Animex (Part 2)
Nicole Stark followed Ken, who was representing ‘Disparity Games’ from Australia! Their game revolved around mechanics which confront bullying and self-esteem issues.
It was a refreshing call to arms on addressing all of the stereotypes and typical sexualisation of women in games, especially in light of all the recent things that have been orbiting regarding it.
Nicole was quite clear to point out that we “should be changing thinking fallacies” and was quite open to suggest that to be successful one must “Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, in response to the needs of the situation.”
The remainder of the day was fantastic, including talks from Cubic Motion, Alessandro Taini from Ninja Theory (Go Cambridge!), Gary Napper from Creative Assembly & Phil Co from Valve!
The Alien Isolation talk was fascinating and it was really cool to get a high level, abstract view of how the alien makes decisions (in true non-scripted style!).
Additionally, Phil Co outlined how they as a Cabal, approached a film in the same manner as how they approach their video games development (I went away and watched Free To Play on the back of this talk and it was amazing!)
Andrew Walsh who has been working on writing for Fable Legends had a brilliant hand on exercise with the audience which had us writing out barks without adding any descriptive stereotypical statements (it actually can be quite difficult). This again was a refreshing challenge on the current perceptions of stereotypes and the lack of empowerment for women characters and disabled characters.
Jennifer Clisby from Lionhead delivered an amazing outline of Agile (I love agile, Jennifer you’re awesome ;D) including adding a list of life ProTips!:
- Always leave the email field blank until you are absolutely sure you want to send it
- Write to do lists
- Talk through issues
- Remember the crappy things your boss did and don’t do them
- Management of your manager
- Do everything you say you will do
- If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything (or as much)
- Work Hard
- Don’t stop learning
- Never be above any task
I’ll definitely be applying some of these to my daily workflow (the to do list I’ve been practising more)
Finally Wyeth Johnson from Epic did a talk on generally being awesome (and being awesome in a team) with a presentation titled ‘Make it more yellow!’.
He had a personal approach on giving feedback, suggesting that “you should suggest levels of completion and provide/expect feedback based on that level, so no one wastes time” (He called it 30/90 feedback). This approach “Takes control of the feedback you want”, “Promotes feedback” which we should all be seeking all the time to be better and “acts as a self serving bias”.
He also went into the theories of a book called ‘Tribal Leadership’ suggesting that teams should be aspiring to get to Level 4 on the tribal leadership ranking system.
Finally, he outlined positive intent, and this level of synergy is only achievable through positive intent. This can only be achieved through “trust, analysing why choices were made and learning from them & ousting the power trip and is it not healthy to the general functioning of the team.”
His talk was very thought provoking, I loved the suggestion that everyone “has to be on the context train’ for full understanding during the development process. He also suggested avoiding “interrupting people when they’re in flow’, admittedly I’m guilty of this sometimes, so I’m trying to be more self-aware with people in depth concentration at work.
As always there was so much great games development ideologies, considerations and processes to be considered to improve games development. Many which I’m sure I’m going to put into practice!
