On the second day of GDC 2014 I went to a talk by Ashley Egan and Adam Ormsby covering their experience switching from the legacy animation system in Unity over to Mecanim halfway through development of their game "Undertakers". Mecanim was pitched as a scripting-free way for artists to make their animation state machines, but they discovered (as I had) that it requires a nontrivial amount of coding to get working properly. They broke up a lot of their state machine into layers as a sort of high-level state machine covering major actions like movement, injury (limping), hit reactions, and death. I hadn't thought of using layers so much, and I think I'll be copying some of their techniques in the future. I had a good time talking to Ashley, Adam, and Elise Motzny (art director on Undertakers) after the talk, and I hope to continue to in the future. Ashley and Adam run the Mecwarriors, a group devoted to the understanding and adoption of the mecanim animation system.
The mecanim talk was part of the Technical Artist Bootcamp series of talks. I've been finding lately that I fit in more and more in the technical artist talks, which is pretty exciting. That said, I popped my head into a talk on visualization tool for AI debugging in Evolve, and could barely parse what was being discussed. Oh well.
I took a break from talks to check out some of the indie games on display (I completely missed them last year). I played a cool game inspired by Megaman Battle Network and Super Crate Box called Trestle on which I got a reasonably high score (25). I also got to try out a Final Fantasy: Tactics-style game by Behold Studios called Chroma Squad. It's based around managing a Super Sentai-style fighting team and entertaining a tv audience to get powerups. It had a cool system where you could put characters into "teamwork" mode to power up nearby teammates, deal extra damage, or add extra distance to their move action by throwing them into the air. Good fun!
Then I saw Quadrilateral Cowboy. This game speaks to me on a deep level. I only got to play for about an hour, but I already love it. I would probably describe it as a first-person puzzle platformer where the puzzle is based around hacking -- not the usual videogame-y hacking you get in bioshock, but actual typing. Your instructions must be well-considered and syntactically robust to clear a given puzzle. It's like Portal but with typing instead of shooting and instructions instead of portals, and it has a fantastic sense of presence. The graphics are simplistic but evocative, and always clear. Just -- just look at it:
so charming...
Anyway, I was so enthralled by Quadrilateral Cowboy that I was a little late to the next talk called "Fewer Tifas or More Sephiroths? Male Sexualization in Games". I have strong opinions about the idea of male sexualization/objectification, and I'm glad I'm not alone (for the record, I think that we need many more examples of male objectification. We unnecessarily ignore or push aways potential female audience members by not making them feel included -- by favoring the 'male gaze'). Michelle Clough gave an excellent talk about games that have successfully captured a female audience by catering to their interests (including, but not limited to, hot guys). Square Enix has been making bank off of this strategy since the mid 90s and Mass Effect has done a decent job of it recently. She put her slides up online, and they do a better job of summarizing her presentation than I could here, so I urge you to go check them out.
I need to get around to making a guide to help other straight men draw characters that can appeal to a straight female or gay male audience. It's something that the vast majority of us are really bad at (I'm looking directly at you, Blizzard).
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