Richard Lemarchand, lead game designer at NaughtyDog, just gave a wonderfully inspiring talk at UCSC. (Talk-description here.) Richard spoke about the beauty of systems and about creative risk-taking, illustrating with evokative pictures and music from games. He referred to two talks that I'll want to check up on, Jonathan Blows talk from GDCE this year about truth and game design (available for free in the GDC vault), and Kent Hudson's talk from GDC'11 on "Player-Driven Stories: How do we get there?" (available at Hudsons website). Richard said so many beautiful things about games, and showed many good examples. I don't think I was alone in the audience in wanting to rush home and make a game once we had stopped applauding him.
Richard ended with a list of practical advice to anyone who is about to make an indie game:
- Don’t listen to people saying it can't or shouldn't be made - Do what you can with the skills you have
- Collaborate, and be persistent
- Say when you don’t know something - people will teach you stuff
- If something needs changing - change it
- Be respectful but direct.
- Be honest, and dare to be vulnerable. (Helps create an atmosphere where it is ok to fail - necessary for risk taking)
- Fail early, fail often.
Richard ended with a list of practical advice to anyone who is about to make an indie game:
- Don’t listen to people saying it can't or shouldn't be made - Do what you can with the skills you have
- Collaborate, and be persistent
- Say when you don’t know something - people will teach you stuff
- If something needs changing - change it
- Be respectful but direct.
- Be honest, and dare to be vulnerable. (Helps create an atmosphere where it is ok to fail - necessary for risk taking)
- Fail early, fail often.
