My Notes: GDC 2014 – Day 6 – Last day at GDC

The GDC 2014 in San Francisco happened one month ago and I am going to bring you a post every day like a diary for the next few days =)
This was my first GDC in the States and I took some pictures and wrote a lot of notes about my daily stuff, the talks / lectures and what I have experienced.

Friday, the shortest day at GDC because everything was over at about 4pm, I was pretty disappointed cause of that but the Cheesecake Factory for dinner made the day good again! 

My Day in Pictures

After hanging around for a while with some friends we finally went for dinner…
in The Cheesecake Factory *_*

Sessionlist + Notes:

I’ll link all sessions to the GDC-Vault, if possible to the free stuff.
All notes are my private quick notes, ask me if i need to clarify them.

• Creating a consistent crossplatform UX Design
  • Main navigation in the upper left for most iPhone apps
  • Navbar at the bottom part of the screen
  • Wireframing is key
  • 10 usability heuristics for UI design by Jacob Nielson
  • Color tests with a lot of iterations
  • Hide everything not needed immediately as much as possible
  • Try it with a few small games first
• Character creation across multiple game genres
  • Live demo; Audience can choose genre theme archetype etc.
    • Female – Fighting – pirate – stealth
  • He’s defining shapes with fine lines
  • Fighting games – poi can be anywhere
  • MOBA’s and RTS’s – the angle is important, big weapons are working fine
  • Shooter – 3rd person need details on their back, its important
  • Designer inspire and artists are working out and creating concepts and having ideas
  • Having a story, helps… even tiny parts
  • Don’t add to much stuff
  • Get a few hook references and focus on them instead of searching for hours
  • While concepting, being zoomed out helps to overview everything and not spending time with to much details
  • Fading out lines and draw over with even more details
  • Lines give you more details and more variations instead of blocking
  • Blocking is faster and also helps with colors if you want
  • Colors after line
• Agile lessons from Ryse & Crysis 3
  • They try to sell scrum like a product and indoctrinate you
  • First time they used it, it failed ^^
  • Different work needs different methods
    • At first you need to analyze your environment
  • Team got frustrated because it didn’t work
  • Same team without live environment and stakeholders worked out fine, big success
  • Our reality will not bend over to fit our processes
  • There is nothing bad in breaking scrum
  • Don’t touch retrospectives or time-boxes
  • Think in suggestions, not in rules
  • Know ur lifecycle
  • There is no process to rule them all
  • From scrum to daily planning
  • KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid
  • How do we plan unexpected items?
    • Let go the illusion of control (By Master Oogway)
  • Scrum by the book didn’t worked out again as the team had to be more reactive
  • Individuals and interaction over process and tools
  • PM is part of the team, not the boss
  • The most important and constant thing is good prioritization, Pragmatism & Flexibility ofc