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Game Dev Talks/Lectures

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I think I saw the first one of those sometime last year, when you linked them in the UE4 thread, and it never even occurred to me to consider that anybody might want to edit geometry inside a level editor, I just sort of took it as read that static meshes were something you did in max/maya/blender and then imported into the editor.  So that was a new and interesting concept for me, even though I suppose it ought to have been obvious.

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I actually wish Rami would've not said "Hey, maybe you WILL win the lottery!" at the end. I thought the lecture could've stood well on it's own without a cherry on top.

Nice talk though!

 

On that topic, I encourage everyone to check out ctrl500.com. It started as a site where you submit a helpful anecdote from development experience in 500 words or less. There's some Mass Effect stuff, some Last of Us articles, Hotline Miami, and a couple from me! :o

 

Right now it's full of Control Conference lecture videos, which is fair, because they're good too.

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Talks from this last Full Indie are starting to trickle out, including this very funny one on Desert Golfing by all-around-good-dude Justin Smith

 

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Yeah that one was great, another one I recently watched was one by Daniel Cook on narrative games

 

 

Did you see Dan Cook talk about Road Not Taken during Beat the Dev: http://www.twitch.tv/beatthedev/v/27715286

 

It was kind of a downer. Like as he was playing he realized none of the game made much sense. I feel like he put too much emphasis on trying to get game design principles to tell this story and nobody got it and it was too hard to play. 

Really love the Spryfox guys but sometimes I feel they overthink things

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Did you see Dan Cook talk about Road Not Taken during Beat the Dev: http://www.twitch.tv/beatthedev/v/27715286

 

It was kind of a downer. Like as he was playing he realized none of the game made much sense. I feel like he put too much emphasis on trying to get game design principles to tell this story and nobody got it and it was too hard to play. 

Really love the Spryfox guys but sometimes I feel they overthink things

 

Oh I haven't, I'm going to watch/listen to it now but darn thanks for warning me about downer aspect, those things gets me super bad so it's good that I can steel myself for the possible sadness.

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Ok I know this is going to be a hard sell but stick with me...

 

This is one of the most eye opening, enlightening talks I have ever watched. It is all about how to develop games for casual gamers. What is cool is it treats those players (mostly women) with respect and complexity. You see the motivations and what drives casual gamers. What you realize is that they are not just mindless people who buy whatever, they are really discerning, spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on games. Also they really keep an eye out for games with the best graphics. It is a real interesting look at the other side. 

 

Most interesting fact is how much whether or not spiders are in the game affect its popularity. I though it was so funny I browsed the big fish forums and there are whole threads dedicated to which games do or do not have spiders. Also look at app-store reviews of hidden object games with spiders in them - they instantly get 1 star reviews with people complaining about them.

 

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That bit on spider sold me on watching that video thoroughly.  And I don't mean ironically, I mean strong influences like that which are not that obvious are always so fascinating to hear about and I never thought of spiders adversely affecting sales but to hear that it does is like wow, fascinating!

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That bit on spider sold me on watching that video thoroughly.  And I don't mean ironically, I mean strong influences like that which are not that obvious are always so fascinating to hear about and I never thought of spiders adversely affecting sales but to hear that it does is like wow, fascinating!

 

Arachnophobia is really interesting in gaming. That ios game Spider has a non-spider mode funny enough. I have also read of skyrim mods that swap out all spider models. 

If you are a game dev, don't add spiders.

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This is SUCH a cool thread, especially that 80 Days talk. Many others have been bookmarked for later. 
 
A talk I found last night that I really enjoyed, was Jake Elliott's talk about text in real time situations. It's quite specific, but it's certainly food for thought. Also if you're a Kentucky Route Zero fan it's a nice look behind the curtain[/size]

 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fBHq56hB3BU

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GDC Vault stuff is up, here's the link to all the free ones: http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-16

From those, I highly recommend Trent Kusters' Armello post-mortem (marketing focused): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023416/-The-Armello-Postmortem-A

and Piotr Iwanecki's talk on SUPERHOT (design-y): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023483/Game-Design-and-Mind-Control

I don't know that it was useful, but Tim Rogers' talk on why Videoball is the worlds greatest sport was very entertaining http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023454/video games-Are-Better-Than-Sports

And Jakes talk on building had some good specific implementation info for doing Unity terrains and building an open world game http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023556/Level-Design-Workshop-Building-Firewatch

The Diablo and Ms Pac Man post mortems were supposed to be good too, but I didn't see them.

Some other good ones that aren't free I don't think are Meg Jayanth's (80 Days) narrative summit talk (she also gave a main conf one that I didn't see) and the Darkest Dungeon post mortem.

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Thank you! I've been checking back at the GDC site waiting for stuff to go up.

 

Wow,I was excited about seeing a talk on action games from Platinum, but theirs is very boring. I will definitely check out the ones that you linked instead!

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Great thread, I bookmarked quite a few talks for later viewing.

 

I recommend the NYU Game Center talks. Both their lecture series and their Practice conference include some gold nuggets:


https://vimeo.com/nyugamecenter/videos/page:1/sort:date

 

If anyone here plays Netrunner, Lukas Litzsinger, the designer talked about the experience of re-designing an existing game. https://vimeo.com/125164271

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I'm not a big fan of Extra Credits' video style, but wow this introduction to posing and animation is a great video. I really appreciate the work of breaking it all down.

 

 

Actually, for those of you looking for something a bit more advanced, This Skull Girls animation talk from GDC was really really good:

 

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Here's a GDC talk about the enemy AI in Sunset Overdrive (You'll remember which game that is when ya see it)

 

The game is all about fast traversal, jumping, grinding, zooming around. So it's a challenge to come up with satisfying enemies in an open space that fight intelligently.

 

If you're a fan of Sunset Overdrive, you might be even more interested in this talk that's basically about what the game ALMOST was:

It was in-fact almost a much more boring game! This was during the back-half of Insomniac's FUZE development... just in-case that would add any context to Insomniac starting up work on a surprisingly boring game.

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Thanks, @slime for posting this in the Slack.
I just realized I had seen all of the excellent videos recommended in this thread, and sure enough here comes another truck-load. 

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Talks from PRACTICE 2016 just went up, here're a few I recommend.

 

Robin Hunicke talking about building her company:

 

Dain Saint talking about UI/UX:

 

Ken Perlin talking about the future of AR/VR:

 

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