Devin Weidinger

Can We Make One Button Fun To Press? Pressing a button alone is not very fun. Imagine pressing a button on an unplugged controller, how long could you do that before being bored? Impact We like having an impact on our environment because it gives us a filling of control and power. Destroying is low effort high impact, often making it fun. Impact can be state changes   Color  Movement Lasting consequence is the biggest difference between low and high impact.  People like to have impact on other people. Triggering thoughts, emotions and reactions from your opponent. ie. Shooting and enemy is more interesting than a wall.  Rewards that focus on sensory elements are often more impactful. Audio  Eye candy  ASMR channels for reference Haptic rewards Good rewards need to have good impact and impact always feel rewarding in some way they are interchangeable and can be measured in the same way. Lasting rewards feel better just like impact.  XP Bars an...

Making of 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission': Reinventing Platformers for VR Creative Pillars Magical The Wow Factor 360 Worlds BIG VR Moments (Scale) Surprises (Controller is a live) Believable Characters Innovative New & Unique Intuitive use of Hardware Reinvented Classics Totally new ideas Playful Like a Fun Toy Lots of Humour Toy Gameplay Physical Comedy Cute Characters Inclusive VR for Everyone Built for Multiplayer Easy to play Universal Themes (Relatable) Goal: Not a copy and paste; an analysis and reconstruction. Fun first. 18 Months 24 People Very Light Game Design Doc Mostly Visual, Minimal text Gameplay Programmers are the core of your team. 2 Week Prototypes, core mechanics tested. GDC 2015 Talk? A metrovania game in VR? (Mentioned at the end) Gameplay Demo Had no textures, only animation and lighting Controller + Character relationship was formed (Bot jumps out of controller) VR-ness of Character was establi...

Source Notes for Vladimir Slav's (Owner & Director, Coldwild Games) GDC talk. Coldwild Games is a husband and wife team. 2019 - Focused on Art first, the game has sold 3x more than their normal approach. How; while finishing ports for the last games, art is envisioning the next game. Daily images posted online ~4pm. Lens to look at art created - Do we like it - Social media response - Ease of creation - Design constraints (Game genre is falls under) - Record Likes/Retweets/Comments Once you find a champion art piece for your game start posting more pieces as a subset and still analyse social media's response. Piloting the idea,  - Make concept art / game play gifs (without actual prototype) Made 6 prototypes for game play before finalizing. Know your limitations and use them to your advantage. Created steam page only 2 - 2.5 months into development Use twitter to convert audience ~5k wishlist's on launch Con - be careful sharing everythin...

How to build a Remote Team for Better Happiness  a write up of the 2016 GDC talk by Foxcub Foxcub operates globally with 30 people. 5-6 devs, 12 artists, then misc. Art is separate from dev pipeline. Recommended Reading: The Future of Work - Jacob Morgan. Measure people on output not hours. Give people free hours. Bet big on the good things. Advantage of hiring. Lifestyle, Work life balance, communication, measured on impact. You get more experienced hires, opportunity for healthy culture. Ever discipline test; can they work within our environment.  They look for people via subreddits. Deveolpers designers and UI need to be closer to the same time block than artist due to artists often being able to run with an idea or concept for several hours independently.  Core hours Remote Operation 12:10 Slack, a ton of channels - each conversation thread is it's own channel. #analysis, #dev_analysis, #callouts, #random, #builds, #c...