Once again, I headed down to Raleigh, North Carolina to attend the East Coast Game Conference, or ECGC, as it’s more commonly known. The conference took place on Wednesday, April 23 and Thursday, April 24, and was well-attended by academics, students, and professionals, and filled with panels that were informative and exciting. There were some different tracks this year, a larger expo floor, and some additional exciting events surrounding the conference itself.
The event started off informally the night before on Tuesday, April 22 at Tir Na Nog with an ECGC/IGDA party. After being on a train for eight hours, I wasn’t as social as I usually am. Fortunately, the Raleigh IGDA chapter is full of friendly, outgoing people, who came over to me and made sure to introduce themselves. They made me feel right at home, and before I knew it, I was networking and having a great time. It was definitely a foreshadowing of the events to come.
On Wednesday, I started the day off early by checking out one of the new tracks, Unreal Engine 4 for Everyone. The very first talk was called “Unreal Engine 4 for Everyone – What Does that Mean?” It included a brief overview of the new engine by Andy Hess, the Epic Games Evangelist, who then turned the floor over to Zak Parrish, the Developer Relations Technical Artist. Epic Games might as well just call Parrish “a wizard,” because his abilities in Unreal Engine 4 are magical. He showed off the engine’s new tools smoothly and assuredly, as though he’d gone through them in front of a crowd of strangers hundreds of times (which he probably has). He gave us a quick tutorial of everything, from redocking panels (“Good for double monitors”) to the content examples project, which you can download as soon as you get the engine. There are even games within the engine that teach you how to make games – very meta!
From there, I went to the “Narrative Design and Player Agency Are Friends” talk by Heather Albano, which was part of the Narrative track. Albano, a freelance writer who is the co-author of several award-winning text adventures (Choice of Broadsides, Choice of Zombies, and the Affairs of the Court trilogy), spoke eloquently about emergent narrative, railroading the player, and that tricky sweet spot writers try to achieve of writing a coherent story and hitting the necessary story beats while still making the game fun for players. She pointed out that you can use the same building blocks and get a totally different experience, citing the fact that “Much Ado About Nothing is the upbeat version of Romeo and Juliet.” Albano’s talk was inspirational, and her brilliant suggestions (such as “write three or four arcs – not one or 20!” and the “stacked bush concept,” in which you have multiple branches from a few sources that all come back to one choice) were “a-ha!” moments for me.
The Ken Rolston keynote was amazing as well. Rolston, Director of Design at Turbine/Warner Bros., had a lot to say about storytelling, with an emphasis on the relationship you want to have with your players. The lead designer on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind gave a lot of professional advice about how to pitch ideas, including the continuity of vision, how to summarize and outline the pitch itself, and to make sure to share the process of development with everyone in your company, not just your own team. “Creativity requires some crazy,” he told us, encouraging us to “let out our inner children.” He also said that it’s OK – and fun! – to fail, which can be a difficult thing for many professionals under stress to admit. All in all, he shared his wisdom with us, and his carefree attitude was infectious.
The last talk of Wednesday that I attended was in the Programming track – Unity Evangelist Carl Callewaert’s “Developing Successful 2D Games with Unity 4.” Callewaert took us through all the steps of how to make a 2D game in Unity, explaining about overdraw, layers, and how to animate your sprites. He had a great sense of humor and kept cracking jokes, while showing us not just Unity 4, but also some new features coming up in Unity 5, including the new menu as well as physical-based shaders and image-based rendering.
Wednesday night was host to a booth bar crawl in the expo with DJ Cutman, a Mystery Race Bar Crawl (which included meeting Cliff Bleszinski), and a concert with chiptune artists and DJs. I was hoping the Bar Crawl would be a fun networking event, but it turned out to be more of a competition, so I fizzled out early. But the concert was exciting, with everyone riding high on the events of the day and looking forward to the next.
Thursday started off on the Design track, with Jeff Howard’s “Game Magic: A Game Designer’s Guide to Constructing Magic Systems.” Howard is an Assistant Professor of Game Development and Design at Dakota State University, and has written two books: Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice, which will be out this month, and Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. His main concern was how magic feels in games, and he lamented that in recent times, magic “has become repetitive and mechanical” – as players, we have a tendency to find whatever our most powerful spell is and spam it. He emphasized that magic is an art form, and that it should be like learning and performing an art, and not just another banal game mechanic. He went into a lot of history about magic and magic systems, delving into the language of magic and rituals.
After that, I headed back to the Narrative track for “The Freelancer’s Guide to Hustling Online.” The talk was given by Toiya Kristen Finley, who is a freelance narrative designer, game writer, and editor who is also an executive board member on the IGDA’s Game Writing Special Interest Group. She encouraged people to do a lot of research, keep excellent financial records, and know how to manage your time, excellent points that are sometimes so simple that people who want to freelance overlook them. She also said you should be confident about your abilities, not talk about your passions (a word she cited as a “problematic buzzword”) or how you’re an amateur. Above all, she emphasized the importance of having contracts, and never, ever lowballing. She even went through some sample job postings, giving us an idea of which ones were good… and which ones to run screaming from.
Mary DeMarle, the Executive Narrative Director at Eidos Montreal, was the second keynote speaker. She gave a lot of great advice about narration, which seemed to be one of the most important topics at the conference. “Put in choices to show [the players] more about themselves,” she said, “and show them the repercussions of their actions.” Within those choices, the story must still be told, and the narrative designers are the ones who get to choose just how that’s done. Much like there are strategic choices in a game, there are also emotional choices, and within those, the writer should “avoid false choices, but give them powerful choices.” This idea has been a difficult one in games with “karma meters,” where the decisions are always so extreme that they seem too cartoonish and pull the player out of the story. But making the choices powerful ones keeps the player immersed, creating a better experience. This highlights issues in games like those in the Infamous series, where choices are obviously (and exaggeratedly) good or evil, whereas in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, the choices are more visceral: do you save a young boy, or an adult man?
After the second keynote, I headed back to the Narrative track for “Under the Influence(s): Making Use of What You Already Know.” The talk was by Seth Andrew Hudson, Assistant Director of Game Design at George Mason University. His talk was full of nuggets of wisdom – “Don’t reinvent the wheel, just make sure that it rolls,” and “If my head is already filled with this stuff, why not drill a hole and let it out?” As with other talks, Hudson emphasized the importance of allowing ourselves to be creative. He also filled his talk with poetry, with lines like “Creativity starts flowing and ideas being to mount, but if it’s not written down, it really doesn’t count.” He encouraged everyone to join writing groups, keep a journal, and, much like Rolston said in his keynote, don’t be afraid of failure, because “it is important to fail to learn more about how to succeed.”
Finally, I headed back to the Design track for the final talk of the conference, “Narrative Design: The Importance of Narrative Affordances.” Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Ph.D. student in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, was the man behind this talk. He talked about the unspoken rules of interaction within a game, and how great it is when we are betrayed – when our expectations are turned on their heads by a change in game mechanics. (He cited Super Mario 64 and the fact that, when you get to the painting of Bowser, you fall through a trap in the floor.) But, he said, “in story-driven games, we have both unspoken rules of interaction AND unspoken rules of narrative arcs.” This means there have to be narrative affordances, and these affordances themselves rely upon conventions. One of the best quotes he gave us was that we should “frame design as a dialogue between you and a potential player,” another idea that echoed throughout the conference.
There were so many talks I didn’t get to make it to, and even some tracks I didn’t get to check out. Production had “What Makes You Think You Know What a Leader Is?” and “Stay Sane Inside Insanity: Identifying Toxic Game Development Environments,” the Art track had “Using the Kinect as a Poor Man’s Motion Capture” and “An Artist’s Introduction to Programming,” and the Career track had “Going the Indie route” and “QA Practices and the Role of QA Within the Industry,” among many others. There was also the new Serious Games track, which had two talks – “Virtual Reality Gaming” and “Bots” – and one panel, “Serious Games for Serious Students.” And, as with last year, there was the Career Lounge, which had not just informal discussions, but also time set aside for professionals to critique portfolios.
The East Coast Game Conference continues to get larger every year, and successfully services students, academics, and professionals alike. If you’re anywhere near Raleigh – meaning if you’re within the ten-hour range – you should definitely consider making this trip. It’s especially important for East Coast game developers to have a conference they can go to not just to learn, but also to network. Making it out to GDC can be expensive and time-consuming, especially for those with part-time jobs, or those just getting out of school. You should definitely take the time out next year to attend ECGC. You won’t regret it.
