I realize I’m bleeding a little bit into August, here, but here’s your monthly check-in all the same! June saw a variety of streams and guests and lots more work on Imaginal, amidst the whirlwind that is E3.
Here’s what fun July had in store:
Category Archives: Games and Game Development
Thoughts on games and game development
Lisa’s Indie Adventure Update – June 2015
Greetings friends! It is once again time for my monthly update on my indie adventures. If you recall from May, I cracked down on taking care of myself and ensuring that I took proper breaks, so as not to burn out super quickly.
1. Part of June was a lot of behind-the-scenes work on plotting my website revamp. While I restructured things and posted some new pages on my current streaming project, I haven’t pulled the trigger as far as an updated front page and a theme change. However, just this week, it seems I have accidentally managed to update my old theme and lose all the custom CSS I had in here, so I’m probably going to finalize the revamp sooner rather than later.
2. E3 was also this month, and with it game a number of gatherings with visiting game devs from all over. I got to reconnect with folks and learn about exciting projects and developments. On the floor itself, I was especially excited by For Honor and Trackmania (the latter being a surprise to me as I had never played the franchise, but the 2-players-driving-1-car mode sold me!). However, a downside was that the week leading up to and during E3 was really rough on me, health-wise, and I struggled to stay positive and not get too down on myself about the limitations I have to deal with.
3. More work on Imaginal included the beginnings of an installation version with interactive LED lights, lots more insight writing, and work on some nuts and bolts to get it release-ready. I also brainstormed with folks about some fun ideas for how to launch the game, which I’ll keep on the DL for now, but it should be fun. I also submitted the game to NotGamesFest 2015, a festival with a focus on more interactive art pieces.
4. I had a great dev stream with Adriel Wallick on Idea Generation that was great fun for both of us as well as the stream. We tackled some brainstorming exercises and came up with loads of silly game ideas. My hope is that someone is inspired enough to make one of them.
5. The SteamLUG episode that I recorded for was posted, talking about Slow Down, Bull, Linux, games I’ve been playing lately, and indie games in general.
6. Cat Trick is coming back into being an active project! I had a great stream about all the considerations one must take when making a mobile game out of a PC prototype, and then an in-depth follow-up article about the decision making process when dealing with larger, goal-oriented decisions to be made. With those two things I’m feeling pretty good about starting back in on development with this game.
7. I’ve been having a lot of great times making levels for Hyperlight Drifter, especially in recent weeks when I’ve been focusing a lot on combat-oriented rooms. I feel like I’ll always be a combat designer at heart 🙂
8. I’ve started doing a monthly Patron Hangout for my $30+ pier patrons, wherein we hangout and talk about whatever. I just had my first one!
So what was the big insight for this month? As I mentioned a bit earlier, E3 week was super rough on me, physically. When I have lots of plans for the games and projects I want to work on, and they all fall to nothing because I can barely move for a day, it is really demoralizing. Fortunately I have a lot of people in my life who encourage me and remind me to focus on the positive and the things I *have* accomplished instead of what I wanted to accomplish but couldn’t.
It was also rough in the sense of just feeling like I’m able to keep up with my industry peers. I took E3 very slow, and several nights opted to retreat home to the burrow instead of stick around looking for adventure (perhaps as a reaction to completely overdoing it the weekend before and paying for it in exhaustion).
The insight, then, is that I have to learn to align my expectations with my physical limitations. Thinking about what I actually CAN do in the time I have, and not beating myself up if I don’t live up to superhuman standards. I think it will still be a struggle for me to accept this about myself, but the insight is there.
If you’ll notice, the theme for the past couple of months in the insight department has been all about self-care. There’s an insight in that fact alone, for sure 🙂
As always, if you would like in on the more frequent updates, or want to help me continue my dev streaming initiatives, please consider supporting me on Patreon!
Cat Trick Plots and Plans
On my most recent developer stream, I dove into the not-so-simple process of preparing my PC-based game jam entry, Cat Trick, for release as a mobile title. There were lots of technical things discussed, but I think the most interesting and insightful segment of the stream was the last part, where we discussed how a lot of design and format decisions depend on the clarity of my goals for what I want out of this game. I recently went over my decisions with my teammate, Will, and since we were in agreement in all of them, I decided to walk through my entire decision-making process here.
Lisa’s Indie Adventure Update – May 2015
Humans! It is once again time for a monthly Indie Lisa Status update! My April post saw me having all sorts of adventures, and learning a lesson about my new perception of work life balance.
So as for May, did I learn anything? Let’s find out! May adventures included:
Schoolhouse Jam Postmortem
Last weekend I participated in (and assisted in the wrangling of) a small experimental game jam focused on games for classroom learning. I’ve always recognized educational games from afar as something challenging and impressive, but this was my first time dabbling in it myself, with 0 experience making an educational game. I learned SO much about educational game design and the shortcomings of my own design intuition in this context, even from one small weekend prototype. It was incredibly valuable!
Flaws and Games and Character
On one of my recent “class” streams, a conversation evolved about how the flaws of games can give them character. It really started out as looking streamlining between generations of genres. In our case we were playing Borderlands 2, and I was observing how a lot of tropes of that generation were present in Destiny as a more modern “rpg-shooter” hybrid, but had been hyper streamlined. Some of the older conventions of the late PS3/XBox 360 era of shooters now felt a little clunky – things like waiting on NPC positioning for events to occur, the “turn-in” experience, accomplishing different tasks via different menus which sometimes had limited access, how sometimes the relationship between systems and options made some actions obsolete and other decision making processes feel paralyzing.
Lisa’s Indie Adventure Update – April 2015
Ahoy ahoy humans! I hope you well. It has been little over a month since my big indie jump, and I wanted to a general update.
Hi!
Hi I’m Lisa and I’m a game designer! I worked on AAA games for 6 years and now I’m independent. I love helping other people get better at making games and dev streams are my jam. These days my games are a little weird and personal and experimental, and I’m happy to share the process of making them with you!
I’m making games and doing dev streams to share my knowledge of game design with aspiring developers and curious gamers. Your support will let me continue making this content.
Lisa Goes Indie
I suppose this was inevitable.
Yes, it’s true. After 6 incredible years as a designer at Insomniac Games, it is time for me to fly away for new adventure. I’m going indie.
I’m feeling as one would expect, which is at a moving point on the oscillating curve between total excitement and utter terror, but that seems to be par for the course. I’m sure you have questions, the biggest being, well…
What are you going to do?
Well, I’m going to be making my own games full-time, which is the biggest part of all this, but for this initial phase in the indie adventure I want to do a bit more.
For the past several years I have been a big proponent of sharing design knowledge among other developers, helping students and aspiring designers, and streaming in multiple game development capacities. I want to devote more of my time to doing these things, but to pull this off I need the support of the community.
I’ve started a Patreon to support these goals. If you have been a fan of my developer streams, my game jam feedback streams, and my “game design class” streams, please consider supporting me so that I can continue to do them. Or, if you believe in my desire to take my 6 years of design experience and try to use it to help as many people as possible become better designers, please also consider supporting me 🙂
If you’re not in a place where you can support on a monthly basis but would still like to help with the streaming initiative, or just want to help support me making my own games, I can also take paypal donations:
Will you be doing anything else?
I’ll move to contracting with Insomniac for the launch of Slow Down, Bull, and am open to other contracting work if they are intriguing projects on the design front, just drop me an email at wertle@wertle.com!
I also love to speak, especially to students, and my schedule has become more flexible! If you want to contact me about speaking opportunities, please email me – wertle@wertle.com.
Special Thanks
I want to thank everyone at Insomniac Games for all your brilliance and camaraderie and support over the past 6 years. You were the crucible that honed me into the designer that I am today, and I will miss you all terribly. Please don’t be strangers! I especially want to thank Ted Price for believing in me and giving me an opportunity to grow that I probably could not have gotten anyplace else in the industry.
Thank you to the indie community, who has already been such a huge source of support to me before I even got here officially. You are all such kind, big-hearted, passionate people and I am excited to be so welcomed among you.
My mentors, who have always been there for me and helped me grow and learn and be better (and who didn’t even TRY to PRETEND to be surprised that this was my next course of action 😛 ).
Thank you to my family, for understanding why I have to do this thing and for always just wanting me to be happy.
To everyone who’s ever hung out in my streams or played my games or thanked me for inspiring them or sent me an encouraging word on twitter or been delighted by a piece of content I made and let me know about it. You are amazing and you are most of the reason I’m doing this.
And now…
Adventure!
My Train Jam
“How was Train Jam?”
People have been asking me this all weekend, of course, and it’s been a little bit difficult to answer. I usually opt for “it was an adventure,” which seems to perplex people, especially after the stall. I answer that way thinking about my ETC fundamentals “adventure module” from back in grad school, and the perspective that an adventure doesn’t necessarily mean an entirely positive experience, and that there can be some danger involved in addition to fun and insight.
Well, I could try to answer briefly: It was wonderful and terrible.
When I told Adriel I wanted to write about my experience, she said “Yes. The good and the bad.” So, I suppose, let me explain from the beginning.