GDC 2010 in San Francisco, CA

So last week I was convinced to go to yet another GDC. We took a 13 hour long road trip from here to California. Ugh, I had forgotten to print out my business cards, bring my portfolio, and print out some resumes. We got to San Francisco early; we arrived Monday. I was hoping that would be enough time to get some business cards from Fedex/Kinkos. Unfortunately they wanted 153$ for 250 cards. :-( So I went to the copy print place, Copymat, a few buildings away and they said they would do it for 75$. They were nice people and they called us when our cards were done. They turned out really well! Fisherman's Wharf was really nice besides the cold strong winds.

This was my 3rd time visiting San Francisco for GDC. I believe I enjoyed every GDC I've been to. However, I do wish I had talked to a lot more people this year.
I did get to tell a few people about 1Trick Star. John from Steam seemed pretty interested so hopefully we can get the game up there. We also told the people from Sixense about our little indie game company and they were thrilled. They want us to start developing a game for their new controller. Nick and Parish are really pumped and have been arguing over the story lately. I think I might read some Gamasutra.com articles to find some good advice on setting a length for a game before it's made. I'm hoping I can convince Nick(director) and Parish(lead programmer) not to plan too much and get us in over our heads. After all, the smaller the studio the less hectic it will be with communication between members, but that also means that's less people to work on assets and code. So I'm hoping they don't get too carried away, but I'm ready to give them some reality checks.

There's a lot of excitement for the new game, but no worries 1Trick Star is going to get finished.

Level Designing for a Game You Play With One Button

I needed this brainstorm while was working on One Trick Star:

So the arena is space themed and the first one I'm making is oval shaped. I honestly am very new with the Unreal Dev Kit. So the boundaries of the arena is a cool particle effect I made that looks like an asteroid field. However, I can't get the particles into a perfect circle orbit so for the sake of looks I'm going to have the arena the same shape as the particle system. I'm hoping the LOD function of particle systems will let the game play at perfect FPS. That's why I didn't think we should have hundreds of static meshes flying around the level.

I'm sitting here with my pencil, graph paper, and Nick's fancy ruler. I'm almost shocked about how linear this game looks on paper. Our game play could be simplified into a flow chart...
Such a simple game play mechanic. Will it be fun? Can we make it fun and non linear for a player limited to 2 actions: "Change Color" and "Nudge". So do I design the pick ups in the level first or do I plot the barriers first?.. If I design the pick ups placement first then I can plot down different solutions. But if I place the barriers first then I put a pick up were multiple paths cross.