Lecture at the IT University in Copenhagen

Apparantly I'm going to hold a lecture about game development related stuff in Copenhagen in early February. I'm supposed to fill up almost an hour with talk, mainly based on my own knowledge and experiences with game design. Now, if you went to an event like that, what would you like to hear about? I'm interested in both general topics and specific questions.

More information about the lecture will appear later.

Well your games are noted particularly for their use of environment, so I'd pose this question: How do you design an environment so all of its parts are coherent (graphics, sound, music etc.) and really bring it to life?

You should talk about many aspects of the design process as well as the making process.

Think about doing up ideas, creating the graphical content, making the music, creating the sound effects and making the level. Next it can be interesting in telling a little bit about making/finding tools to make the game development more easy.

You should talk a big part about designing levels; capturing the feeling, telling a story, keeping the player happy all the time. It will help to use previously made games as examples. For instance, a few WaDF puzzles, the Knytt Stories level editor, Saira's graphics obviously, but also tell them about the mistakes you made as in: MAS way too hard, knytt experiment not turning out because you listened to the community instead of following your own ideas.

Yeah, I plan to bring a lot of those points up! Thanks for the suggestions and more is always welcome!

Maybe you could mention some post-development tips. I've seen much focus on making games, but little about the tasks after the game is out. Distribution, networking, monetizing and other such things that outsiders have little or no idea about. Less exciting but perhaps just as important for a pro.

Good luck with the lecture!

You can talk about your experiences working with other people: musicians, artists, and so on. You can also talk about the importance (both pros and cons) of having a community of people that follow your games.

Oh, and you can also make public the slides of the lecture or a video of the lecture. That would be nice  .

Is there actually a procedure to making a Dragon Noir? Is there some sort of checklist you can go through to use to tell someone how you made it? Can those intuitive creative processes be verbally distilled (can they be put down on paper)?

How do you pace a game? How do you make sure you've got a perfect balance in terms of level design to keep things interesting, fresh, compelling (utilizing differing graphical styles, differing methods of traversal and movement)?

Those are some questions I'd like to have answered.

Also, I don't know the background of this university and what they study, but if they already are studying gamedesign, you wouldn't want to dive too deep into how you make games and what techniques you use. They might already be learning about those. Maybe you can ask about what they're learning before you prepare yourself (given that you haven't gone there already)

I think it already happened:

http://www1.itu.dk/sw121488.asp?m=2&y=2010&showDay=2

...slides? 

I've searched the forum for "vimeo", "lecture", and "copenhagen"...I didn't find anybody who posted this:
http://vimeo.com/9440930
 

Cool.
Also, now everyone who pays attention will know the "official" pronunciation of Knytt and Saira.

Awesome!

Thanks for posting that video Looki. I'll take a look at it when I come home.

I've searched the forum for "vimeo", "lecture", and "copenhagen"...I didn't find anybody who posted this:
http://vimeo.com/9440930
 

...was that smb2 clone the new game?

...was that smb2 clone the new game?

HA! I so called that.


About part 1 of the video... I have to say, it feels like my life might end up playing out a lot like that.  I have this really big adventure game I've been working on for the last 8 months.  I devote so much thought to this game.  I have such big dreams for it.  I have documents full of random stuff that I'd like to incorporate into my game...
But do you know what I have to show for this after almost 8 months of development?  9 mugshots (3 of which are in my avatar), 8 songs, a placeholder sprite, a rushed 16-color generic grass and dirt tileset, and a game engine that doesn't even have all the necessities yet (like support for animated sprites, display of text, or even functional hit-detection).

Judging from your story and seeing where my game is right now, I'd say this is probably just going to be another failure, which is really depressing for me to think about given how much thought I've dedicated to it.  If I ever want to accomplish anything, I'm going to need to learn to start smaller, and I'm going to need to learn how to actually get stuff done.
The other parts of the video helped a lot in that aspect except for one thing:  Unlike Nifflas, I can't draw, and my pixel art skills are just barely sprouting, so placeholder graphics is about the best I am capable of.  I mean, I couldn't animate a sprite for my life.


Eh, enough about me.
Nifflas, that was very insightful to watch.  And now I finally know how to do a proper sound effect!

I've also watched the movie last night, and it also helped me a lot too.

As one of the few (probably many will come after me:P) I want to say to Nifflas: You did a very good presentation, aside from the fact that you look a bit nervous and unprepared sometimes) It was very well done that you added jokes in the presentation like: showing all the steps making me think: yeah, I want to do that too, and yeah, that too, and then you say: scrap it. waste of time. LOL. My reaction on that was: heheh, lol, yeah thats even better!

I also find it funny that you said things like: you probably don't know what I'm talking about right? (tracker stuff)