The slightly incoherent ramblings of an Aussie at GDC 2012 - Part Two news

Too much hand shaking

The beginning of my day was the same as most of the attendees at GDC, sessions and sessions. As I may have noted already most of my time was spent at the Indie Summit, today was no different. The first talk was on failure and how to best plan around or plan not to fail when making a Indie title. They had a handful of speakers like Amir Rao of Supergiant Games (Bastion) who talked about the years worth of development that had been spent on the since removed gardening section of the game. Enemy Airship spoke on how Shadow Physics will never see the light of day (HA punny) and a few other designers as well.

I was going to attend the next talk with a handful of experienced composers who write music for indie games but I ran into some old friends out in the hall from Tripwire Entertainment. We had a fantastic chat about the detailed voice acting component from Red Orchestra 2. If there is ever a cocky Russian in a future patch because of a high D/K ratio you can thank me for the idea.

The next event I listened too was one on video game clones. The developer Vlambeer (Radical Fishing) talks about how they dealt with clones. It has created a lot of discussion based on a few things like how the act of cloning could be dangerous to up and coming indie developers. After that it was a Galcon post-mortem with Phil Hassey, quite entertaining even if his games are not any of my favourites. The main talking points he brought up where that even though he has re-re-re-released Galcon over the years it still is his only main source of income, even though he has other projects.

After that I wondered over to the GDC Play booth where our old friends from Contagion were there in full swing showing up some extended gameplay videos of Contagion and a prop showreel. I was asked to have a session with them for the game but as you are about the find out I quickly ran out of time for anything else.

Love that tumtum!

After that, it was time to sword and board as I was heading to the Paradox show room to see their new game War of the Roses.

The gameplay is quite similar to that of Age of Chivalry and possibly the new version Chivalry. However the combat feels really good due to the the mixture of old and new mixing the mount and blade combat with some modern trippings. I also had the chance to quiz the designers on a few things, first War of the Roses will be 90% MP which was a little disheartening for me personally. There will be dedicated servers day one, there is mounted combat but they were not showing that off just yet, modding will be a featured part of the game with server mods being supported as well.

So far it is looking very awesome, weapons feel heavy and lethal, bows act like a bow should, and the combat is fast. You can (right now) spawn on your team mates after kicking the bucket, or you can wait for a revive (if you have not been stabbed in yo face already). Keep an eye on this one!

I also got to pick up a sweet sword and shield which Scotty promptly stole, packing something like that for international travel was a joy...

Come at me Bro!

It does look awesome though.

One Eleven Hundred Whiskies Please

Day three all things considered was a quiet one, I only had two things I needed to do. The first was to meet up with the lovely Mike Kasprzak who is the current organiser for the Ludum Dare a monthly game dev game that lasts for 24 or 48 hours (depending on your commitment level. We had a long chat about well everything. It sounded something like "oh yes server server server loads on the server server backlog server server video games". The second thing I had to do was watch some horrible video game themed karaoke. Never watch video game themed karaoke.

A final thought: Why is it that American food sizes are larger then everybody else (US Medium = or > AU Large), however when ordering dinner from a nice restaurant they only give you 8 boiled potato balls in spinach? Have some consistency America!