Guest Lecturer - Si Donbavand

Our guest lecture this week was presented by Si Donbavand who is the development director at wrkflw. He talked about when he was younger he made mods for the game Doom which sparked an interest in joining the games industry, so far in his career he has worked for many companies including, Psygnosis and AAA companies like Sony and EA.

Si split his lecture up into three parts, he talked about portfolios and their importance, the fact there is no such thing as a bad idea and also how prototyping game ideas really helps. This leads me to talk about many things, as I have talked about portfolios before in previous reports I will talk about the latter of his presentation.

Si told us that there is no such thing as a bad idea for a game, in fact he pulled some from his head, and one of them was, “A hulk based unicorn riding game with rockets” which I found hilarious. So I researched into these types of ‘silly’ games, I looked into ‘Goat Simulator’ which is pretty much what it says on the tin, it is a ridiculous game where you play as a goat in a really intentionally buggy world. When asked why the developers, Coffee Stain Studios, created this game, they simply had a wacky idea and wanted to make it in a game jam, once they released the trailer for fun they said, "Once we hit about a million views we started to realize moving on the one of the "real" projects was not the best option anymore." It goes to show that even the craziest ideas can become popular.

The final part of the lecture was about prototyping which Si stressed was important, an article from Gamasutra titled, ‘The Importance of Rapid, Iterative, Prototyping’ also explains this, they say, “the act of creating an original model as a foundation for the end product, is an essential and efficient part of the game design process”. Prototyping is split into multiple stages, the first being brainstorming ideas, the next is creating a mock up and gaining feedback from testers and then the final stage is full prototyping where you gain all the feedback you have received and implement that into your creation process.

References:

Alex Wawro. (2014). Q&A: The weird, wacky success that is Goat Simulator. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/215628/QA_The_weird_wacky_success_that_is_Goat_Simulator. Last accessed 8th May 2015.

Shelly Warmuth. (2010). The Importance of Rapid, Iterative, Prototyping. Available: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ShellyWarmuth/20101213/88622/The_Importance_of_Rapid_Iterative_Prototyping.php. Last accessed 8th May 2015.