Vilya's Workblog: Expo

Yesterday, today and tomorrow is a very busy time for us Pixel Ferrets! It's time for the annual Gotland Game Conference, where we get to go to our old campus and judge the games the students made this year.

This year things are a little different: there are new award categories and a whole new voting system, which means as opposed to previous years we're expected to play all of the games this time! We've always tried to play as many games as possible, but this year it's for real. Yesterday we got split into groups in order to listen to their presentations (which we are to judge as well), then we had the rest of the day until way into the evening to play their games.

Today it continues with another full day of game testing (there are 34 games in total, so as you can imagine playing all of them takes a lot of time)! In the evening we will meet up with the other judges and nominate the games we see fit to win each award. Then we have one final day tomorrow to play any remaining games (especially the ones nominated by the other jurors) before we have to decide on a final winning lineup. At about 19:00 there will be a fancy award ceremony with an after party. Whew!

As you might understand there won't be a lot of work on Grindea during these days - there simply isn't enough time in the day - but I've prepared blog posts for the remainder of the week and will get back to work on Thursday as usual. In the meanwhile, enjoy these pictures, courtesy of Gotland Game Conference's Facebook page!

This week is a very special week, seeing as it's the annual GGC week!

GGC is short for Gotland Game Conference, which is basically a game expo where the students at the game design education showcase their game and a bunch of people from the industry is invited as judges to give feedback and select which ones did the best. It all culminates in an award ceremony with an after-party where we all get a chance to hang out together and share experiences with other game developers. So basically, it's great!

This year GGC runs from Sunday to Tuesday, so as I'm writing this post we've already finished Sunday's work, and are about to head out to do some game testing this evening (we're likely already there once this post goes live).

So yesterday we got to watch a ton of presentations (pretty much 5-10 minute pitches) for each game we're responsible for. Me and Fred got to watch presentations made by the second year students this year, and Teddy was sent out to watch the third years. While those are the games we have a main responsibility to judge and provide feedback for, we're encouraged to play all the games.

On Thursday, once everything has settled down and the winners have been chosen, I'll write a wrap-up post about the event as a whole and the games we liked the most. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be regular posts, though! We'll be able to squeeze in a bit of work before and after we go to the event every day, so hopefully things won't get too disrupted.

When we're not at GGC judging games and hanging out with fellow game developers, this week will be all about some last minute housing polish, finishing up the remaining details and the graphics needed for them! In fact, we hope to be able to patch once we're done at GGC, so sometime during Wednesday.

Today was the last day of GGC, which basically means the scores we gave the games over these days are put together and prizes are awarded accordingly. The weather has been absolutely amazing these few days, so it's been nice to get out a bit from the office, even if we all really long to get back to work properly!

I mean, look at these pictures I took along the harbor and beach next to the event area:

Anyway! The award ceremony was really cool as usual. The jokes delivered by the people presenting the awards this year were hilarious and a lot of really promising game concepts got awards! One of my personal favorites were Cryptogram, which won best 1st year project:

Cryptogram is a game where you're stuck in a series of room, and the only way forward is through a hidden door opened by pulling a book in a bookshelf. In order to know which book to pull, you need to follow the instructions in a mysterious diary, where you first must understand which room you're in based on the author's descriptions, and then you need to solve a riddle or puzzle in order to know which book(s) to pull in that specific room.

The game had such a cool H.P. Lovecraft vibe, with a monster slowly crawling closer towards your room, and if you're not solving the puzzle quickly enough, it'll catch you for sure! The puzzles/riddles were cool and you had to know a little bit of literature to understand which book to pull, which was a huge bonus as well! Very well deserved win.

The winner of best of show (also known as the PWNAGE award), as well as several other awards, was a second year project called Anchored, which I unfortunately never had a chance to play:

There's a trailer for the game here, in case you're interested:

I'd definitely like to try it out if I get a chance later, unfortunately things were just a bit too hectic during the exhibition since we decided to stay home and work yesterday!

After the award ceremony there was a party above the event area, which was a lot of fun and a nice chance to just relax and hang out with people:

After a couple weeks of worrying about the cat it definitely felt good (though again, I'm really hoping we can have a few regular weeks now, where we can actually focus on work 100%)

You know what I, and, I suspect, Teddy and Fred had forgotten when we set out this work week? That this weekend was Gotland Game Conference, and we were invited to be judges (which has kind of become a yearly tradition: 2015 - Day 1, 2015 - Day 2, 2015 - Day 3).

While it kind of sucks to have been gone for almost two weeks, and all I really want is to get back to working properly, we probably wouldn't be where we are without the GAME department of our old school (plus hanging out with other devs talking about how to make the best game is of course a lot of fun), so backing out would have felt pretty lame!

And so, we spent this Saturday looking at presentations and trying to games out!

Yesterday we were supposed to meet up with Humble in Stockholm, but because Link the cat is still sick and needs medication throughout the day, we ended up not being able to go. It would have been a lot of fun, but it's so important Link gets his medicine now so he can make a full recovery :(

So, instead of combining business with fun in Stockholm, I spent most of the day at home working (while I would have loved to attend the outings for the judges at GGC, my conscience simply wouldn't let me stay away from work any longer), but tonight I'm going back to play any remaining games I might have missed and watch as the winners get announced, so that's gonna be fun at least!

The final day of Gotland Game Conference! This day we went down to play some more games - because why not - before heading to have dinner with the other judges and preparing for the Awards ceremony and party (which lasted pretty much all night - thank god we only do these things once a year or so ;)).

Drinking some champagne at the pre-awards VIP mingle.. :o)

There isn't all that much to say about today, other than that I got to talk to so many amazing people! I love attending GGC because you get to meet a lot of people that are much like you - we all love games, developing their different aspects and sharing knowledge and experiences in doing so. After mainly being locked inside our apartment developing day and night, just us three, it's really refreshing to get out and meet some real people in the industry, as well as students about to join us.

Plus, as a gamedev, you can't really play too many games, right? Gotta keep in touch with that side too!

I think that's all for this year's GGC! It's been an honor to be invited for the third year in a row - I'd do it again anytime! :)

BTW, for those that are curious, here's a showreel with all the games participating in this year's GGC:

And here's a list of the winners:

Best First Year Project

Frog Climbers

Best Second Year Project

Clouds Below

Best Graduate Project

Agency

Best Presentation

Tamarrion

The Cha-Ching! Award

Summit Chasers

The Almedalen Library Award

Colors of the Wind

Alumnus of the Year

Rikard Jaksch

The Innovation Award

Workspace Warfare

The Tokyo University of Technology – School of Media Science Dean’s Award

Clouds Below

Students’ Choice Award

PvGvP

The Pwnage Award (Best of Show)

Frog Climbers

Yesterday we continued to play games at GGC! This time around, the public was welcome to attend the showfloor, meaning there were a lot more people there. I finished playing the second year games, and managed to play a bunch of others as well, since we had a bit of extra time!

This time around, I was the most impressed by a racing game called Twin Shift, which combines the basics of a racing game with a shifting mechanic resembling the one in VVVVVV:

Basically, it's like any other racing game, but there's also a track above your which you can shift to. Sometimes the track you're on will end abruptly, meaning you have to shift to avoid crashing and losing valuable time, and sometimes the track above/beneath you will take you through a different route than the one you're currently on. While I don't normally enjoy a lot of racing games, this felt intriguing since it had such a cool, yet simple, mechanic that at least I haven't seen before in racing-type games.

In general, I feel like the best games on exhibitions like these, where the contestant only have 8-10 weeks to build their game, are the ones that use very basic core mechanics, polish them really well and expand from that center rather than the ones that try to do too many things at once. A lot of the time you can tell that someone had this huge vision of a game where you could do a bazíllion different things, but trying to implement all those aspects into a vertical slice in such a short time is near impossible and typically leaves you with a buggy, unpolished shadow of your original vision.

Learning to understand what your core is and keeping it simple instead of adding unnecessary features is a really important aspect of game development, regardless of whether your project is a 10-week expo project or the long-term project of your dreams. It's something we struggle with as well - sometimes we have to sit down and ask ourselves if what we want to add really serves to improve the game or if it's just another "wouldn't it be cool"-idea that will take a lot of development time without increasing the value of the game. While it's cool to have a ton of features, you have to finish the game as well, and the content you do implement has to feel polished and like it belongs in the game.

Anyway! After playing the games we were invited on a walk through the city along with the rest of the judges. We got to visit some of the companies in Visby and tried some of their wares (cheese, beer and wine) before going back to the school where we had dinner consisting of some of the different specialties found here in Gotland.

All in all, a great day!

This week will look a bit different as me and my fellow Pixel Ferrets have been invited to Gotland Game Conference, where we'll serve as part of the jury, trying out a bunch of games and giving feedback (and scores)!

The jury consists of a bunch of interesting people from different parts of the game design industry, and the whole list of people can be seen here; needless to say I'm very excited to be part of this gang :)

Today (Sunday) was the first, inofficial, day of the conference, where the jury meet up for the first time and listen to a bunch of presentations held by the students about the games they've been making. Listening to the presentations is actually part of our duty as jurors, and we have to grade each presentation based on how good we thought it was.

The jury meeting up for some expo information and a light lunch
before starting the hard work!

I'm judging the Second Year students, and I have to say, they were really good! The presentations were all very clear, people spoke great English (they do presentations in English since not all of the jurors or teachers are native Swedes), and the games felt, for the most part, well thought through.

Once the presentations were done, we got to experience the expo floor for a bunch of hours on our own along with the students; tomorrow the public is allowed in so it'll be a lot more cramped. Unfortunately, I had to leave the expo area quite early today, since I've been feeling a cold coming on (got a horribly sore throat), and it got much worse towards the evening. Therefore I couldn't play as many games as I wanted today, but thankfully there are two more days and hopefully I'll feel better after some rest and a good night's sleep.

Anyway, of the games I did play today, some stood out quite a bit! One of those were Naar, a middle-eastern inspired game where you play as a guy who looks a bit like Super Mario in an oversized turban:

Naar manages to capture the spirit of a world that, at least to me, feels very unique: the theme is middle-eastern, kind of Arabian nights-styled, where your main character is on a mission to fight an army of djinns. The gameplay allows you to cast a variety of different spells, which can be combined in different ways, creating even more powerful attacks, and you gain new abilities by killing certain monsters.

While the mechanics may need some polishing, I loved the world and the premise of the whole thing. The 3D-graphics were among the best I've seen this school produce as well, with wonderful textures and a sense of everything fitting together really well.

Another game that showed great promise was Scrap Pirates, a 2D co-op puzzle-ish game where you and a friend take on the role of two pirates looting abandoned ships:

The 2D art of this game really appealed to me, and the mechanics were pretty cool too! Basically you have two different energy fields, one blue and one red, which works kind of like magnetic auras: depending on what color aura other things (or your friend) have, you'll either pull things towards you or push them away. For instance, if your friend activates the red aura, and you activate the blue aura, you will cling to each other, something that's very useful in certain parts of the puzzles. If you both activate the same color aura, however, you'll bounce off each other instead, which allows to reach new places.

My biggest gripe with this game was that the only way of playing was through co-op, making it an incredibly hard sell. I, at least, wouldn't want to buy a game where I have to have someone else interested in playing with me. While the auras definitely work the best in co-op, there were plenty of ways in which they were interesting in solo play as well, so hopefully they consider adding single player levels in the future!

That's all for today! Sadly no Secrets of Grindea updates, but later this week things should go back to normal :)

As you might have heard, we'll be exhibiting Secrets of Grindea over at Dreamhack Winter this weekend. Well, when I say we, it's not really true: Fred will be there representing, along with one of his brothers. Teddy and I will stay at home to keep working: we really want to finish the game sometime after all... :)

Anyway! Going to an expo such as this needs a fair bit of preparations. For the last couple of expos we've been to, we've used a special build of the game, which only allows you to play until the end of the trials (basically where the demo ends, if you have tried it). That's not the only thing that's special with the build though!

In our expo build, characters aren't saved. We added this feature because we faced an issue where people didn't dare delete an old character when all slots were filled, but started playing on one that already existed instead. That, of course, meant that they had no idea what they were doing, as they jumped straight into the action without even knowing which buttons to use! It also meant we had to spend a lot of time deleting characters so there always would be free slots open..

The expo build also resets back to the main menu if no key is being pressed for a while. We added this since a lot of people, once they're done, simply get up and leave, instead of going back to the main menu first - again confusing people wanting to try the game, who then jump straight into where someone else left off.

This time around we've added another feature, addressing a problem we've been having with the game at expo's ever since the beginning. You see, when someone plays the game, people tend to get really interested, looking over their shoulder to see what the game looks like. If they like what they see, they usually end up trying it themselves. However, when nobody is playing, all you see is a main menu and a bunch of clouds. That doesn't exactly let you know what kind of game it is, and it leaves people uninterested or too intimidated to try it out.

So basically: when someone is already playing, people get interested and want to play, creating a queue. If nobody is playing, it's kinda hard to get the ball rolling in the first place.

Previously we've solved this by having someone we know play the game until someone else comes along, but it's not always a viable solution and can feel pretty weird for those times when we only have 2 computers available - you're basically hogging 50% of the space for your own game, and a lot of people want to play in pairs.

This time around, if nobody touches the game for a minute or so, video footage featuring in-game battles will automatically start playing with the text 'press any key' fading in and out on top of it. Our hope is that this will allow people to see what kind of game it is, and hopefully grab their interest so we don't have to deal with either an overcrowded booth or no crowd at all!

Wish us luck! ..and if you're attending Dreamhack Winter - go say hi to Fred for me :D

Day 2 of Dreamhack Stockholm (Saturday) started a little bit earlier. The expo opened to the public at 10 am, so we went up to catch breakfast an hour or so before that.

As expected, there were a lot more people attending the expo this day. There were a lot of different games being played on the main stage and in the expo area at once, and I'm pretty sure people in general were the most excited about attending the SC2 finals later in the evening, so out of the two days, Saturday definitely had more exciting things going on.

Anyway, since there were much more people walking around the expo, it also meant a lot more people came to play Secrets of Grindea! We got to meet some really cool people, both new players and people who played it before. Below is a couple of photos I took of people playing the game (though I caught one just before a loading screen, so it looks all black! :D):

Since we don't like hanging by the booth all three at once (kind of intimidating with 3 people managing a 2-seat booth), we took turns going around the expo and watching the different events. The Street Fighter tournament was being played out right next to our booth, so we had lots of opportunities to watch that, but we also managed to catch a bunch of SC2 matches before they moved on the the main stage.

Street Fighter tournament in action, right next to our booth!

The expo area closed at 20 (8pm), just as the SC2 semi-finals started on the main stage. We quickly packed everything and carried it out to the car in hopes of being done in time to watch the final match. Turns out we managed to catch the last semi-final as well (thank you, delays!), so we got to watch Solar dominate both CJ herO and SK-T soO to end our Dreamhack Stockholm experience!

Solar playing against herO in the last semi-finals!

Solar accepting his prizes after winning against soO

After the prize ceremony there was a Twitch-hosted after party at Clarion Hotel, which we went to after much deliberation (it was really late and we had to get up super early in the morning to catch the bus home). It ended up definitely being worth it, as we got to meet a lot of awesome people, Solar and soO among others. I also got to talk to Rachel and Sue, which totally made my day (or week, or year)! I think they do a totally amazing job, and I'll probably remember this night for the rest of my life with equal shares of joy and embarrassment.

I think I'll spare you the details of the Sunday, in which we spent like 5 hours travelling back home, only 3 hours after coming home from said party... ;)

Anyway, to sum it up: Dreamhack Stockholm was a great experience for us, both professionally with the game but also when it comes to entertainment. I'd definitely do it all over again!

So this weekend we went to Dreamhack Stockholm! Let me tell you a bit about that and how we went about doing things while being there!

Day 0: Thursday

We left for Stockholm on Thursday. Since we live on a silly island off the Swedish coast, it takes us 3 hours by boat to actually get to the mainland, then another hour or so to get to Stockholm from there. First thing we did was go to the expo area to unload the car and start setting things up. It's really cool to see expo areas before everything's in place, cause it's totally amazing how such huge and empty rooms can turn into loads of awesomeness after just a few hours!

Below is a bunch of pictures I took while we set everything up in our area of the booth:

As you can see it kind of starts off like a mess! But in the end, everything tends to come together. What we do this first day is that we put everything where it's supposed to be, test-run the game on all computers and make sure everything is working just fine. Basically, we don't want to do any last-minute additions or changes or anything to the booth in the morning - ideal case is just that we press the on button and everything runs fine.

We got to the expo area around 20 (8pm) in the evening, and probably left around midnight. It's kind of crazy that it takes that long to just set up a few tables and computers, but then again there's a lot of small details like moving things around to fit perfectly, finding the cables in the different boxes (we shared equipment box with another game to make things more confusing as well), and when sharing expo space with other projects, make sure everyone is happy about the layout and things like that.

Once we were done we went to our hotel room and got a short night of sleep; breakfast was served around 9:30 and just a short while after we had to leave for the expo area again!

Day 1: Friday

The Street Fighter area, before they got there!

The expo opened to the public at 12 am and was scheduled to close around 22 (10 pm). Since we were there ahead of everyone else we got to walk around and take a look at everything. Apparently, the pools for the esport games were played in the expo area, and our booth was just next to where they were going to play Street Fighter, so we got to see a lot of real time action while managing our booth!

Both the Starcraft 2 pools and Hearthstone pools were going strong all day (and way into the night, apparently) in the expo area, but on the main stage there was only CS:GO for today. What that meant for us was that most of the people attending on Friday were people who loved CS:GO, since anyone else would save their money for the SC2, Hearthstone, Street Fighter and WoW finals on Saturday (jeez, that planning)!

In other words, the expo area was kind of slow and with not a lot of people walking around. That, on the other hand, meant that we could take more time to walk around and enjoy the expo before all the other people would arrive the day after.

A very blurry Fred by the Hearthstone tables!

The expo as seen from above, on one of the areas where the SC2 groupstage matches were played out

The main stage being prepared for CS:GO, a couple of hours before the actual event

A couple of people playing Grindea by our booth!

The CS:GO event getting started!

After the expo closed (and let me tell you, it did not really close at 22, the Hearthstone group stage apparently went on to 5 am or so, tho we didn't stay that long), we went back to the hotel room (pretty exhausted from standing all day!) and watched one of the League of Legends world group stage matches that we had missed during the day. What better way to end a day of esports and gaming with more esports and gaming, right?

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