![]() That is very much the feeling during the talk given by Buried Signal's Jason Roberts, the one-man band behind the singular puzzle title Gorogoa, his first ever published game. The room, one of the largest at GDC, is teeming with people, his arrival on stage greeted not just by applause, but a generous amount of enthusiastic cheering and hollering. "In a sense, making an unwise decision among wiser people will result in uniqueness" Seven years after work on Gorogoa started in earnest, Roberts is at GDC to take his victory lap. "A little bit," Roberts concedes, when I ask if that's how the crowd's enthusiastic reception felt. "But I still stressed a lot about the talk. But I don't think I'd advise anybody else to." It's the first big talk I've done at GDC, and I didn't realise how much work goes into it. ![]() Roberts' speaks with a measured, even tone, and one gets the impression that he's no great lover of the spotlight. In addition, the level of interest in hearing him explain his process since it launched to rapturous reviews in December 2017 is difficult to square with the way he sees the game. Gorogoa is, he says, "a non-verbal experience" by design, and one created almost entirely on his own. "When I try and talk about it, it's just this confusing word salad that comes out of my head," he continues. "I don't know which of the things I did I should encourage people to emulate, and which I shouldn't. Jason Roberts collecting a BAFTA for Best Debut Game The overall theme was about my struggle, over the years, to make the content of the game the themes work with the mechanics I had made. "The lesson, I hope, is about that thought process, by giving an example of what I went through to figure that out. Every piece of Gorogoa was a new problem." If you build a game with a particular mechanic, not every story makes sense to tell that way. ![]() There is no question that Roberts struggled to finish Gorogoa and bring it to market, and that's largely down to a "bespoke" development process that was defined as much by naivety and inexperience as it was by his abundant talent. Indeed, when he created the first demo in 2012, he did so "in total isolation as a developer." No feedback from a peer group, no education in game development he had never so much as read a book on game design theory. Roberts started with the intention of writing a graphic novel, and simply followed the idea wherever it took him - very often into uncharted waters. ![]() "So I encountered that criticism from other designers - I mean criticism in the constructive sense - after I'd already built something," he says, recalling the moment he showed that demo to people for the first time. "A lot of it was seeing what people said about the demo, and understanding their points, but they were referring to principles of design that I hadn't given a lot of thought. It's not like all that effort just disappeared" "The game was hard to make in a way that looks like it was hard to make.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |