In Unlocking the Vault, Game Developer editor-in-chief Danielle Riendeau dives into the rich archives of the GDC Vault in order to uncover timeless game development advice, anecdotes, and hard-learned lessons tucked away within the hundreds of talks from decades of GDC shows preserved within the Vault. Every other week, this curated overview will feature key takeaways from a vintage or classic GDC Talk with the goal of helping today’s developers unearth new lessons from the past.
Welcome to our first edition of Unlocking the Vault, a new series here at Game Developer where we’ll take a look at classic (or modern classic) talk from the Game Developers Conference archives through a modern game development lens and share lessons developers can learn from and apply to their current projects. Think of it as an enthusiastic trip to GDC’s massive library, so we can pull a book off the shelf and jot down some inspiration and practical advice from devs who solved development problems successfully in the past.
I wanted to start this column off with a bang, indeed, with one of my favorite “classic” GDC talks on embracing limitations and the power of gestural prototyping! This is Chair entertainment group creative director Donald Mustard’s GDC 2010 talk on Designing Shadow Complex, and like a well-loved VHS tape, I feel like I learn something new with each viewing. I’ve been teaching a Principles of Game Design course at the Berklee College of Music for just over ten years now, and I show this talk to my students on the regular. The principles showcased are so universal, and applicable to devs of various experience levels.
While the presentation contains some (often charming) signs of the times—especially the use of Adobe Illustrator for “paper” mapping and constant references to extreme file size limitations in the Xbox Live Arcade era—it has great evergreen design advice, particularly for the prototyping process.
Get everyone on the team to play the game—on paper
In the talk, Mustard compares early paper mapping to the filmic technic of creating animatics, and notes the team’s process was to “gesture it all in” and get moving on world and level design as early as possible, to find the core game loop. Instead of busting out the cardboard and markers, the team used good old Adobe Illustrator for the early mapping. He pulls up the raster-based document that shows the entire game, as envisioned in the first couple of weeks of the process.
The team spent those weeks constructing the full map on the Illustrator grid, with every room in the game represented, and designed a little guide (showing specific limits for each ability, such as the double and triple jump height), that they would take through and “playtest” the map. Importantly, Mustard notes that every team member would take the map for a spin, and that the process was absolutely integral in determining the core gameplay loop for Shadow Complex. Essentially, everyone was playtesting before they were even dreaming of a playable build, and that made all the difference.
It’s also enormously entertaining: watching Mustard joyously describe the rather “imaginative” playthroughs of his colleagues in meetings, he runs through the map, swooping the stick figure guide around with the practiced flow of a speedrunner:
“So, this is like… the funnest game that will never get released!” he laughs, bringing the “guide” through a narrow tunnel onscreen. “We’d sit there in meetings and be like ‘yeah I went through and I shot that guy in the head! Then I jumped up here, and then I went back!'” He laughed, noting the paper “playthroughs” were “ridiculous,” and a lot of fun, and more than anything, extremely useful: “But we learned a lot by going through this process because it really helped us to define what our core gameplay loop was.”
Paper playtesting and grayboxing show the power of “gesture it all in”
He then shows the same narrow passageway in-engine, in a very early graybox stage. The team worked hard to “throw everything in” in-engine and again, the whole team played the earliest graybox levels, which Mustard noted was key for finding the game’s pacing.
There are other lessons for modern teams in this condensed 30 minute nugget of mid-naughts development advice, including tenets for running a lean operation (constantly cutting!), keeping constraints in mind at all times, and integrating systems for more emergent, satisfying gameplay (Mustard notes he wishes the team was able to take this even further, in hindsight).
But if there’s one thing every developer can take from the talk, it’s this: embrace the call to “gesture it all in!” Make ugly, simple maps (heck, maybe even in raster drawing program of choice) and have the time of your life playing them alongside every colleague, no matter their role, finding the fun at every possible corner.
Unlocking the key takeaways
In case you want the sparknotes version of the talk—or you’re just outlining some of the major lessons in your notes—don’t worry, I’ve got you!
The key takeaways here are Lesson #1: Make Ugly Simple Maps (and have the whole team play them like they are real), lending to Lesson #2: Play Paper Prototypes Promptly.
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