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Concept to Competition, Mastering Game Development with Olli Mäntylä
123 Plays1 year ago
In this enlightening episode of the Player: Engage podcast, host Greg is joined by Olli Mäntylä, a pivotal figure in the gaming industry. Olli, who serves as the director of the Game Development World Championship (GDWC) and the founder and CEO of Ace Lagoon, shares an in-depth look into the workings of the GDWC. He explains how the championship is not just a competition but a platform that allows developers from around the globe to showcase their games. Olli emphasizes that the GDWC is designed to be accessible to game developers of all levels, from indie to more established studios, and discusses the variety of prizes that range from industry recognition to substantial funding and publishing deals.
The conversation also delves into the challenges and intricacies of organizing such a massive event, including the process of game submission, judging, and feedback. Olli reveals that he personally plays over 2,000 games a year to ensure a fair and comprehensive evaluation process. He also discusses the new initiatives by Ace Lagoon, like the Pipelines project, which aims to connect developers with publishers and funding opportunities.
Key Takeaways:
- Global Participation: Learn how developers worldwide can enter their games, regardless of the development stage.
- Judging Insights: Discover the unique challenges of judging thousands of games and how biases are managed.
- Pipelines Initiative: A new opportunity for developers to secure funding and support.
For a deeper understanding of these topics and to get a firsthand account of the behind-the-scenes efforts that go into organizing a global game development competition, tune into this episode of Player: Engage.
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Transcript
Introduction of Ali Mandala and GDWC
00:00:08
Speaker
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Player Engage podcast. Greg here. Today we're joined by Ali Mandala. He is the director at the Game Development World Championship. He's the founder and CEO of Ace Lagoon, and he's also had other roles as biz dev and co-founder in the gaming industry. And I'm really excited about today's episode because I think when you start hearing more what they do at the Game Development World Championship, you'll get a better understanding of that and how he gets to play all these different games.
00:00:36
Speaker
Before we even jump into it, Ali, thank you so much for joining me today. Is there anything you'd like to say to introduce yourself? Thank you for having me, Greg. And hello to everybody. And I think we are good to jump into the questions. That was already a pretty all-encompassing intro, I think.
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, so our audience can kind of get an understanding.
Overview of GDWC's Purpose and Prizes
00:00:57
Speaker
Ali and I met at GDC this year. He helped some of our colleagues at our community clubhouse, which you'll hear more about in the next few weeks. But I was introduced to Ali and his position and what they do at the Game Development World Championship. And I'm going to hand it over to you here, Ali, to kind of explain what you do at the World
00:01:19
Speaker
GDWC is what I'll call it because it's a little easier, but I'll let you explain what they do and let people understand why it's so cool.
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So GDWC is a global open competition for game developers, meaning basically anybody anywhere can participate and submit a game that they have either developed and released within like a narrow window before the competition or that they are working on right now. And just to make this clear to everybody, we are not a game jam. So you don't have to make the game for us. You can just submit the games that you're working on anyway.
00:01:54
Speaker
And that's basically it. We kind of do like an Oscar thing here, where we collect all the games, then we bring in industry people to pick the winners of best games in multiple different categories. And that's kind of the gist of the whole thing. So not a game, Jen, but any indie game who's making your developer that's making a game can join the GDWC and trying to win an award in specific categories. What are the typical types of prizes that they're shooting for?
00:02:25
Speaker
The prices vary a lot. In the past years we used to bring in representatives from the development teams to visit us in Finland and to meet people from the Finnish games industry and just have a bit of fun and so on.
00:02:41
Speaker
and that was one of the main prices we used to do ourselves. Then we've had lots of great sponsors and partners throughout the years who have provided lots of their services, like special services to help the developers forward. We've had cash prizes even in the past, and also software licenses, of course, for different tools. Houdini has been a great sponsor over the years multiple times, and we've given out a lot of Houdini licenses.
00:03:10
Speaker
And we've even had publishing deals from a VR publishing partner in the past and even marketing funding for mobile games going up to $100,000 for the winner and so on. So we've had all kinds of prizes ranging from basically the whole spectrum that you can imagine.
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. So I mean, in my mind, and you can correct me, but if you have an indie game that's in a decent state, close to launch or playable, I guess, right? There's no negative, except maybe time and effort, because obviously time and effort is something that studios have, but there's no reason that you shouldn't look into things like this, right?
Participant Benefits and Challenges in GDWC
00:03:50
Speaker
Because there's prizes, there's visibility, right? You're
00:03:54
Speaker
It's a way to get noticed. Am I wrong? Am I thinking here? No, no, you're absolutely correct. Especially we understand that the developers have a lot on their plate and limited amount of time to do things. So we try to make the participation as easy as possible, depending a bit on the season that we have. And thus our categories change a bit for each season. So sometimes there might be a bit more work if you want to participate into everything.
00:04:22
Speaker
And sometimes there's less categories and less work to participate. And also, if you just want to participate on the default categories that we do ourselves, then it's really quick and easy usually.
00:04:35
Speaker
So, and you, I think you definitely always should look into, you should always participate in GDWC and you should of course look at other opportunities because they all just aim to promote the games that are out there and coming out and so on. And I mean, that is one of the biggest challenges most developers face is to get found and get seen by people. So definitely you should like generally aim to like do anything you can to get rid of your game.
00:05:02
Speaker
In the indie world, it's often people always talk about, I don't know where to get funding. I'm looking for funding. Where do I get funding? Whether it be GDWC or other contests, this is a great way to learn visibility of, hey, what do others think of my game? Where can I improve my pitch? What else do I need to add this? And I'm assuming this is the type of feedback you'll give, not to everyone, obviously, because you're getting lots of applicants. But towards the end, I assume everyone's taking this advice and hopefully running with it.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, the feedback is absolutely a big challenge because of the amount of games we get. And unfortunately, we haven't been able to provide proper feedback for all the games in the competition. It is something we are looking to fix and hopefully can fix in the future.
00:05:46
Speaker
Overall, I think you should definitely just take it as an experience and see what you can... If you win, great. If you don't win, then take the steps of thinking, what could I have done better? What was maybe the things affecting my game and so on? But also, there is the fact that if you don't win, there's nothing necessarily wrong with your game.
00:06:11
Speaker
you might literally be on the position 6 from out of hundreds of games. And if we reward top 5 then unfortunately you didn't quite make it.
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah, and that shouldn't dissuade people, right? Because I mean, a lot of the launch of a game is timing, it's the community that you've built all this stuff around it as well, right? And absolutely, you know, it's funny how you can have the best idea in the world. But if the timing isn't right, it's just not gonna be the right time for it. And I don't think people really factor that in. I mean, it's a bit of luck, right? And you can't really
00:06:44
Speaker
do that, but what you can control is the game that you're building. You can take the feedback from what you get from GDWC, from your other players as well to hear what you're going to do. And you can build upon that. And I think, I mean, this is part of the reason you might go into early access or you might go to alpha and beta to get that feedback. So the main question I had on my mind is not the main question at all, is how many games you think you play a year? I've probably played well over 2000 games a year easily.
00:07:12
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, last season we had over 1,900 games submitted. The season before that was over 1,800 games. I have play-tested not everything, but I have play-tested most of them. And on top of that, then the previous season before that as well. So this is a question I just had for myself.
00:07:39
Speaker
How do you, and this is a silly question, how do you deal with installing all these games? There must be a ton of work that has to go into just setting this up. That is true. I mean, Steam is a luckily pretty good tool, and a lot of games, even if they're not finished yet, they are already on Steam one way or another, or on itch.io. And they are both really good for installing games, especially Steam, of course.
00:08:03
Speaker
and other storefronts as well, if the games are available in there in one form or the other. But then, of course, a lot of them are just installation files that we have to download, we have to check them, everything that they're safe, and then just install them. And we use remote gaming machines for that, just for security reasons, to install everything on a separate machine.
00:08:30
Speaker
But yeah, it is a bit of a process and it takes quite a bit of time.
Judging Process and Objectivity in GDWC
00:08:35
Speaker
Even just activating the games on Steam is a bit of a workload to be honest.
00:08:41
Speaker
It's funny, I was thinking about that this morning, I was like, wow, he must spend a lot of time still like games, like gaming anxiety thinking about like, this random publisher, you've never heard of a developer, you've never heard of I'm going to install their game on my computer right now and just trust it's going to work. And obviously, you're using the remote machine, so you so you're safer there. But I just kind of thought about wow, that's a that's a time you got to learn how to juggle your time with that.
00:09:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's you're going to have to have multiple things running at the same time just to like set everything up. So because you have transferring like, not even just downloading all the installation files, that's already a bit of a workload. And luckily, there are some ways to like automate that partially at least. So we can like load big chunks of them at once. And, and it also varies how people provide their games.
00:09:25
Speaker
Largely, like I just mentioned, Itch.io and Steam games and just like Google Drive download links and stuff like that. So when you're playing these...
00:09:37
Speaker
few thousand games, right? Everyone has a bias. Some people like sports games, some people like roguelites, hyper casuals, popular, I saw casuals gonna make more of a comeback here, right? And obviously, there's gonna be some bias towards these games when you're playing them, right? How do you and I know there's other judges as well, right? But how do you kind of mentally set your mindset towards all right, I'm not necessarily playing this
00:10:01
Speaker
for fun, obviously it is for fun, but you may not pick up a rogue light if you don't like rogue lights that are fun, but how do you go in with an honest judgment when you're playing a game type that may not be your cup of tea?
00:10:12
Speaker
That is, first of all, a challenge and a really good question. I can't say how exactly other judges necessarily do this. And we've had cases where judges have directly admitted that they don't like specific type of game and even asked if they can skip those type of games or give them to other judges, which we usually accommodate if they don't feel that they can comfortably or be fair for the game.
00:10:34
Speaker
Funnily enough, we've even had judges say that I don't like these types of games and this was the best game of the year. So I think that is a very high praise for any game.
00:10:47
Speaker
But personally, I think what helps is just having a background in having first of all worked in game development and also just having played all kinds of games over the years and from all the way back in the history of Commodore 64. So I have some experience with all kinds of games in technical sense and design sense.
00:11:09
Speaker
on a pretty wide degree. So I think that gives a good perspective. And you, of course, kind of have to force yourself a little bit to think like, what am I thinking? Am I just like, am I being objective about this game?
00:11:26
Speaker
There are games that are maybe for me not my favorite things, but then I kind of have to sort of steer myself towards like, okay, what are the cool things in these games? Usually what people like, does this seem to have those elements? And even just like basic mechanics, like, is the game doing basic mechanics well? Like, is there something that's not gender dependent that just is
00:11:52
Speaker
annoyingly done for example or poorly done or super well done or so on so
00:11:58
Speaker
So yeah, it is a balancing act. And you kind of have to always rank the games against each other, which becomes even more challenging because you can have so different types of games. We don't do traditionally just genre-specific categories. We just have more of a team size and commercial, non-commercial games categories and that kind of thing.
00:12:24
Speaker
So you can have technically like an RPG going against an FPS and an RTS game. And then it's like, OK, even if I like all of these, they are very different experiences. They are very different to start. And then you have to sort of like, what are the things that I'm valuing here, especially? And it's not easy, but you kind of have to. Ultimately, you have to put one game above the other and you have to have a reason for that.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of crazy how it's like, you just said an RPG versus an FPS, right? Like, it's not normally, I'm not gonna say it's not fair, because a great RPG and a great FPS are both going to be great games. Just interesting how you get to mix the two genres. And I get it. It's awesome. I love you. You're looking for the best of the best. And it's a fascinating,
00:13:14
Speaker
Fascinating topic and I think I don't know why I'm liking it to this kind of thing but you know when you go to the eye doctor you change your lens like what's better one or two and one or two and then the guard two or three two or three I'm just like wow when you're playing this many games they must bleed and blend into each other and one of the things I'm terrible at and trying to get better at is staying organized keeping your notes and all this stuff.
00:13:38
Speaker
Well, what's your preferred method of staying organized? How do you stay on top and make sure you know that, hey, this game I played first happened to be the best game, even though 685 games later, I still don't have that one. There is, like, first of all, like we used to do just Google Sheets heavily and with ranking systems there. Now we have our own ranking tools as a part of our platform that we use. But that is something where you kind of have to just revisit the games.
00:14:07
Speaker
and you have to relook it. Because the fact is, of course, it takes a long time to review. Even if we're doing preliminary reviews, it takes time to go through all the games. So you kind of have to revisit them, especially the top list of why are these games... These games got here yesterday, or these games got here last week.
00:14:31
Speaker
This week, you just might be on a different mindset. And that way, your ranking might be changed off. It can be a clear offset. So you kind of have to revisit them regularly and just re-think, is this actually better than that? Or should this actually be higher? Should this actually be lower?
00:14:52
Speaker
But once you go through the games multiple times, checking, not necessarily play testing every time, but just reviewing trailers, screen search, description, and you have some idea on your head what it feels like to play, you start seeing relatively quickly, at least, let's say we have an indie category with 800 games,
00:15:15
Speaker
you start seeing like, okay, these certain games keep creeping up again and again to the top, maybe not to the top five, maybe not even to the top 10, but easily the right top 30, top 50. And then you sort of move over that again and again and again and again, and you start finding like, okay, what is the differences start become narrower of like, or like, why is this better than this and so on.
00:15:41
Speaker
And again, the factors may move about a little bit as you go through that. But you can't really directly just trust that the game that I put as number one a week ago will still be number one this week, even if I currently don't instantly put anything ahead of it.
00:16:05
Speaker
So with the ranking stuff, right? Are you are you communicating with the other judges or is it a private type of thing where you're not allowed to share information until the end? That varies a little bit. We have had we've done like especially like preview judging where the judges just just give their own rankings and they have different sets of games. And and then we sort of like put those numbers together. But then we've also like our with our own internal team, we've gone through
00:16:35
Speaker
uh we've gone through the games and just like discuss together especially when when it's come time because like when the final juries review the games they don't review all the games we can dump 800 games to a visiting judge uh so they get a short list of games so then it becomes like okay we we have now have a ranking of roughly 800 games which let's say there's like
00:16:57
Speaker
top hundred top hundred and fifty is like the interesting part and we already have like a top thirty that we need to provide judges then we usually go through like okay is this really the best top thirty there is and we review it again multiple times of like and there usually some switching around at the very top at that point still.
00:17:18
Speaker
But we kind of have to be confident in the shortlist that we provide to the final judges. And just to sort of continue on that a little bit, we don't prevent the final jury members from discussing. We used to actually have
00:17:35
Speaker
We sort of shifted around the format a little bit. We used to have smaller juries in the past for the final juries, but they used to have like a meeting where they discussed together about the actual top listing. But we've gone more towards bringing in more judges and allowing them to sort of
00:17:53
Speaker
because working out schedules for all the guest judges, especially with judges from different continents and so on, can become really challenging for the meetings. So we've kind of moved towards just like a ranking system where everybody ranks the games the way they see best on their own. But again, some of them are from the same company, so they discuss.
00:18:14
Speaker
When you're in your role, does gaming become less fun because of how much work you're putting into it? On the judging period, it kind of does. It does kill the vibe a little bit over time for a brief while. But like, but then after a while, you just I mean, gaming is still fun. You kind of jump back into your favorite games that you want to play and just continue with that.
00:18:44
Speaker
Usually, this would be my kind of fireball around question, but I'm going to ask you now is that when you're kind of judging and you kind of need to kind of clean your palette, right? Is there a game you'll always pick up that you'll know can, hey, reset me? Oh, that's a good question. I haven't really thought about that. Oh, it's a palette cleanser, right? Maybe solitaire.
00:19:06
Speaker
Maybe I might play Hitman when I play that, when I do that. Or Payday 2, because those are like really long time games that I've been playing for a long time. Yeah, I want to pick a Payday 3. I haven't yet. I heard, I don't know if they've changed this, but the original progression system that they had, I don't like that type of progression system personally, so I just didn't pick it up.
00:19:34
Speaker
Yeah, it was a it was an interesting start to that game. Yeah. So let's actually go into our fireball round. I'm just gonna throw a few questions at you. Super simple questions. Just answer them as you would. First question is what do you have for breakfast today? Today coffee. Perfect. If you what's your dream vacation? Dream vacation?
00:19:59
Speaker
Maybe, okay, maybe like the next one I'm planning is maybe going to New York, because I haven't been to New York. So that's, that's probably it right now. Well, if you come to New York, hit up Ed and I, we're both outside of New York. I will. If you are going to go to a bar and order a drink, what is the drink you're ordering? Gin and tonic made from Napua Gin. Okay. And then the last question I have for you is what is your all time favorite game?
00:20:30
Speaker
Oh, that's well, yeah, that is a challenging one. I think, well, I will hit month the latest, the world of vaccination is really good. Payday two is also awesome. I played it. A lot of it. I have a love hate relationship with that game.
00:20:48
Speaker
And then, but then like Fallout 2 is definitely one of my all-time favorites. I played it back when it came out. I was probably too young to play it, but I still played it. I actually like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, and then like Baldur's Gate games were basically my way of learning English. And because I played them with, and actually, playing the escape tournament, I played with like a Finnish to English dictionary, because that was the only way I could like understand anything.
00:21:18
Speaker
And then like all of those are great, but also one like brother, a tale of two sons, that is like, that is absolutely one of the best games I've ever played. So that has to be like really at the high end of them. So it's kind of split between those. And I'm kind of suspecting that you usually get this kind of answer.
00:21:39
Speaker
No, it always really varies to be honest with you. You get a lot of kind of the basics like mine, not basics like Minecraft, right? I mean, Fortnite, they've been around for a long time. I'm partial to RTSs, like the Command and Conquerors of the day. Also a good one. Yeah.
00:21:57
Speaker
But I think that's all I have for you for the hot seat. So I like your answers, but let's go back to competition.
Trends and Submission Process in GDWC
00:22:05
Speaker
First off, I mean, within your role where you're sitting, I feel like you have visibility on what's coming out in gaming, right?
00:22:12
Speaker
feel like you have a front seat to the current trends that are happening in gaming. And before I let you answer this, there's things that are like live ops are always online types of games, which I don't know if you can test that because the games may not be in a stage that are there. But do you have that visibility on kind of where people think games are going and does it align properly, would you say? I think partially, yes. I mean, at least we can see interesting trends there.
00:22:43
Speaker
They might be a bit on a delay. For example, I know that Among Us was in our competition before it broke big. That was before my time, I think, like two years ago. But it was in the competition. I don't know if they were... It didn't win, so I don't know if they were able to see what it would become. I suspect nobody was able to see that.
00:23:12
Speaker
But on the trend side, after COVID, we saw a huge spike in these all-nova games jumping in. There was always these all-nova in the competition, but there was a huge spike of them. And then the spike went away in the following years. They are still there, but nowhere near as many as back then.
00:23:39
Speaker
Also we've seen like adventure games definitely are consistently there and like a really there's really good quality adventure like all point and click adventure games or variations of that type of game. Like if you look at the marketplace as like just like briefly it might seem that they are dead but they definitely are there at least I mean to be honest I don't know if they are selling
00:24:01
Speaker
they are there they are being made and they are really good and we've seen a couple of spikes maybe in a few years where there's been surprisingly many of them but again they take quite a bit of time to make so understandably not every year also like i've seen weird i wouldn't maybe call this a trend but one year we had suddenly three games that all had like one of the core mechanics was delivering mail
00:24:29
Speaker
And then we haven't seen any like that afterwards. But it was like one year, three of those, and then none afterwards. So it was kind of funny just to like notice that from among the older games. But yeah, it's hard to say if we really like, we don't necessarily even look at that, but it will be,
00:24:53
Speaker
It would be interesting to look at what the trends overall are and how they match to market trends in general. As for games as service games go, we do get those as well. Every now and then, they are a bit more challenging because the game needs to be out properly for it to work. Well, it depends a bit on how it's set up, usually.
00:25:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's for example, I didn't see what's the that was big hit last fall, the little little companies called. Yeah, it has a really interesting visuals, like almost like PlayStation one era kind of thing, but it's still a bit of its own style.
00:25:37
Speaker
have to check it out. But that's an interesting thing is like, and I'm guessing the answer is no, based on what you said, but you're not selling any of these trends or analytics, not selling, I'm sorry if selling comes to mind, but like creating white papers like hey, this year, we had 85 action games and 10% of them were hypercat. I don't know. Like you don't you don't do any sort of trends or white papers with their with analytics with this type of stuff, huh? Yeah, we are. That is that is something we have considered. We just haven't like,
00:26:04
Speaker
We honestly haven't had the manpower to focus on that. But it is something that's been on the mind because there is a lot of games and it would be interesting to pull that type of data. We do have a survey for the developers as a part of the submission, which is completely optional, where we do get some details on what kind of tools they use, that kind of basic stuff, and do they plan to use outsourcing, for example, and stuff like that.
00:26:32
Speaker
Cool. A little bit there, but we haven't fully embraced that part yet. You're seeing a treasure trove of data here. Yeah, I know.
00:26:42
Speaker
Let's talk about it from the publisher, the studio, the developer, right? Because these are the guys that are in gals who are applying, trying to get their game made, looking for funding. Can you kind of give us the high level rundown of what it's like to apply what happens when we're accepted and kind of the next steps if I was creating my own game?
00:27:03
Speaker
Okay, so if you want to submit your game, the first thing is just to create an account on our site at teddywc.com. Then you need to add your team, which can be your company. It can be if you're a publisher, it can be your publishing company. It can be if you're a student team, just your student team's name.
00:27:23
Speaker
Or if you're a solo developer, then just the name that you want to have, the end of it that you want to be connected to your game. And then you add your game. The game submission form, like I said earlier, it varies a little bit based on what categories we have. But basically, you need to provide us just a description of the game and, of course, name for it. And what platforms it's on, preferably a trailer, some screenshots,
00:27:52
Speaker
And that's majority of it. And then if you just want to participate in one of our main categories, that's automatic. Once you submit it, you don't need to select anything. If there are, depending on what custom categories we have there, you might have to fill out some extra details.
00:28:08
Speaker
for some of those if you want to participate in them. And then basically you just hit submit. There is a bit at the end of the form where you need to submit also an activation key or download link or something that we have an access to the build.
00:28:25
Speaker
You don't have to do that right away, because we have roughly four months of submission time usually per season. So some people join, of course, really early, but they don't necessarily have a build then. So they can add the build in later as well. So it is, I'd say, anywhere from five to 10 minutes max to do the whole thing generally.
00:28:49
Speaker
So when you're accepted, you get an email, hey, you made it, and we need your key by a certain period, because you got those months to keep building, keep grinding, whatever you got to do to build it, right? Then if you're accepted, how long is the typical kind of process from being accepted to the awards?
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, so we don't really do the accepting phase specifically because basically everybody is automatically in the competition. We just straight up go into like preliminary judging and we kind of consider every game is a possible winner at that point.
00:29:23
Speaker
So we basically we do before we close the submission time, we do reach out to developers if they haven't finished their submission, if they are missing a build or something. So we do try to remind everybody to hey, finish your submission before the time runs out, add your game in there.
00:29:40
Speaker
So for the developer, basically, if you are among the finalists for a category, you get a message from us that, hey, you are a finalist in here, and then basically depends
00:29:53
Speaker
again a bit on the things sometimes we have custom things that need to be done there for specific categories where we might require like hey you need to fill out for example this survey if you since you're a finalist in here if you want to actually have a chance at winning this is the last step sometimes there's something like that but oftentimes you just are let known that you are in the finals and then you kind of get to know at the awards if you want or not
00:30:20
Speaker
And I mean, we do request, usually at that point, some new materials from you, like videos. We usually request a thank you video from everybody, because it's kind of great to show like when we, if you can't be at the award show, to have like a video thank you. And of course, if you're a finalist, we can't tell you if you want, so we have to ask it from everybody, which is unfortunately some unnecessary work for some,
00:30:48
Speaker
you know, keeping the excitement alive. It's pretty straightforward from there overall. And right now the feedback system, like I mentioned, if we have feedback, we can send it directly to the developers from the judges. But we are looking to update the system so that you would get the feedback on the platform itself. So you could see like which categories you are on that.
00:31:14
Speaker
get the feedback straight up there. That's not there yet, unfortunately, but I aim to have it there in the near future.
Common Pitfalls and Feedback in Game Development
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, I'm curious if, and maybe this is going to go into my next question, but when it comes to feedback, is there often a type of feedback that you're giving the most? Like, hey, you're trying this too much, or this isn't clear, or is that, and maybe this rolls into this question, or what are some of the common mistakes that you see time and time again? You know, when you're building a game, you're like, this is my baby, I'm going to build the best game in the world, and some people are kind of blind to feedback, but are you seeing common mistakes that these companies, or publishers, or studio, I keep saying publishers,
00:31:50
Speaker
developers make when they're building these games? There are some that we see, but the thing is that once we get to the top 30 of most categories, it's very rare to see any kind of basic level
00:32:10
Speaker
Mix up or mistakes because the games are usually already so well polished or or well made that Not necessarily finished even if they are like alphas or something. They might they are just usually very well polished at that point But the common mistakes that we see so they come usually in earlier they include things like
00:32:33
Speaker
just like the game breaking in unnecessary ways. We've had so many games where you have some kind of tutorial window that pops up, tries to tell you something, and then it just steals all your input away, and it doesn't let you play at all.
00:32:51
Speaker
that that is really unfortunate and and like of course it's possible that that's like a mistake with special specific device so we but basically every time that that has been a problem it has all been a problem beyond testing on multiple devices so that's really unfortunate. Some things that have come up with judges as well which is not like a technical issue but
00:33:16
Speaker
but the thing that tends to annoy people, which is not the best when you are in a tight competition, being judged by multiple jury members. But this has come up that some games try to push their story and world building too much, too early in the game. And okay, this is not necessarily the most descriptive of a normal player's experience, because understandably the jury members are
00:33:44
Speaker
often times under a lot of pressure to review the games they don't have unlimited time and so on.
00:33:50
Speaker
So regardless, the basically cases where you try to start the game, and then it gives you a massive lower dump. And then like, at worst cases, it doesn't let you go past those. So for developers who love their world building, love their story, I will just urge them to like rethink how they want to feed a story to the player. Because I mean, games are still interactive mediates.
00:34:16
Speaker
you should kind of get into the interactive part, preferably a bit faster, at least in this context. So that's one of the things that we've run into a lot. It doesn't necessarily kill a game's chance, but it is usually a little bit of a mark, especially if the game, then when you die on the first obstacle or whatever, it throws you back before the Lord. Then that's usually pretty bad.
00:34:47
Speaker
Also, we've seen mobile games do things where they throw ads at your face before they let you play, which is usually a mood killer instantly. And just, I generally say, a bad practice.
00:35:03
Speaker
This is more of a trailer thing, not a game thing. The trailers are part of the review process overall, not on the final preview process, but the preliminary preview process. In that, we see a lot of trailers where there's
00:35:20
Speaker
dark screen or like black screen with slowly fading white text and then you might have like a frame or two of gameplay flashing and then you again have a long period of black screen text for slowly fading in saying something deep and meaningful of course and and like
00:35:37
Speaker
those get really jarring because you just want to see the gameplay or any game footage. So I kind of see where that kind of editing comes from, but I would really urge against that kind of editing for the trailers. Oli doesn't want teaser trailers with too much teasing. We want real trailers.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, but even if you have like, not like proper gameplay, but like a cinematics, but just show the cinematic preferably, then dark and black screen. But yeah, then just like, I think then beyond that, it's just like really weird bugs and just like games crashing and so on. Beyond that, it's usually maybe it comes down to not necessarily anything being specifically wrong, just that if you have
00:36:30
Speaker
For example, if there's like a dozen platformers, you are, then it's an easy to compare you against the other platformers. And then some of them just do the controls slightly better than the others. The same with FPS games. If you have an RTS or something like that, the menu structure can be really important how that's controlled. And it's, again, easy to compare. Interesting.
00:36:55
Speaker
I love all this stuff, right? I mean, gameplay bugs, right? That's fine. That's feedback. There's a bug in your game. But some of the other things you mentioned, like world building is such a fine line because there's so many great games out there that have good world building. But again, maybe if you're a big AAA publisher with a little bit of oomph behind you, you can you could spend a little more time world building because people will know.
00:37:17
Speaker
you're getting into, right? Whereas if you're starting this new game from this indie publisher, and you're spending 15-20 minutes watching this trailer, this cinematic, and it's just like, come on, I just want to play the game, right? Like, it's interesting to kind of hear those two different points, because I don't think they're at all related. And one is more, again, there's a bug, it's fine, we can fix the bug. The other is like a design choice of, hey, we're gonna make this unskippable intro, and you're gonna sit here for 20 minutes and learn about the whole realm. And it's just like,
00:37:45
Speaker
right when you're judging that many games, how much time do you have to like, I imagine if you die two or three times and you have to rewatch this whole thing, you're just like, screw it. I'm not, I can't do this. Yeah, that is like, that is a really like,
00:37:59
Speaker
Well, I don't want to say common issue because it's not super common. But whenever it happens, it's really annoying because the game beyond that might be really good. And usually, like, then it's not a, again, it's not a killer issue. But it is a mark against it because then again, if you have similar games where both which port are doing a really good job at what they're doing, but then the other just like prevents you from playing because it desperately wants to tell you things, make you read things or listen to things, which is fine within moderation.
00:38:29
Speaker
But then again, if the other game just lets you have a better experience to try from the start, it usually goes a bit higher. Again and again, this depends partly on the judges. So different judges value different things as well. Yeah, and I actually want one like which
00:38:49
Speaker
It's sort of a bug, but an actual technical issue that we run into a few times every season is games where the keys are, if there are keyboard control, keyboard mouse control, the keys are hard coded and they are hard coded in some other keyboard layout than what we have.
00:39:09
Speaker
So, and you can't even rebind them to fix it. So you kind of have to, I don't know if you can fix it with changing language or something, but this is something where we run into this issue multiple times where you're like, if you try to use WSD movement, it's not there. The movement keys are all over the place. And that kind of kills any playability instantly.
00:39:32
Speaker
It's, it's funny you say that I started alpha testing this RTS game and to move the camera, it's the arrow keys, but any action button is WASD keys. I'm just like, Oh, come on, man. Like this would be so much better if everything was right here. And like you said, like, I get it, right? It's like alpha and it shouldn't be, but, but I've been reading and reading, I've been
00:39:53
Speaker
podcasting of people who work in accessibility and the things they keep always talking about are remappable keys, right? Like people don't really think about that. But if you if you build it from the ground up, I mean, you're gonna open up your whole game to a whole whole new set of people with accessibility. And I realize what we're talking about now, they may not have time to stuff all this accessibility stuff in there. But if you start early, it makes a difference, right? Even just even if you don't need the accessibility, just the the
00:40:19
Speaker
quality of life by having everything right on this side of my keyboard and not spread across the whole thing makes a huge difference. Like, I think bigger than what people think like, it's frustrating to move your hand when you don't need to do to kind of especially when you're trying to be quick with it. Yeah, I fully agree with that. I think that is like one of the
00:40:37
Speaker
things that those are like fundamentals that you should get like, sort out when you're making your game. Just like the basic control structure of everything. How do you control it? Just like where are the keys? And so on. So I fully fully agree with that. And it is it is a bit of a pain if it's all over the place.
00:40:58
Speaker
for the Game Development World Championship for you guys, right? When are you collecting feedback from applicants or from the whole process and altering how things may work with judging or with other things based on the feedback of people who are either applying or part of the competition? We usually have an open feedback form in the submission form. I don't actually know. I don't think it is there right now. I think we lost it in one update.
00:41:25
Speaker
It should definitely be there. But we also have a open Discord where everybody is free to come and comment and give you their feedback. And there are things that people have given feedback and we are actively fixing things and just trying to improve things overall. So we definitely want to hear what we can do better. And so all feedback is very much welcome. The Discord is actually the best place to. Discord is what we're hearing more and more often. Everything's going on in Discord here.
00:41:52
Speaker
Yeah, I'm personally not a big fan of the like, traditional internet sort of disappearing into these walled gardens. So I kind of I'm from the forums era. So I kind of would love to see more forums. But I mean, it is becoming walled gardens now. Yeah. Nothing's safe. True. We spent a lot of time talking about GVWC and I love it. I don't have many other questions for you. But do we want to talk about Ace Lagoon, what you're doing there?
00:42:23
Speaker
Well, Ace Lagoon is basically running GDWC and responsible for that and then developing things around it. One of the things that we've done this year as a new thing that I could mention is we lost this thing that we are calling currently Pipelines. And the goal with that is to basically connect the developers with publishers and funding partners and so on.
00:42:48
Speaker
So we have right now, we have two pipelines actively running. One is looking for, one is where is a publisher is looking for a micro indie studios, like one to four man teams that have a game, like a rogue like replayable game, replayable game.
00:43:07
Speaker
And they are basically offering funding and support to bring their development to finish their game and bring it to market. So that is something that developers should definitely check it out. And the other pipeline is a big platform holder.
00:43:22
Speaker
that is aiming to like looking for games to fund basically. They are I think they're offering up to 250,000 in funding for select projects. So that is the applying to those is completely free for developers. So if you have a game that you're working on, if you have indie studio that you're running, you should definitely go and check it out. They are on that GDWC website just
00:43:44
Speaker
or scroll down on the front page, and you can check out what they are offering and you can apply. Your game needs to be on our platform. But again, even if you haven't been on the competition, you can just add your game without participating in the championship, if for whatever reason you don't want to do that.
00:44:02
Speaker
you just add your game and then you apply to the pipeline and then get reply and feedback from the partners. So that's one of the things we're developing. We kind of want to find a way to bring more opportunities for the developers. And so on. So that's some of the things that Aesla Run is doing next to running the competition.
00:44:26
Speaker
Super cool. So for anyone listening that's building a studio, trying to kind of get a game built, check out the GDWC website at the bottom.
Ali's Personal Aspirations and GDWC Deadlines
00:44:34
Speaker
Check out Pipelines. No reason not to put your game on there. More people will read about it, hear about it. It's a way to spread the reach of who knows about the game. And maybe you'll even find some funding or some help along the way there.
00:44:44
Speaker
Ali, this was an awesome conversation. I really loved it. I have one last question for you because I truly think if I looked at a young Greg, my dream would have been playing every single game that can come out. And it seems like you're along that path. But my question to you is when you were young, when you were in grade school growing up, what did you want to do when you grew up? That's a good question as well.
00:45:05
Speaker
I maybe wanted to do something within the cinema space, just like working in movies or something. I was much more of a movie buff than a gamer. Really? Nice. What movie got you into it? Maybe Terminator 2. Nice. Best sequel of all time. Yeah.
00:45:24
Speaker
Cool. Well, Ali, this has been such a cool experience to hear everything that you're doing, how you do it, how the GDWC operates. We'll have all of Ali's information along with GDWC's website, all their information on our player-engaged website. We'll also shoot it out on all our socials so you can see it there. Before you go today, Ali, is there anything you'd like to just share with the audience? It's the last month of submission time is in May.
00:45:53
Speaker
for GDWC 2024 summer season. So if you have a game that you are developing right now or have released within the last year, any digital platform, PC, mobile, console, VR, AR, browser game, all are welcome. You should definitely check out our competition and join. And the next season will start in August.
00:46:16
Speaker
Sweet. So May is the last month. We will post about that as well and send some information out there for any of you indies that are listening that want to try and put your game up against some of the other ones that are out there right now. Ali, I really appreciate your time today. This was great. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Greg. Thank you for having me here. Awesome.