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2024