Sunday, December 14, 2008

The Road to GDC

My speech proposal for GDC was accepted this week! "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band" is what I'm delivering, and it's war story retelling under the lens of how to ship awesome games in no time and less resources.

First step: Celebration
Second step: Abject terror about talking in front of hundreds of peers

After a conversation with some friends, I realised that there a bunch of pitfalls that I need to avoid - for example, less talking about standard things like "more resources needed/Top 10 of x/scrum is great" and more talking about interesting stories and lessons that nobody else would be talking about.

So, I'm opening it up to both of the people who read this blog: what are the kinds of things that you'd like to hear in a design speech about Rock Band? And what are the things you hope to never hear at a GDC speech ever again?

2 comments:

Keith said...

Personal stories about behind-the-scenes hilarity that wouldn't get out otherwise would be something I'd like to hear. People learn from mistakes so share some nixed ideas or bugs and stuff of that nature. Hope this helps!

DJStarstryker said...

My main suggestion is don't sound corporate. I went to GDC'08 and the worst sessions I went to were Nintendo's. They were interesting topics, but it felt so dry and stale.

You want people to take you seriously, but you don't need to be boring about it. If you have any amusing stories to share, do so.

More ideas:

- Is community feedback helpful from a design perspective? What lessons have you learned from the players?
- Did Rock Band 2 present any specific challenges in the design that the original game did not?
- If you could start the Rock Band 2 development all over again, what would you have done differently?