Games Connect Asia Pacific 2018 The Walls We've Built Ourselves

Who's ready to play with fire? In this talk, Damon Reece presents best practices for utilizing procedural generation and modular design to build gameplay content that’s (almost) endlessly reusable, without breaking the bank, boring your players, or making your producer cry.

Intricate puzzle games like Starseed Pilgrim, Sokobond, or A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build utilize a method of musical performance, but synchronize it directly to gameplay. There are a few simple ways to create meaningful player sonic performance that will keep them engaged while learning gameplay mechanics. This session will dive into the creative ways to give the player a performing voice while they are simply just playing the game. There will be examples from games like Guacamelee 2, Shoot Shoot Mega Pack, Soundself, and The Beginner’s Guide, to name a few.

Why are some games easier to navigate than others? How do some games present huge amounts of information without overwhelming the player, all the while creating enjoyable, seamless game experiences... and yet others we uninstall within minutes? And why are good UX Design processes so crucial to every role within game development? Good UX Design manifests itself in two different ways - player facing and developer facing. So how can we use it to solve problems for our players and create clear, intuitive game UI as a result? Once you’ve identified your target audience and their key needs, how do you help your team help your players? As a developer, understanding and working with UX Design means making your team’s processes faster and more efficient, by wireframing, prototyping, and iterating on your core game mechanics. It is a way of aligning your entire team with a unified vision as you work to create your final product. Join me as I go through the differences between UX Research, UX Design and UI Art, and how to implement these into your processes to make your team as efficient as possible... all the while delivering satisfying, engaging and enjoyable gameplay experiences for your players!

God of War is a massive project with a huge development schedule and many complex pieces. However, behind all of this is a core set of design rules that can be applied to designs of all shapes and sizes.
Step through the level design of Thalmur's Frozen Corpse and explore the core design techniques that are used in God of War's pacing, layouts and puzzles.

Fourteen years ago The AbleGamers Charity was the vanguard of game accessibility. In 2011 it published its award-winning Includification in 2011, the first guide for making games accessible. Now, major game companies bought into the need for accessibility, and have created and remixed guidelines regarding what developers must include in their games to reach players with disabilities. We have come a long way, but guidelines, including our own, do something we never intended... they can stifle creativity, and impede out-of-the-box thinking, by focusing only on the features rather than the experiences they deliver. For the last two years, AbleGamers and the University of York have gathered data from players with disabilities from around the world, listened to developers about what they find hard about accessible design, and consolidated knowledge from across our existing guidelines. The result is a new way of doing design thinking about the inclusion of people with disabilities in games. APX is a new approach that gives developers the tools they need to make accessible player experiences while allowing for creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This talk will introduce the ideas of APX, and how it will change the way you design games to include players with disabilities.

Live service has converted launch dates from finish lines into starting lines and with games like The Sims FreePlay running successfully for 7 years from launch, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Even 7 years after launch, some of the decisions we make in development can still limit our choices and impact exactly how fast and hard we need to run in live service or even create impenetrable barriers we must live with. In this session, we will look at design, team make-up, tools and content implications to think about while building a game to help run a healthy live service and dev team for years to come.

How I might describe the talk in a blurb: Unless you’re making a game that only you will play, every game you will ever work on will make more sense to you than it will to the end user. A little copy of you will not ship along with the game to navigate the player around a bug, your players will invariably wish you had created more content no matter how much you produce, and your specific sense of fun is probably applicable to a smaller percentage of the world than you realize. This talk aims to explore how to let criticism and impossible demands fuel your designs, as taught by years of computer roleplaying game development. While most relevant to game designers (as the talk will primarily explore various hits and misses of game design), the talk is intended to be philosophically applicable to developers of any discipline. Even rougher draft that’s intended purely for this application process: This talk is a sort of career-retrospective with a focus on my evolving sense of what my job actually is (vs. what I think it should be/ought to be). Having gone from a junior designer with stupidly out-of-scope ideas to a project director with the power to pulverize hopes and dreams, I’ve come to firmly believe that even if you’re not making ‘games as a service,’ you are a servant to the player. You have your job because your judgment and tastes are maybe a little better than that of the average gamer, but to think your imagination is superior (or to consider yourself immune to feedback) is how forgettable games are made. I mostly envision this talk as heavy on RPG systems/narrative design, with the binding theme being lessons of temperament that held true across multiple projects, teams, and roles. I’d go through post-mortems tidbits of various titles I’ve worked on in the last decade or so, with a focus on times where our ability to deliver a fun experience came by way of balancing that which we personally like and that which is best for game and the player.

When all you have at your disposal is a small team of developers; making certain styles of games (such as RPGs) can take a toll on your budget, time and sanity. How do you push gameplay quality without cratering your project scope or riddling your game with bugs?

Marko will share lessons learned from creating RPG games in Unity; how leveraging data validation, tools and other technology helped speed up iteration times on gameplay and design. Specific examples and usage that improved quality and reduced testing load will be shown; from the currently in development Adventure RPG 'Ravencall'. This talk will also touch upon gameplay programming tips borne from the multidisciplinary mixture of programming and game design.

Though these techniques come from the experiences of working in small teams they still apply to developers working in larger teams. Never again should a spelling error in your configuration data cripple your gameplay, nor should a data heavy game style seem out of your reach; simply because of your team size.

For many games, especially games that involve physics and/or probability, it can be relatively trivial to make a clever AI that can beat a human player. The real challenge is designing an AI that feels challenging but can be beaten, creating an experience for the player where they feel that their skill and adaptability has triumphed over a worthy enemy. This non-technical talk covers ways to approach the challenge of designing good AIs in both action titles and sports games – not just how to make them seem clever, but knowing when to stop making them cleverer!

As designers we often look to our own medium for inspiration, but perhaps we can look else where for diverse and clever problem solving from other practices. What can VR learn from Spanish theatre makers in Barcelona? Could the problems of design, way finding and narrative structures be tackled with ideas from immersive works of art? What responsibility do we have as designers of agency and how might Boal’s theories of audience engagement help? What do Shakespeare’s cod pieces have to do with character design? In this session we will be looking at how theatre’s long history of immersion, engagement and indeed design might aid the development of the games we love to make. By analysing and researching the hundreds of years of practice we can hope to learn from theatre’s mistakes and pitfalls. Going from ancient Greek to recent immersive developments in Europe and the U.S, we will look at what has made experiences for theatre goers transforming and how we can translate it to a digital medium. Finally the discussion will end on where the boundaries are between the two medium, and see how blurry it can get. What are the avenues that we as creators can hybrid our works to keep experimenting and pushing our medium to new and exciting directions? Let’s find out.

Mature themes such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sexual Trauma, Disordered Eating and Mental Illness are rarely explored in game narratives.

This talk aims to educate the audience on the importance of creating serious games, and how to handle games that explore sensitive subject matter.

To do this, Jean Leggett and Gabriella Lowgren will be speaking about the games they have worked on that deal in mature themes. Jean Leggett will cover the design of Charlaine Harris’ "Shakespeare's Landlord," a novel-to-game adaptation and how the development team designed narrative choices, events and characters to mindfully explore trauma, PTSD and character progression within the construct of a 2D mystery adventure game. While Gabriella Lowgren will be discussing Shrinking Pains, a free semi-autobiographical visual novel, and how the game was designed to foster further empathy and understanding for sufferers of anxiety and eating disorders.

This session will explain the existing features of Unreal Engine we used, and the enhancements we made to Unreal Engine in order to bring the full Fortnite Battle Royale game experience to both iOS and Android. It will discuss the challenges we faced bringing the full PC and console game experience to mobile platforms and how we used and enhanced Unreal Engine's scalability systems to address these issues. It will also focus on the unique challenges posed by the Android ecosystem such as a diverse set of system software and graphics driver versions, and a wide range of memory capacity and performance capabilities across popular mobile devices, and the engineering solutions we used to overcome these limitations.

Mike has been making Dead Static Drive alone for quite a long time, but even though it feels like it's been forever, he's been able to make a hand-crafted game that's much larger than many one-man teams can make. This talk will cover how he's used procedural tools and pipelines to ease the burden of building stuff.

Our brains can’t help but construct stories from their experiences. But how big can the gaps between pieces of information be for someone to fail to make an unconscious connection? These information gaps are integral to constructing a well-refined story, but are particularly important for game storytelling. Knowing how to utilize the gaps in information is vital for understanding how to set up an environmental story with the fewest assets, the amount of exposition to provide at the start of a game, or how much needs to be said during an expensive cutscene. Saf will break down how players interact with given information and how to use information gaps within the context of game storytelling. This talk will navigate the spaces between narrative data points, exploring how little information a game can give before the narrative falls apart and how developers can stretch the gaps between information to encourage deeper interaction with their players.

There's a lot of fear and mystery around asking the wrong questions. Especially when it comes to transgender issues, both in video games, and in real life.

How do you ask for someones pronouns? What's the difference between a non-binary person, and a genderqueer person? How do I write transgender characters into my game, without being disrespectful? How can I make my workplace more transgender inclusive?

Sav Ferguson, Charlie Cassidy, Snow McNally, Fae Daunt and Damon Reece assemble as a panel of gender diverse games developers, programmers, and writers to answer the questions you've always wanted to ask, but weren't sure how to phrase.

Come sit down, and have a chat with us.

Submit your questions here:

The key to creating meaningful player interaction is getting the player emotionally invested in your game and keeping them engaged throughout the playing experience. This talk is about how to induce this engagement by using known UX lessons, dramatic composition in narrative design and variation in the core mechanics of your game, making them deep rather than complex.

Learn how to cleverly focus on strengths of the limitations within your core game mechanics, creating immersion from the moment the player opens the game, designing an easily accessible tutorial, establishing and breaking core mechanics, utilizing the structure of your narrative design and supporting it through your level design as well as using engaging writing and powerful sound design to create memorable gaming moments for your players.

Using the award-winning privacy invasion thriller Orwell as a case study, Mel Taylor talks about game design lessons from working on the development of one of the most successful text-based indie games of the last years. Orwell explores contemporary themes of security, privacy, and our interpretation of online information. It has received critical acclaim from players and media worldwide.

More and more games are pushing for meaningful narrative content, but what does that actually mean and what sort of systems do you need to build to support it? Blair Leggett (One More Story Games) and Anna Tito (Hipster Whale) talk through the processes of developing the technology to support narrative games. They will introduce you to the conceptual frameworks they have used, as well as dig deeply into some of the critical systems that underpin them such as localization, approaches to episodic content and testing. Coming from two very different development focuses Blair and Anna will compare and contrast their different approaches while sharing the good, the bad, the ugly and the gotchas behind building a narrative system. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion about possible future narrative creation technologies.

Players of EVE Online submitted more than 100 million analyses of lightcurves of distant stars to help finding new exoplanets, making Project Discovery one of the most successful citizen science projects ever. Come and hear about how game developers and designers can participate in advancing science, and what are the specific challenges that we face when embracing real life content in our games.