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Gamespace Report: Violence!

We got together to discuss a hot-button topic, violence in games. We wanted to go beyond self-flagellation about how violence is bad, and talk about the different forms violence takes, and the reasons why it's prevalent in gaming.

We started out with a short presentation on the topic - yes, you are very much encouraged to make and bring slides to gamespace discussions!

The core idea was that the degree to which violence affects us depends on how viscerally violent the experience is, and on how justified the violence is by the story. Killing innocents, such as in the infamous Call of Duty 2 airport mission, affects us a lot more than killing monsters. The latest Doom is very, very violent in its gory details, but we're killing literal demons from hell.

During the discussion, we came up with a third part of the equation, which is the cultural context. How close to home is the violence? A fictional war has less impact than a real one. And perhaps, as our living memory of the world wars slip away, games set in those wars lose their impact, too. They can be flattened out all the way into simple heroic stories.

Another aspect to consider is player choice. To what degree is the player given the choice to engage or not engage in violence? To what degree are they given incentives?

We talked a lot about Postal 2, another infamous game. It's ostensibly a simulation of real life that simply gives the player the option to commit violent acts. But actually, it does everything it can to lure and goad you into violence. It's not a fair representation of real life, but rather a concentration of everything that's annoying about it. You have to do tedious chores, surrounded by irritating, foul-mouthed people. Even the way they walk seems calculated to annoy. At the same time, it's clear that a lot of the game's content is in the violent parts.

Somewhat similarly, in Rise of the Tomb Raider, you can craft upgrades for your equipment by killing (lots and lots of) animals. There's no good in-story reason for Lara to try and single-handedly wipe out a bunch of endangered species, but if you abstain, you again miss a significant part of the game.

Speaking of player choice, a recent news item on that topic was players beating up and killing a suffragette in Red Dead Redemption 2. There, the player can harm her because they can harm pretty much everybody in the game. Unlike Postal 2, the game doesn't especially intend for the player to hurt her. But a portion of players chose to publicly take out their misogyny on her.

So why is violence so prevalent in games? Games are about agency, about the ability to affect the world. One very simple way to affect the world is to destroy stuff. It's way easier to set up the rules and assets for destruction than for creation.

But there's actually large areas of the gaming world where violence is pretty much absent, they're just the part that "mainstream" players and devs tend to forget about. Puzzle games, hidden object games, story games, and so on. And they're not a small niche. Myst outsold Doom by a factor of 3. There are many, many non-violent games. They just tend to be coded as being for women and "casual" gamers, and hence get mostly ignored.

There was a lot of ground to cover, and this report leaves out a number of things we talked about. We may do a future session to talk about non-violent games more in depth.

For now, we have some upcoming events:

Ludum Dare 43 get-together, at Cafe Auer

Post-LDJAM game presentations, also at Auer

Our Christmas Social, on December 14, LIIP Arena

Oh, and here’s the slides.

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Gamespace Report

Plenty of people attended last night's Gamespace!

After we settled in and the usual intro slides were done, we had open screen:

Benjamin showed his game jam game Death Arena Sigma.

Simone showed his game jam game Rainforest.

Radomir showed Jupiter Hell, a sequel/remake of DoomRL.

Michael presented his interactive text adventure on horrible things that Columbus and Vasco da Gama did. It will be on lesespuren-online.ch soon. This led to a discussion about about portraying history and especially portraying historical violence, the limits of what you can show, and how to prevent players from shrugging off the material presented. It's easy to say that the past was a violent time. It's harder to look at how that violence shapes the present.

Tobias told us about Zurindies, a game coworking event he's started.

After a break, David then did a talk on "Punk, Personal, and Political Games". Here's the slides.

While the games are very different, what unites them is that they give you new experiences. They make you feel something that isn't the usual limited range of emotional beats that mainstream games produce.

Right now, there's almost nothing of this sort in Switzerland. David made Martian Immigration Nightmare, but he worries that if he made a game too critical of Switzerland, this would cost him opportunities.

We discussed reasons why there isn't much of a weird games scene in Switzerland. Political games struggle with a small audience. Professional developers are focused on creating commercially viable games. And there just aren't that many people in the world making that kind of game. David semi-jokingly suggested a "Contra Helvetia" organisation to fund games that would piss off the mainstream. Benjamin suggested that weird games could be a good jam theme.

Finally, we gathered ideas for the discussion topic for the next event, which will be on Thursday, October 25. We voted on the ideas and ended up with Balancing as the topic.

(Thanks to Henry for writing the protocol this report is based on.)

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Gamespace Report!

Once more we got together in the space of games. News brought us tales of some cool games created by the ETH game lab, especially a voxel art cooperative railway building game called Derailed.

In the open screen, Rae showed their game Numbers, a piece of interactive fiction about mysterious radio stations. I gave a short experimental talk on how to process things you read to improve your creativity. Dimitri gave us an update on his zombie game. Finally, Radomir showed us his tiny python game console!

I then unilaterally declared that the topic for July 2 will be useful mathematical tricks: lerping, color-shifting using matrixes, gradient descent, bounded randomness, and so on.

Finally, we did the game concept jam - let's say you finished your current project(s) and are looking for the next thing. Let's also say that you've got a decent budget and complete creative freedom. What do you make?

In the end, we didn't really produce specific concepts, but we did exchange plenty of ideas about game design: variants on chess, requirements for games to keep players' attention long-term, games that take communications lag into account, and more.

Next time, on June 18, we will talk about character design: What makes an effective character design, how can you communicate things about a character, etc.

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Gamespace Reports!

Monday, May 7

We got together for spacing of games. In the open screen, Henry showed off his cool new airship-shaped business cards, Jeff showed some experiments he's doing with a Monet-style shader, and Ron told us about XOXO, his monthly local multiplayer meetup.

We democratically decided the topic for June 4: A concept jam. So it's a micro-jam where you create a game concept. I'll bring by a bunch of cards and dice and prompts.

We then talked about hidden game design, which is a topic that's been brought to wider attention by Jennifer Scheurle. What's meant with hidden game design is any kind of part of the game design that isn't visible to the player but is used to improve gameplay experience. The classic example is that in a lot of FPS games, the final bullet in your gun does more damage, as it's satisfying to win a fight with the last bullet, but very frustrating to run out of ammo just before you do.

The degree of tweaking you can do can perhaps be categorized into three strengths:

Purely sensory things like gun sounds, rarity colors, or enemies waiting to explode until they are in your FOV.

Rubber-banding, timing events, causing enemies outside of your FOV to slow down.

Actually giving advantages in multiplayer to first-time players to give them a satisfying experience.

There's also the reverse of hidden game design, in a way: features that are shown but don't actually exist - eg a racing game where all the cars actually have the same characteristics but handle differently. And because the game is ultimately in the players's heads, things like visuals and character customization do affect the game experience.

Intro Slides, containing news and upcoming event calendar.

Monday, May 21

Two weeks later, as is the rule, we got together again. We celebrated the successful release of two new Swiss games, FAR and Invisiballs, and briefly discussed the recent takedown of a bunch of visual novels by Valve.

Open Screen brought us more progress on Jeff's Monet shader, a neural network doing cheap face transfer without depth information, and a game about zombies with exploding grenade-heads.

Voting on the topic for June 18 was tied, so I broke the tie to decide we're going to talk about character design: what makes an effective character design, how can you communicate things about a character, etc.

The discussion topic was alternate revenue streams. Valve had just nicely demonstrated that they're... less than reliable as a revenue source, at least if you make "the wrong kind of game". So what are other ways to make money from games that don't involve selling it in an app store?

Patreon is a pretty popular option, especially for games that can't get onto Steam because they're, well, porn. But in general, Patreon can work if you work very hard at having a constant flow of new things for people. Features, updates, streams, community engagement, and so on. If people have an emotional connection to you as a person, they will want to see what you're producing - so you're really turning yourself into a full-spectrum entertainment product.

Other incentives include allowing players to influence the direction of the game, but this can be tricky if their ideas are bad ideas. So this is something you have to manage where you give people choices, but not free reign.

Coming back to porn somehow, the webcomic Dumbing of Age has this revenue model where the comic itself is free, but then you can buy the sex scenes. So they basically went "people are going to draw porn of our characters anyway, we might as well be the ones doing it".

Anyway, it doesn't have to be porn. Charging for additional, deeper content like extra story, "fanservice episodes", lore, and so on could work.

One idea we had was to make a game with a large cast with a lot of potential romantic pairings - "ships". Then let people vote on - or even pay to tip the scales on - which pairings end up happening in the game's plot. Sort of like a dating show with virtual characters that's also a game.

This again brings us back to emotional engagement, this time with the characters in the game, as a reason for people to get engaged beyond plopping down a once-off $5 in a sale for your game.

Which makes it quite convenient that we're going to talk about character design soon, isn't it?

But next up is the Gamespace Social, this Friday at 19:00. We'll have pizza, play some local multiplayer games, and chat.

Intro Slides, containing news and upcoming event calendar.

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Gamespace Report April 23

So after a bit of a break with less structured gamespaces, yesterday we did a standard meetup again.

Ludum Dare's just concluded, so we got to see the games created by gamespacers:

Amanda's Pony Farm 1917

Blockchain Simulator

Headball

We democratically decided that next time (May 7) we will talk about hidden game design - breaking the visible "rules" of your game to produce better experiences. The thing to watch here in preparation is this Extra Credits episode:

Finally, we spent some time talking about game performance. The major two items of advice were to use an ECS or some other means of making related data actually co-located in memory, and to be aware of the Big O complexity of your code.

Slides can be found here. The next meetup will be up as soon as meetup.com stops being broken...

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Gamespace Report February 12

We had a big meetup this time around - lots of people, including some familiar old faces.

As usual, we started with the intro slides. I added one new section, which is about interesting game-related technology I've found. This time, I had two to report on:

OpenPose, an open source pose detection system. Think Kinect, but it's open source and works using a normal webcam.

Quiet, a library for communicating between phones and computers using ultrasound. It's kind of a terrible security hole, but it's also potentially a super-convenient way of exchanging data between phones without having to set up some kind of pairing or NFC or QR code.

Next, the open screens:

Henry showed his research on using AI agents with knowledge modelling to create interesting stories in games in a bottom-up fashion.

Carlos showed us the trailer for Nimbatus, which he made the music for.

Finally, Radek showed us his tiny handheld console running MicroPython.

Then, we did a big section on shaders. I started out by going over the basics of what a (surface/fragment) shader actually is - a program that gets run on the graphics card for each visible pixel of each triangle of a 3D scene, and determines the color of the pixel.

We started up Unity and played around first with the options of the default shader, and then with a very small custom shader, creating various effects, leading up to this picture of a cat with scrolling lava eyes.

Dragica answered additional questions about shaders, including the state of different shader languages and how to do advanced effects like toon shading.

The state of the whiteboard at the end of the session:

The next meetup will be on February 26, and the topics are Freelancing and Game Code Architecture.

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Meetup Report January 15

We had two events in rapid succession: a social meetup and a standard gamespace meetup.

For the social, I set up a PS4 with the projector at Liip Arena. We ended up playing a bunch of coop Diablo 3, passing on the controls occasionally. Around ten people turned up, and it was nice to hang out, so we'll do this again soon.

The meetup was the first one that clearly advertised that there's an open screen, where you can bring a thing and get a few minutes to present it. We ended up having five short presentations, including a kid who had made his first game with the help of his dad, the VR startup Inspacion, CC-Licensed assets by Super Game Music, a robot programming game from ETH, and an opportunity to show games at a FHNW LAN party.

Next, we discussed and voted on topics for the session on February 12, which will be player retention and shaders.

Finally, we had a discussion on game feel and animation, including animation curves, the now-famous Juice It or Lose It and The Art of Screen Shake talks, and the various works of Vlambeer as excellent case studies on how to do it right.

See you in a week!

(Intro Slides Link)

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Meetup Report December 18

The last Gamespace meetup of the year was a festive affair. I brought along chocolate, pine branches, and a lot of mulled wine in thermos flasks. We got kind of drunk, actually, so forgive me if this is a less precise report than usual.

We started with the usual intro slides including some ideas about future plans. We will definitely keep running meetups every two weeks, and host Ludum Dare every four months. In addition to that, we might do gamedev courses, a small (un) conference, or a kind of radically democratic awards show where everyone gets an award...

We decided on the topics for January 29. Chris is going to do a presentation on interesting sound design in games, and we're going to talk about customer acquisition. That dark art of getting people to actually notice, care about, and then buy games.

We might also do a social event in January where we get together and play some games.

Next, I did a short presentation on game key reselling and the thing with the stolen keys that had happened to me recently. Basically, a whole grey-market ecosystem exists because Steam keys are valuable and easily exchanged. And there's definitely lots of shades of grey, from people re-selling keys that they bought all the way to actually stolen items. Notably, with Valve introducing Curator Connect, developers can now supply keys more directly to "influencers", which may reduce some of the problems around key reselling, as long as you're willing to become even deeper embedded into Valve's systems.

Finally, we exchanged tips for how to deal with going to big game events, like gamescom or GDC. These were both physical and social:

Know your limits in terms of how long you stay up, how much you can drink, and how far you can walk. Treat these limits as a budget and spend them wisely.

Get comfortable shoes.

Keep hydrated. A lot of the time, when you feel tired or stupid, you're just dehydrated.

Bring plenty of business cards, and make sure there's enough white space on them so people can write notes on them.

When introducing yourself, give people "hooks" for asking additional questions. You don't have to be the most interesting person in the room, but if they know what city you live in, or what kind of games you've been playing, or whatever, they have something to start a conversation about.

A lot of these events are incredibly loud. Get comfortable with just suggesting you go somewhere quieter so you can talk. If you don't mind smoke, smokers don't mind you joining them outside.

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Gamespace Report, December 4, 2017

We got together, twelve of us, in the bowels of the Liip offices. Two had hurried over from the Ludum Dare jam site nearby. There were plenty of familiar faces and some new ones, too.

We started out with the usual intro slides, including the big news: Stray Fawn Studios is going to sponsor Gamespace! Which also means that we will finally become an association (Verein) rather than an ad-hoc group of people. I'm working on the constitution now, and hope to get it founded before the end of the year.

Next, three of us showed our Ludum Dare games:

Henry showed com.uni.sm =), a city-building game set in a distant future where money is abolished and cute-speak is the norm.

Daniel showed Conway's Snake of Life, a clever combination of a-life patterns and snake, spawning coins and obstacles based on stable patterns in the game of life.

I showed EARTH BLOSSOM, a game about being an alien blob monster on a course for Earth.

Next, we very democratically decided the topic for the meetup after next, on January 15. We gathered ideas for topics and then voted on the long, long list of accumulated ideas. At the end, there were two clear winners: game feel and world design.

Then we started on our discussion about game audio. We were lucky to have two experts on the topic, who we bombarded with questions.

We learned that sound design is an important part of the game creation process and should be integrated into it, rather than added at the end. The basic two skills for creating game audio are mixing and mastering. Balancing the volume of the sounds, and making sure that individual sounds behave well and don't have weird frequencies or other problems.

Sounds should match what happens, so a powerful attack should sound powerful, or a swift movement should sound swift. Sounds are used to give feedback to the player, so even - especially - when the player gives an input and nothing happens, there should be a sound to acknowledge that. The click of an empty gun. The rattle of a locked door.

To prevent sounds from becoming repetitive, give them lots of variations, make them very clean, or make sure they're not too loud.

The amount of reverb in a sound gives an impression of the space the sound is happening in. If there's a lot of reverb in what's meant to be a wide-open space, it sounds weird. If there's no reverb, the sound does not feel real.

If you are working on a bigger project, consider using or implementing fmod, an industry-standard sound design tool that your sound designer can use to integrate and tune the way the game sounds like.

Compared to graphics, I felt that it's harder to pin down what distinguishes the sound design of particular games. Apart from the really obvious stuff like "is it beeps or is it recorded sounds". We hope to see a presentation of games with interesting or unique sound design to help us hear the difference.

So, how do you get sounds? Hire a sound designer! How do you make sounds? You can get lots of stuff from freesound.org, or use bfxr, or get a decent microphone and make your own foleys with household objects or your mouth. Sounds in EARTH BLOSSOM derive from a tangerine and a crinkly paper bag.

So what about music? Like sound, it helps with the feeling of the game, with the player's immersion. It's possible to make dynamic soundtracks that adjust based on the game's situation, but timing is important. The new Doom is very good at this, whereas old 90s games like Deus Ex were really bad at it.

How do you get music? Well, it's possible to have a computer make it for you using Jukedeck. The result is deeply generic but perfectly listenable music. Or you can find someone to work with! There's a lot of game musicians out there, but most of them are pretty terrible, so be careful and selective.

Finally, we had a listen to the music variations used in Undertale, 101 different tracks linked by tune and instrumentation for the various scenes in the game.

And that was it! We went home, looking forward - I think - to our next meetup on December 18, where we aim to talk about grey-market game keys and surviving game events.

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Gamespace Report November 6

This time we did a color scheme jam! The idea is that color scheme influences game feel, and so in the spirit of marketing-first gamedev, we did a jam on the basis of color schemes.

Colors can make a game feel intense, or relaxed, or sad, or joyful. I picked four schemes, ranging from pleasant to weird, and presented them to the group. I then asked each participant to tell us what the colors reminded them of.

The first one reminded people of cityscapes, banners, large ships, and undersea landscapes.

The second, of space, comets, and molten metal.

The third, of avocados, bamboo and Zelda.

The fourth, of fire and sunsets.

After the traditional intro slides, we got into teams of one or two people and spent three hours making stuff. Some of us made games or interactive things. Others created mockups. We used itch.io's jams feature to publish the results. We ended up with ten games which I think is rather more than most jams on itch.io manage!

Here they are:

The Bleeding City: An endless runner where you are a red figure in a green-gray city.

Line: City blocks of green on green, a single red line going through it.

Crucible: A sequence of noisy pixelated images of a foundry.

Birdy Geometry: Flickering squares and triangles! A bird! All the color schemes!

Sticky Fire: Catch the small dots, avoid the big ones!

Tic-Tac-Go: A mixture of Go, Conway's Game of Life, and Tic-Tac-Toe.

Blood Bunny: It looks kind of terrified.

Burn the Clouds: Playing around with UE4's Twin Stick Template.

Coral Weeds: Place orange sands and yellow growing coral.

Dino Planet: A tiny tiny platformer about dinosaurs!

Finally, we decided on the topics for December 18. Well, I suggested two topics and no one complained - we all wanted to go home at that point, I think.

Game key reselling: David will recount his recent adventures in the land of grey markets, and we can discuss the economics, ethics, legalities - and above all, practicalities - of the grey market for game keys.

Surviving game events: Big events like gamescom or GDC can leave you exhausted, sick, injured. How do you stay in one piece and achieve your objectives? We share tips.

The next gamespace will be on December 4, and Ludum Dare 40 will be on December 1 - 4. See you there!

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October 23 Report

On Monday, we once again met up to talk games. Attendance does seem to be rising: we had nearly twenty people.

First, I should note that I got the future meetup dates wrong. The next meetups are on the following dates:

Gamespace: Monday, 6. November

Ludum Dare: 1. - 3. December

Gamespace: Monday, 4. December

Gamespace: Monday, 18. December

The intro slides have been updated to reflect this.

Also, we have a Discord instance now, if you want to chat to other participants.

So what did we talk about? Legal stuff, and marketing/community stuff.

On the legal side, since none of us are lawyers, we mostly exchanged issues and some basic tips. One big topic: how to structure working in teams with others as Indie developers. There are plenty of horror stories of teams breaking apart, of people being ejected from teams, of stolen work and personal conflicts. Starting a company can help with a legal framework, but it doesn't fix everything. If it's possible, the cleanest thing to do is to keep the number of people in the core team to a minimum - like, one person - and work with others on a contracting basis.

On the other side of that relationship, what happens if you don't get paid? In Switzerland, you can do a "Betreibung", where you ask the government to chase up your debtor. While this can work, if the debtor resists every step of the way, drawing out the process from the Betreibung all the way to bankruptcy, this can take three years, cost several thousand CHF, and a lot of time and energy. So sometimes you just have to write things off.

Another topic is copying games: actually copying someone's source code is of course breaking the law, but there's plenty of more subtle types of copying where things can get very murky. And very expensive and full of lawyers. For example, the very popular game ARK: Survival Evolved became the target of a lawsuit based on a non-compete agreement by one of its team members. And trouble may be brewing with Epic Games' Fortnite looking quite a lot like PUBG, a game using Epic Games' Unreal Engine.

On the Indie side, there's the case of Vlambeer's Radical/Ridiculous Fishing games. Vlambeer created Radical Fishing, a popular little Flash game. They then started working on a fully-featured version called Ridiculous Fishing. But another company took Radical Fishing and crossed it with Fruit Ninja to create "Ninja Fishing", releasing their game before Ridiculous Fishing appeared. So Ridiculous Fishing ended up looking like the clone.

Finally, we shared some practical advice:

Get "Rechtsschutzversicherung", Legal Insurance.

When working with others, take meeting notes, and have everyone sign and date them.

If you're worried about your work being stolen, you can print it out, seal it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself to effectively "time-stamp" it.

If someone starts insisting on doing all conversations / negotiations in person or over the phone when they were previously happy to talk by email, this can be a warning sign.

In the second part of the evening, we talked a bit about marketing and community management - how to interact with players of your game.

A community is a strong reason for people to stay with your game. It helps with spreading the word, and it can be an emotional support network for the developers. It does also have to be actively managed and moderated. By default, an Internet community will eventually slide into a cesspit of racist memes and screaming, which means you need to shape the boundaries and tone of the community.

Another question that came up is how to present yourself as an Indie developer: do you create games under your own identity or identities, or do you use a company or team name? The former can help people relate to you, but it also exposes you more. In practice, you need to set boundaries, and you inevitably end up playing a role that's at least a bit different from who you are.

Finally, we also decided on the topic for the meetup after next, which is on Monday, 4. December (not 6. December as previously claimed). After some amount of democracy, these are the topics:

Game Audio

Narrative Design, and why RPGs feel unsatisfying

And next up, on November 6, is Colour Scheme Jam, where we make games or game concepts based on random colour schemes.

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October 9 Report

Once more we met up at the Liip arena to discuss games. Lots of people came!

After grabbing some drinks and chatting for a while, we started with the five-slide intro, marking Swiss game related news, and listing future events. (A note, by the way: While we have beer at the event, we also have soft drinks, juice, and water, and it's not a boozy event. Don't feel that you have to drink alcohol, or that you'll stand out weirdly if you don't drink.)

The first discussion topic was graphics. We generally agreed that visually distinct graphics are necessary to draw people in. That doesn't have to mean beautiful or realistic or super-expensive ones, just different.

One interesting thing that came up is that photogrammetry is rapidly making hyper-realistic graphics quite easy to do for indies. On the other hand, defining and consistently applying a sophisticated style can be very labour-intensive. So we may be heading towards a future where indie games have detailed but fairly static photogrammetry-based graphics, while AAA goes for distinct visual styles.

Going further, machine learning may be able to automate animation, or be used to apply a consistent art style using style transfer. David promised to try out a style transfer system on some game screenshots to see whether using that to apply an art style would work in practice.

Next, the question of finding an unique art style. There are fads in Indie art, such as pixel art, low-poly, and now apparently PSX style. A better approach may be to copy one from somewhere else. Darkest Dungeon copied Mike Mignola. Cuphead copied 30s cartoons. Henry suggested looking at LD Jam entries that scored high in graphics. Given that they were made in 24 hours, the art style can't be too time-consuming.

Another common approach is to pick a commoditized version of some culture. Apotheon, Aztez, and Guacamelee are all side-scrolling brawlers that are "skinned" with a particular aesthetic. While this is a strong way of creating an aesthetic, Beat pointed out that it creates games that feel somewhat hollow: could you distinguish these games from each other without their graphics?

Another example: Ooblets, with its "marketing-first" approach that could also be called "aesthetics-first". They figured out what feelings the game should evoke before worrying about the mechanics.

Finally, we spoke about using limitations to inform your art, like a fixed brush size, hexels, voxels, and limited colour palettes. David suggested a "colour palette jam", where we'd create games based on what simple colour palettes suggested to us.

After a break, we chose the topics for future events. We ended up with two sets of topics, for the next two sessions:

In two weeks: Marketing & Community and Legal Stuff

In four weeks: Colour scheme jam

The paper prototyping event should eventually happen too, pending René Bauer's availability.

Next, some of us gave some ad-hoc presentations on games we recently played, and what we liked about them:

Crypt of the Necrodancer: Nethack + DDR. Gimmicky, but they made it work, with an excellent soundtrack and clever timing-based gameplay.

Sunless Sea: Atmospheric game about being a ship captain in a subterranean ocean. Mood underscored by graphics. Weird and gruesome things happen.

Where the goats are: You have a little farm and goats. You potter around, and a story is told to you by letters that arrive each day. Relaxing, plus you want to see the story.

Helldivers: A 3rd person shared-screen coop shooter. Shoot aliens! Deliver (managed) democracy! A starship troopers esque dark humour thing.

Finally, Beat showed us Sea of Fatness, and David showed Patent Blaster and we talked a bit about trash aesthetics in games.

Until next time, then! As before, it will be at Liip arena, and we'll do a combination of general chatting and focused discussion. Everyone is welcome.

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September 25 Meetup Report

On Monday was the first Gamespace using the new format. 13 people attended in total. We started out with a tiny intro slideshow of recent news and upcoming events. Next, we had two discussion rounds on topics agreed previously: prototyping and money, which went really well.

With the prototyping discussion, there was a lot of emphasis on using prototypes to learn things. A prototype is an experiment rather than something that must be turned into the final game. You can prototype various aspects, such as mechanics, art style, or interaction. You can use prototypes to try out wildly different approaches to the core idea. And it's important to stay focused: once you start adding too much stuff on top of your prototype, or spending too much time, it's time to move on.

With the money discussion, we did it under the Chatham House Rule, which is something we will use on occasion when talking about sensitive topics. The official version goes like this:

When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

So the point was that we could talk about our financial situation while agreeing not to share this information in an identifiable way.

Conveniently but unfortunately, the recent fate of The Chinese Room, an UK studio who just laid off all its employees, provided a good starting point. So we talked about the cost of game creation, the "burn rate" of studios, different costs of living, and using freelancers and outsourcing to cut costs.

The conversation then went on to general game business topics such as distribution and how to be noticed and build a relationship with potential customers. This changes pretty rapidly: four years ago, it was maybe blogs, then YouTube, then Twitch. It might be Discord now, or some other thing we weren't even aware of.

Finally, we decided the topics for the meetup on October 23. If possible, we will do a paper prototying session. Otherwise, we will do two discussion sessions, on creative techniques to find new mechanics, and on the question of planning vs experimentation in game development.

The next meetup will be on October 9, again at the Liip Arena. The topics are:

Graphics - How can you make your game stand out? How do you create or find assets for games?

Dissect-a-game - Talk about a game you recently played from a development perspective - be it design, programming, art, audio, story. What makes it tick?

[gamespace-ch]

August 28 Meetup Report

During yesterday’s meetup, we had a long session about how to improve gamespace meetups as a whole. While there is a hard core of people who attend most meetings, or attend few of them but keep turning up over the years, we have been pretty bad at retaining people and growing as a community.

The main measures we decided on are as follows:

Change the frequency of meetups from one a month to one every two weeks. Monthly metups mean that if you miss one, there's a two month gap, which is enough to cause you to forget.

Schedule more meetings in advance. This ties into the previous point: if only the next meetup is known, if you can't make that one, you lose track easily.

A more stable format for meetups. Starting with a short intro, news, making people aware of upcoming events, people sharing recent successes.

Topics agreed upon and advertised in advance.

A wide variety of formats, including discussion topics, show-and-tell style events, "speed dating", and micro-jams. The more frequent meetups mean that each meetup can be more specific.

Continue hosting Ludum Dare regularly.

Better communication of upcoming events via local connections like SGDA, ZHdK, etc.

Post-meetup reports, like this one.

Apart from that, we also spent some time analyzing game concepts in-depth and talking about survival tips for big events like gamescom.

[gamespace-ch]

Meetups

We have regular meetups in Zurich. Follow the Meetup.com page for up to date information.

Wir treffen uns regelmässig in Zürich. Die neusten Infos sind auf Meetup.com verfügbar.

[gamespace-ch]

meet & talk

Unser Stammtisch.

Come talk about making games, new technologies around games or talk about your projects.

Feb 20 19:00-22:00

Liip Arena, Limmatstrasse 183, Zürich

[gamespace-ch]

Sommerzeit Grillzeit, das jährliche BBQ findet am 18.7.2016 statt, wir treffen uns 19:00 HB Zürich Treffpunkt und fahren zur Chinawiese.