We are honoured to have been a part of The London Games Festival in April. #LGF22 was the latest annual celebration that spans multiple events across multiple days, from early looks at new indie games, showcasing experimental game designs for investors, and bringing creators and players together for W.A.S.D. Following a two-year absence it proved a welcome return for UK game developers, and over an exciting ten days I found myself very proud of the Bafta Awards for shining a light on diversity and inclusion throughout the event.

Day 1: Taking game development in the cloud to The Next Level

The Next Level was London Games Festival’s face-to-face conference and networking event, featuring a series of talks, panels and demos looking at the future of games. Most of these sessions are available to stream on YouTube, so be sure to check them out and take advantage of the learnings they have to offer. However, I’d like to cast a spotlight on two talks in particular.

Building and expanding the Hitman Trilogy with Azure

Speaking about how the studio is using Azure to support the Hitman Trilogy, Christian Corsano, Senior Online Programmer at IO Interactive, said that it was a vital support to their small team.

“We did not want to manage a lot – we wanted to let the platform work for us”

Christian explains that the Hitman Trilogy uses a variety of different Azure features. For example, they use Azure App Service to run a Configuration Gateway, which gives them incredible flexibility to redirect players to different game branches, all written in a simple .NET Core program.

He also explained how the team collects metrics about how the game runs and how players are experiencing the games, all using a simple ASP.NET program in Azure App Service that pushes data to Azure Event Hubs. These analytics are then further analysed by using Azure Stream Analytics for near real-time processing.

Christian covers even more in his session, including a further look into architecture, how the team uses DevOps and automation, as well as how they used LiveOps to keep players invested in the Hitman trilogy. Be sure to watch the full recording over on YouTube.

Building the Future of 3D Collaboration

Later in the event, Microsoft’s Metaverse Lead Alex Karim held a session on mixed reality, the future of 3D collaboration and the move from individual to shared experiences. He kicked off the session with a bold statement:

“We see mixed reality as the next evolution of computing”

The pandemic has shown us just how invaluable tools like Microsoft Teams are for collaboration when you can’t physically be in the same space as your colleagues. In the future this will be just one way you can work; tools like Microsoft Mesh will allow you to work even closer with people when they can’t be there with you.

People can use Microsoft Mesh from a multitude of devices, whether that’s HoloLens 2, a traditional VR headset or your mobile phone – all you need is a Mesh-enabled app. This could be joining people in the same virtual space, providing assistance while sharing someone else’s view, or simply collaborating on a group project.

Alex also showed off Microsoft’s new Holoportation technology, which lets you bring in a photorealistic model of yourself so that you can interact with others as if you’re truly in the same room together.

This look into the future of 3D collaboration is truly fascinating, so be sure to view the full session on YouTube.

Helping you on your game dev journey

Last month at the Game Developer Conference we announced the launch of ID@Azure, a new programme to help independent game developers and creators use the cloud. This program offers free tools, resources, and support to quickly get game developers started using cloud services.

With ID@Azure we want you to take advantage of the same services and capabilities used by the teams building some of the most popular games today. Working with the cloud opens a lot of possibilities for the development of your game, so we hope you check it out.

Learn more

• Explore the newly-launched ID@Azure
• Celebrating Nine Years of ID@Xbox
• How Hello Games is using Azure to bring No Man’s Sky to millions

The post Learning how to up your game at the London Games Festival appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When you think of Microsoft and gaming, you probably think first of Xbox. And usually when we’re talking about the Xbox business, our customer is the gamer.

But at Microsoft, there’s another customer that’s just as important to us – the game creator. Why? Because a strong and growing creator ecosystem is vital for our success.

By being focused on developer tools, partnerships and infrastructure, we are ensuring Xbox’s ability to bring the very best games to our players.

Our partners are using Azure to help them realise their dreams, and one such partner is Hello Games. At Develop:Brighton I spoke with Iain Brown, server and multiplayer lead for Hello Games, about how they are using Azure tools and services to run the incredibly popular No Man’s Sky.

Harvey: You are instrumental as part of the team that created No Man’s Sky, so please introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do at Hello Games.

Iain: I’ve been making games for about 25 years now. For the last 15 years I’ve worked on online-specific things – both multiplayer and online services – and at Hello Games I’m mostly in charge of our servers, our interactions with those and the multiplayer back-end for No Man’s Sky.

H: For those who don’t know, let’s start with what No Man’s Sky is. How would you describe the core features of the game?

I: No Man’s Sky is a space exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated universe. There are around 18 quintillion different planets in the game that people can go explore, and while obviously no one can ever see all the content that’s out there, every planet is unique with individual “things” defined on each planet.

It’s those “things” on the planets that I’m involved in distributing to different people. The idea is that as you’re traversing the universe, even if you don’t find other people to play with, you may find the footsteps of the people that have travelled there before you. Maybe you stumble across a planet someone has visited before, where they’ve named the planet after their father or something like that. We want to share that between our different players.

H: Tell us a little bit more about how you use Azure to implement some of the cloud features inside the game.

I: We’re a very small team, and I’m generally the only person that works on the servers, so we didn’t want to be dealing with any kind of Ops for the game – we want our servers to manage our servers for us. So we’ve gone for a PaaS offering, which is Azure App Service. We don’t have to worry about the VMs, we don’t have to worry about the OS, we don’t have to worry about the frameworks; We just have to write the C# code, upload it to the cloud and it’ll scale it out for us. That was our emphasis – we just want to write the code and not have to worry about the Ops side of things.

We use a lot of Azure features, so we’re quite heavily embedded in the Azure ecosystem. For instance, we use Azure Key Vault as a place to store all of our secrets, certificates and things like that, so we don’t have to let people see things that they don’t need to see. Anything that needs to be protected lives in Azure Key Vault, and only the servers can see them.

We also use Azure Event Hubs because we wanted to make sure that if the database itself went down, our players didn’t lose anything. We don’t upload our players’ discoveries straight into a database – we upload them to Event Hubs, and we pull them out when the database is in a ready state.

This allows us to do maintenance of the database but it also splits up the load a little bit, so that you don’t have to instantaneously deal with the submissions as they come in.

H: You’re obviously dealing with tons of data as well, so I assume you have data solutions for that?

I: Azure Cosmos DB is what we use for the actual database. It’s a NoSQL database that is automatically managed and can scale – we just say we want to run a number of requests on it, and Azure manages that and puts the data wherever it thinks is best.

We have about 3 terabytes of data in there now. It’s all in JSON documents, all text, so it’s a lot of data, but Cosmos DB deals with it fine and we can run queries across all of that data without any issues.

H: No Man’s Sky is over five years old now, which means you’ve been working with Azure for that period of time. I’m interested to know how has your usage of Azure evolved over the years?

I: The game has grown a lot in the five years since we’ve launched. At the beginning basically everything in our servers were discoveries; the planets, the animals, the plants, the rocks. We’ve added quite a few more features that now go into the database, such as bases people can build and share, and settlements which we added fairly recently. We’ve also added missions to the game that people can work on.

So the game has grown, and the Cosmos DB database has grown along with it – we just spec it up when it’s needed. We’ve also migrated from different hardware, and since we’ve launched we’ve had two iterations of new hardware within Azure. Each one has become cheaper, and we’ve just redeployed our servers onto these new versions where it just works.

Also we launched on .NET Core 1; we’re now on .NET 5 and we’ve also moved to Linux. That was seamless – we redeployed to a Linux app service instead of a Windows one while using the same code base.

H: Could you tell us a bit about how you use Slack as well?

I: We hook up various things to Slack, though they’re internal rather than external-facing things. For example, I use Octopus Deploy for all of my servers. Whenever I deploy a server, it sends out a message to an Azure Function, which is a serverless piece of code. It’s a very simple web hook that writes to our slack to say, hey, your server has started deploying, and whether it has passed or failed. It takes very few lines of code to write a Slack notification and host it within an Azure function.

H: Going back, you famously had so many players at launch – an incredible success. That must have presented some technical challenges, so I’m interested to know how Azure helped you deal with that level of initial player interest that you had.

I: Before we launched, we’d done a lot of load testing and thought we were gonna be fine. We underestimated the player numbers – a huge number during the launch period – but also the nature of our load testing was such that while we were load testing both the CPU and the RAM, we weren’t load testing the number of connections being made to each machine. Unfortunately, we ran out of those.

What we had to do was quickly jump onto the Azure portal and scale up all our servers. So we went from less powerful machines to much more powerful ones that could support many more connections. We also broadened out and went across many more instances of the servers.

All of this was easily done in the portal, and we just had to click a few buttons to get it all up and running. I didn’t have to requisition a new hub or anything like that, it was just a case of going into the portal and changing some numbers until it worked.

The other thing that happened at launch was that Cosmos DB used to have a dev offering, which was unpartitioned and cheap, as well as a partitioned offering that was a lot more expensive. You’d use the partitioned one for your production database, while keeping your dev on the cheaper, unpartitioned offering.

For our testing of the PC servers, we’d set up a dev database as we didn’t want to pay for a production one in the months leading up to the game’s launch. Unfortunately we forgot to change it over before launch, a bit of a mistake, which meant we were writing records into a dev database that wasn’t big enough and wasn’t going to cope. We also couldn’t scale up, as at the time they were two distinct products rather than the single product it is now.

We got on the phone with the Cosmos DB team and they were great – we got in touch with the actual engineers who work on it as well as the product managers there, and they knew what to do. They wrote a script that would copy everything from the dev database into a new one they provisioned that was much bigger, while coping with all the numbers that were being thrown at it. At a certain point we were able to pull the plug on the dev database and have the new one take over, all without any server downtime.

H: One of the key objectives of any game is being able to keep your players happy and engaged. Are there examples from your work on No Man’s Sky that you can share of how the cloud helped drive player engagement?

I: We’ve recently launched a new mode within the game, which is a time-limited season mode. It’ll be out for a few weeks before leaving the game, and you’ll get unique rewards for playing it. We don’t want people hacking the game client to unlock this mode early or to see what’s coming up, so all of that data lives in the cloud. It lives in table storage within Azure, and at a given time it’ll be downloaded to the game clients as they need it.

This is all set up by the game designers. We’ve tried to remove the need for a coder to do this as much as possible, so the designer can set what time events start and finish, point at a file that describes the event, what the rewards are, that kind of thing. It’s very much about empowering our designers to do this, and to be honest we don’t have that many coders so it helps to reduce our dependence on them.

We’ve similarly run weekend missions, where we encourage players to come back on the weekend in order to receive unique rewards. They’ll play together, and they’ll do a task which has a target that everyone is collectively trying to complete. We also have a limit for how much each player can personally contribute to this goal, just so that one person can’t come in and do the entire goal by themselves.

All of this is done in Cosmos DB. We’ve got scripts that allow players to submit that they’ve completed their goal, which Cosmos DB collects. We can then run queries across this data to see how many of these things happened since the weekend mission launched. Again, this is all now driven by the designers. No coders are involved in running the weekend missions – it’s all set up so that it runs and automatically deploys itself.

H: You ended up using Azure PlayFab for matchmaking and Azure PlayFab Party for in-game communication. Why did you choose those solutions and can you explain in more detail how they were used in No Man’s Sky?

I: Cross-play was a big thing for us. We wanted to do cross-play for a while, but again we’re a very small team and there was no way we could write our own system. We just couldn’t write the servers, deploy the servers, manage the servers – it just wasn’t feasible for us.

Microsoft approached us and suggested taking a look at Azure PlayFab, and it had a lot of great features that we were keen to use. For example, all Xbox signed-in users on PlayFab are free, and that’s great as we always want to reduce our running costs. But there’s also some brilliant features within PlayFab Party. It does really good speech-to-text, text-to-speech and real-time translation of foreign languages.

In fact, when we first got PlayFab running in our studio, people would gather around my desk to see this happening. Everyone was trying to trick PlayFab, seeing if they could break it in some way, and it was pretty good at actually detecting what people were saying and translating it into various different languages. I definitely recommend that people take a look at those features.

The matchmaking side of PlayFab was very easy to integrate because it’s basically the same as the Xbox Smart Match system. If you know how to use that, it’s very quick to get up and running on the PlayFab system, which then runs cross-platform. We were essentially able to take all the rules we had for Xbox from the Xbox portal and copy them into the PlayFab portal, then the matchmaking was done. All the rules just worked.

We have two levels of relationship when you’re playing a game in No Man’s Sky. One is when you are flying around the galaxy, seeing other people, who just drop in or drop out because of how physically near to you they are.

We also wanted a more long-term relationship for players, across a single session but also across multiple hours, for people you want to spend time with. We call that your Team, and the way we do that is by running two different PlayFab Party networks completely separately. We only run voice chat within a Team, as no one wants to hear 31 random players talking at them.

H: By choosing to deploy dual networks, while ground-breaking, I imagine your networking costs started to rise. I’m curious how that went and how Microsoft was able to respond.

I: Yeah, the costs did skyrocket a little bit! The way it worked was, if you’re finding people locally, you only create a PlayFab Party network when you matchmake with people. So most of the time, if you’re flying around the galaxy by yourself, you won’t be in a local network.

To make the Teams work, we needed a permanent network for every player in the game, so that their friends could join them through the game dashboard. The network had to be ready for people to join, even though, generally, there was no traffic on that network.

Unfortunately that did cost quite a lot, but we reached out to Microsoft as they had signed off on this design before we shipped it. They were very generous and gave us quite a nice discount, and very soon after that they announced a 90% decrease for all PlayFab Party network minutes which brought the costs down to a much more reasonable number.

H: With the decision to implement cross-play you were faced with the challenge of merging data from three separate databases into one common database. How did you go about achieving that?

I: When we launched, we made the decision to silo off the different game platforms into different databases for tracking player discoveries. There are various reasons behind this that made sense at the time, such as with displaying usernames, reporting content and that kind of thing, so it was easier to silo it all off.

When we launched cross-play, it made a lot more sense to actually have everyone sharing the same names for things. We had these three separate databases, each of which were about 2TB big, and we needed to combine them into one single database.

We made the new database, and we did basically the same thing that the Cosmos DB team did for us during launch – I wrote a script that I ran in an Azure Function, and as Azure Functions are serverless, they can scale massively. We used the change feed of Cosmos DB to do this, as the change feed is basically a list of all the records in a Cosmos DB partition.

Because it’s per-partition, it can also scale massively. We have a lot of partitions in our database so we just put this code into Azure Functions and let it scale itself as much as it wanted. It went very, very wide and had lots of instances of this function running, pulling all the records out of each individual database and putting them into the new one.

There were obviously some conflicts. We had places where two or more people had named the same planet, so we had to pick one of those to be the winner. The way we resolved that was by giving the naming rights to the person who visited the planet first, and we had to check as we went whether conflicting records were older than the records being added to the new database.

It took several weeks because, as I say, there were several terabytes of data in each database, but there were no problems that we could find. We did a lot of testing on it before we launched it, and we had these Azure Functions running in the background even as players were still writing to the old databases. There was no down time for this – we just set a point in time where we were going to move to the newly merged database and make the change.

It actually went surprisingly smoothly. It was a bit scary, but we’d done enough testing and we were happy. The scariest moment came a bit later on when we decided to delete the old databases. Before that we’d had them as a backup for the new database, but we were paying for these old databases and not using them, so they had to go. That was several months after the merge happened, but it was still a scary moment in time.

H: As we wrap up, what are the main take-aways that you want people to walk away with from this conversation?

I: I think the main point to take away from this is that you don’t need to invest massively into online features in order to have nice online features. It was generally just me writing these things – there was no Ops engineer, no database analyst – just me writing in mostly C#.

It takes some research to learn about all the different things Azure has to offer, but they’re all very simple to use and you can hook them up and create nice features without needing a massive team looking at it.

Azure for Gaming

Thanks again to Iain Brown for taking the time out his busy schedule to share these great insights with us. Congratulations too on the huge success of No Man’s Sky, and I know I speak for all of us when I say we can’t wait to see what’s coming next from Hello Games.

The Azure Gaming team has a mission and that is to empower game creators to realise their dreams. One way we measure our success is in the revenue we generate for creators. We want to appeal to developers and publishers, of every size and capability, by helping you both creatively and financially.

For those that might not know, Microsoft Azure has a broad and compelling set of cloud services that empower game creators to realise their dreams. We can help you:

• Acquire, retain and monetise players.
• Build healthy, engaged and safer player communities that help you extend the life of your game for a better ROI.
• Use data and analytics to help you deeply understand your players’ behaviour and deliver content they’ll love.
• Include modern game features that gamers expect, such as notifications, leaderboards and more.
• We can provide you an enterprise grade infrastructure backbone to ensure you can reach your players wherever they are, regardless of location, whatever genre of game you are making, whichever the device or platform you publish on.

Azure is a modern agnostic development platform. When technology is at its best, it gets out of the way so you don’t have to worry about it. We want you to be free to focus on creating great games. That’s our approach.

Learn more

• Join us at the London Games Festival in April
• An Introduction to Microsoft Game Stack
• Getting started with Azure PlayFab
• Celebrating three years of Azure PlayFab and the future of game development
• Learning from the Game Developers Conference, past and present
• Find more game dev resources: https://aka.ms/cloudgaming/resources

The post How Hello Games is using Azure to bring No Man’s Sky to millions appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The Global Game Jam has returned for its 14th year! From now until January 30th 2022, you can join likeminded game developers online and in-person to create something weird and wonderful in a 48 hour timespan.

Why should I participate?

Jams and hackathons are brilliant ways to collaborate with new people in a no-risk environment. You can work in pre-established teams if your jam site allows it, but don’t be afraid if your team is randomly assigned. The first few jams I participated in were randomised, and it’s always good fun to work with likeminded people who all have different skillsets.

While you’re always aiming to create something playable during the 48 hour period, it’s much more important to get imaginative and creative. If there’s a new technology you haven’t found the time to try out, give it a whirl during a jam. It’s not a competition, so take every opportunity you can to be experimental.

Of course, there’s no pressure to make a digital game either; paper-only games and experiences are welcome and encouraged! Even for digital games it’s often worth bringing out pen and paper during the planning steps, especially if you’re working with a team in-person.

For more specific tips, check out our article on why you should be participating in game jams and hackathons.

How do I participate?

You can register for Global Game Jam on the official website, where you’ll then be able to look for a jam site to join. Given the current global situation, many sites are remaining online-only, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding yourself a team. Note that if you’re attending an in-person jam site, the venue itself may have its own rules and admission fees.

Once your team is ready to go, you’ll want to check out the theme for the event. The theme changes every year, and provides something of an anchor point for your game ideas in the planning step. Don’t be too strict on yourself when it comes to the theme though; if you have an idea you want to pursue, then pursue it.

You can also find other developers on the #GGJ and #GGJ22 hashtags. Don’t be afraid to share your progress and chat with others if you have any questions/need assistance. Most of all, have fun!

Learn more

• Register on the Global Game Jam website
• Join us next month for Cloud Gaming Levelled Up: Cloud Native Games – Why Should you Care?
• Game jams, and why you should participate
• Game Stack, who are sponsoring the Global Game Jam this year

The post Try something new at the Global Game Jam this weekend appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Microsoft Game Stack is a suite of Microsoft products and services that can help you address your game development needs. Whether you want to enrich player experiences by adjusting how the game works for them, or you’re seeking technology that helps you and your team to operate the game, you’ll find the right solution for your needs within Microsoft Game Stack.

Audio

Great audio complements great visuals to provide immersive game experiences. Use cloud technologies to provide a rich audio experiences for your players, and enable capabilities that make your game more accessible to players of all abilities.

• Allow players to communicate with voice in-game with Xbox Live Game Chat
• Synthesise written content into speech with Azure Text to Speech and Xbox Live Game Chat
• Transcribe audible content into text with Xbox Live Game Chat
• Improve game immersion using Project Acoustics to intelligently model game audio

Data, Machine Learning and AI

Collect, store, and easily retrieve data that brings your gameplay to life. Gain insights about the health of your game so that you can successfully run your business, and leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to provide customer support at scale as your players grow.

• Create, track, and use data that reflects a player’s in-game activity with PlayFab Player Statistics
• Create and manage in-game items and money with PlayFab Currencies
• Create and manage players segments based on in-game actions and data with PlayFab Player Segments
• Query and analyse data generated by your game to gain insights about player behaviours and game performance with Azure Non-Real Time Dashboard and PlayFab Metrics
• Detect potentially offensive, risky, or otherwise undesirable content in text, videos, or images with Azure Content Moderation
• Provide players with AI-driven customer support with Azure Customer Service Bot

Monetisation

Build an in-game economy with virtual currency to add depth to player actions within your game. Increase interaction between players by empowering them to share the spoils of their many in-game adventures.

• Enable players to purchase in-game items with PlayFab Stores and Sales
• Define items that can be purchased or earned with PlayFab Catalogs
• Manage player items with PlayFab Player Inventory
• Create and manage in-game items and money with PlayFab Currencies
• Allow the exchange and/or sale of items between players with PlayFab Trading

Multiplayer

Allow your players to quickly connect and play with other gamers to extend the life and usage of your game beyond typical solo play. Develop a sustainable community of dedicated fans and boost the level of player interaction.

• Add competition to your game with Azure Leaderboard and PlayFab Tournaments and Leaderboards
• Host your game in the cloud so that you can handle traffic spikes, with Azure Multiplayer Backend and PlayFab Multiplayer Servers
• Group players of similar skill levels with Azure Matchmaker and PlayFab Matchmaking
• Create both real-time and turn-based gameplay with Azure Synchronous Multiplayer and Azure Asynchronous Multiplayer

Security

Allow your players to create a unique in-game identity to build up their account and experiences, as well as restrict player access to your game, temporarily or permanently, to help protect your users from fraud and cheating.

• Enable players to create profiles and identities with PlayFab Player Login and Xbox Live Authentication
• Temporarily or permanently restrict players from your game with PlayFab Play Ban System

Systems & Tools

Get access to tools and capabilities that help you to run your game more effectively. This includes the automation of tasks, engagement of your players outside of your game, and more.

• Define outcomes for player actions in-game with Azure Functions and PlayFab Actions & Rules
• Test two game states with varying rules and events with PlayFab Creating A/B Tests
• Send players messages on your game with Azure Notification Hubs and PlayFab Push Notifications
• Keep players in the loop about current and upcoming in-game events with PlayFab News
• Automate parts of game upkeep with PlayFab Automation

Learn more

• Getting started with Azure PlayFab
• Celebrating three years of Azure PlayFab and the future of game development
• Learning from the Game Developers Conference, past and present
• Game jams, and why you should participate
• Improving the lives of children through games

The post An Introduction to Microsoft Game Stack appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

While commercial video games can take years to create, game jams challenge you to improve your skills, meet new people and make something weird and wonderful. There is (usually) no judging, and it is fully expected that a lot of the games will be completely unplayable, but that’s exactly the point. The aim of the event is to get like-minded people in a room together and create some interesting ideas, rather than attempting to make a blockbuster game in two days. It’s a great way for budding game designers to get some much needed experience in a busy working environment, whichever role they want to specialise in, as well as giving them contacts that may help their careers in the future.

Of course, getting developers into a room together hasn’t been much of an option for the past year and a half, but many jams and hackathons have adapted to an online model to account for this. While few will argue that this isn’t as fun as burning the midnight oil in a room with your friends, it is a good way to experience your first one, especially if you don’t have friends that can help. There’s little commitment if you can’t make it or don’t want to continue, and it’s just as valid a way to make new friends and create something interesting.

Game jams and hackathons are great at catering to most skill levels, so if you have a vague knowledge on a subject and want to learn more about game development, there’s no better opportunity. Organisers will typically try and construct balanced teams based on what skills you have, so stepping on toes is kept to an absolute minimum. However, some locations and events require and/or allow you to arrive in pre-constructed teams. If you need a team to join, don’t be afraid to reach out to other attendees.

The moment when the organisers are reveal the theme for the jam is perhaps one of the most exciting points during the whole weekend. The theme, to a large extent, dictates the jam itself, as each team will be building something based on their own interpretation of it. For example, a theme at the Global Game Jam a few years ago was “extinction”. Some people took this literally and made games about extinct species like dinosaurs and dodos, where others interpreted it as ‘protecting against extinction’, or ‘saving the world’. There are no incorrect interpretations either, and this is the beauty of game jams. Keep to the theme, but also think outside the box.

Before any work can start, the team has to come up with an idea. With the project lasting an entire weekend, you should be cautious and consider all aspects of what you’ll be building, before you start building it. What’s the story? What are the players doing? What’s the point? Discussions may even go on for a few hours before you get stuck in, but you must remember that it’s not a race, and that you do not need to have a finished product at the end of the weekend. Go through your options, make sure you’re on the right page, and shoot for a minimum viable product instead of shooting for a scope that’s impossible to squeeze into a weekend.

It is here that your jam experience will vary, depending on your team and skills. Work out what everyone is best at, as well as any other skills that they may have. This should give you an idea of how you want to approach the game, as you can work out what tools can be used and where to assign work. However, always remember that this is also a learning experience, and people will want to (and should) try out new coding languages, engines and techniques for the weekend. If you want to give something a go and have no experience, let your team know and give it a go. Even without prior experience there’s plenty to work on, and in the worst case scenario you’ll find areas to improve before the next jam.

You might not have a finished product by the weekend, but regardless you should make sure you get people to test what you have. Hopefully it’ll be played thoroughly by your own team, but sometimes you just need a fresh set of eyes see all of the problems. When I participate in a game jam, I typically let other jammers play our current builds at key points across the weekend. Bugs or not, the info you can get from someone that hasn’t actively worked on the game can be extremely valuable. What makes sense to you and your team may not be the case for someone with less information on the project.

At the end of the weekend, when work on the game has stopped and you’ve uploaded your work, it’s time to rest. Relax a bit, and keep away from the project. Revisit the most recent build in a week or so and think about what exactly you’d want to change and where you’d have made different decisions. This is a valuable part of the game jam process, because you will use these learnings in future projects and jams. It’s also valuable to hear feedback from others, so send your game to friends and family, as well as anyone on the Internet who is willing to take a look. Take all criticism on the chin and learn from it – you only had a weekend to make your game, after all.

Learn more

• Learning from the Game Developers Conference, past and present
• GDC’s YouTube channel, which is full of old and new talks alike
• Celebrating three years of Azure PlayFab and the future of game development
• Getting started with Azure PlayFab
• Improving the lives of children through games

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The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the world’s largest professional games industry event. Over a five day period, each event sees tens of thousands of attendees, hundreds of talks and many opportunities for networking and deal making. For small and indie developers, it’s a fantastic place to learn from the best, and acquire new skills to use in your own games.

The 2021 iteration marks the second year of GDC’s move to an online event, due to ongoing uncertainty and travel restrictions relating to the global pandemic. It’s adapted well to the change, however, with many people attending as usual, just from the comfort of their own homes. This year’s event is upcoming, kicking off July 19th and running until the 23rd.

As always, the majority of talks are recorded and make their way to the official GDC YouTube account. If you’re a game developer, it’s absolutely worth subscribing and keeping an eye out for topics relevant to your area. Plus, if you’re feeling a little indecisive about whether to attend, here’s a selection of talks from previous years that will give you an idea of what you can expect on July 19th.

The Design in Narrative Design

In this 2015 GDC session, designer Jurie Horneman presents a framework showing how systems design and narrative design are two sides of the same coin, and why the narrative side of game is important even in games that do not ostensibly have a story.

The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design

In this 2020 GDC Virtual Talk, Alexander Swords presents The Forest Paths method: a workflow for game developers to develop their game narrative in tandem with their design components.

Building Worlds in No Man’s Sky Using Math(s)

No Man’s Sky is a science fiction game set in a near infinite procedurally generated universe. In this 2017 GDC talk, Hello Games’ Sean Murray describes some of the most important technologies and interesting challenges behind generating both realistic and alien terrains without artistic input, using mathematics.

Small Teams, Big Dreams: How to Build a Small Team to Do Great Things

In this 2015 GDC talk, HandCircus’ Simon Oliver delivers practical advice on how smaller game development teams can make the most with limited resources to make the best games possible.

Successfully Use Deep Reinforcement Learning in Testing and NPC Development

In this 2020 GDC Virtual Talk, Unity’s Jeffrey Shih explains how deep reinforcement and imitation learning can be used for scaling playtesting and NPC creation in games.

Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay

In this 2020 GDC Virtual Talk, Butterscotch Shenanigans’ Seth Coster lifts the veil around Forgiveness Mechanics; game systems that allow the player to be “off” in their inputs, but still get the results they want.

Crash Course in Online Features for Programmers

In this 2017 GDC talk, Sony’s Claire Blackshaw introduces a wide range of online features, highlighting easy features most platforms provide for the benefit of game programmers.

Learn more

• Check out the GDC 2021 website
• GDC’s YouTube channel, which is full of old and new talks alike
• Celebrating three years of Azure PlayFab and the future of game development
• Getting started with Azure PlayFab
• Improving the lives of children through games

The post Learning from the Game Developers Conference, past and present appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.