Ate breakfast with Walley and Jackson Walked around show floor looking for board games Walley wanted to buy (Unmatched, something for Kate)

Seminar [Fake it till you make it]

Was aimed at become a professional novel author, not about the actual writing process which is what I thought.

Basically boiled down to “be confident, and occasionally gaslight people into thinking you are important”

How to join the white girl clique 101

Had a fight with lunch, and decided to retreat to the room to recover. (The wrap had a tomato based sauce, and it was way to expensive to just not eat)

Seminar [Good level design can be unnecessary difficult]
Max Mraz

@11Mraz

Max.mraz.11@gmail.com

Game- oceans heart

Exploration is not a goal. It is a process to achieve a goal.

Take away choices to make the choices they do have more interesting/ impact full

Avoid putting players in a situation where they are just randomly wandering in the hopes of finding something interesting

Make sure you understand what way you are testing players, and that the test is interesting to overcome (not just chance / busy work)

You can’t map spaghetti in your head

I met up with Jackson in the room

Got stuff from / dropped off stuff in Jacksons car

We went to look at a few more games, and ended up talking to the dev team for Dungeon Designer for awhile about Development processes and build pipelines.

Keynote

Jonathan Blow

If you are able, its better to spend more time to make a game meet all of your design goals, rather than reducing scope to finish it faster. If you do, you will likely regret it.

Also, reducing or reworking content thats not working is different than reducing scope. It’s a necessary part of the process, just like editing for a book.

Keeping a team small helps it react faster to potential obstacles.

A good game will speak for itself

I should play the witness, I guess

He pushes back against the modern games industry tendency to keep players engaged as long as possible with weird tricks and manipulation. Also the idea that games should be as accessible to as many people as possible.

After seeing Jackson off, I met up with Walley, who was playing board games with his friends. I had some pesto pasta and chocolate cake while we played a game that tested our ability to be literate.

Chocolate wasn’t a great idea though, and lunch decided to have a revenge match.