![]() Roberts started with the intention of writing a graphic novel, and simply followed the idea wherever it took him - very often into uncharted waters. Indeed, when he created the first demo in 2012, he did so "in total isolation as a developer." No feedback from a peer group, no education in game development he had never so much as read a book on game design theory. There is no question that Roberts struggled to finish Gorogoa and bring it to market, and that's largely down to a "bespoke" development process that was defined as much by naivety and inexperience as it was by his abundant talent. Every piece of Gorogoa was a new problem." If you build a game with a particular mechanic, not every story makes sense to tell that way. ![]() "The lesson, I hope, is about that thought process, by giving an example of what I went through to figure that out. Jason Roberts collecting a BAFTA for Best Debut Game The overall theme was about my struggle, over the years, to make the content of the game the themes work with the mechanics I had made. "I don't know which of the things I did I should encourage people to emulate, and which I shouldn't. "When I try and talk about it, it's just this confusing word salad that comes out of my head," he continues. Gorogoa is, he says, "a non-verbal experience" by design, and one created almost entirely on his own. In addition, the level of interest in hearing him explain his process since it launched to rapturous reviews in December 2017 is difficult to square with the way he sees the game. Roberts' speaks with a measured, even tone, and one gets the impression that he's no great lover of the spotlight. But I don't think I'd advise anybody else to." It's the first big talk I've done at GDC, and I didn't realise how much work goes into it. "But I still stressed a lot about the talk. "A little bit," Roberts concedes, when I ask if that's how the crowd's enthusiastic reception felt. "In a sense, making an unwise decision among wiser people will result in uniqueness" Seven years after work on Gorogoa started in earnest, Roberts is at GDC to take his victory lap. The room, one of the largest at GDC, is teeming with people, his arrival on stage greeted not just by applause, but a generous amount of enthusiastic cheering and hollering. That is very much the feeling during the talk given by Buried Signal's Jason Roberts, the one-man band behind the singular puzzle title Gorogoa, his first ever published game. The most distinctive creators from the previous year are given the biggest stages, and what often feels like the entire games industry gathers to reflect on their achievements - to gain a little insight into how brilliance works. In both you’re interacting to progress, letting the worlds unfurl in unexpected and wonderful directions, but where Chuchel is warmly comedic, Gorogoa is austere and elegant.A prominent indie designer once explained the Game Developers Conference to me like this: E3, PAX, EGX and their ilk are the race, but GDC is the victory lap. In terms of its space in gaming, I’d put it as a counterpoint to something like Amanita’s upcoming surreal puzzle toybox, Chuchel. Gorogoa rewards your persistence with delightful elegant mechanisms. I know that Roberts felt a degree of challenge in finding hidden patterns in Gorogoa was important in creating the sense that they were indeed hidden patterns, but I get the sense that that wouldn’t have extended to outright frustration. ![]() The game is structured around seeing these connections in the world and frustration linked in an interesting way to moments I remember from undergraduate maths classes where you’d catch a glimpse of a universal connection within the abstracted fabric and then lose the thread. ![]() I was actually wondering whether frustration could form an interesting part of Gorogoa in a way that differs from the normal point and click/puzzle game frustration. None of them lasted long, but being able to flow through those segments of the story instead of butting my head against them is adding to the appeal of that second playthrough. I had moments where I simply couldn’t see a connection, or where I’d missed a vital way to change one tile and started to feel that rising tide of irritation. ![]()
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