GDC Trip Day 6: Thursday March 8th

On Thursday I attended a Saint's Row: The Third postmortem given by the game's design director. He discussed how it was really difficult for them to capture the game's tone, but eventually they went with "over the top". He also showed some pre visualizations that really helped the team understand cutscenes/missions.



Later in the day I attended a Microtalk. In a Microtalk several speakers have a limited time to cover about 20 slides about a certain theme. This year's theme was "time". Not everyone stuck to the theme, but everyone had something really interesting to say.



Cliff Bleszinski discussed how he would break into the industry if he was 17 again.

Afterwards I headed to the IGF Pavilion again and checked out some more games. I talked to Ty Taylor (programmer/designer of The Bridge) about his game and student projects in general.

This is a shot of someone playing a Co-op game called "The Way". It won the IGF Student award. 2 players cooperate to get through deadly obstacles but can only communicate through gestures. The big twist is that each player knows how to get the other player through a puzzle/obstacle. So each player using hand gestures like pointing to make sure the other player runs through obstacles at the right time.




Then I attended a presentation by John Sharp (art historian/game designer) where he described how abstraction can be used in games and listed some games that are already using abstraction. He showed that abstraction in games should be used through the player's actions and not through symbols/visuals. I found his talk really interesting.