GDS 2013 in Prague

Off-topic
#1

Hello everybody,
I recently watched recordings of some talks and lectures that were presented at the Game Developers Session in Prague last year. Warhorse had a strong presence there and there were also talks by other teams that might be interesting for fans of Kingdom Come, e.g. the keynote and the ArmA talk about developing a game in public.

Keynote #UPDATED!

I decided to make English subtitles for the Keynote. Watch it here. Amara.org is a collaborative subtitling site. Anybody can edit the subtitles on Amara, so if you want to help, feel free to click the edit button on the same page and contribute.

Content of the keynote

  • Games for grown-ups
  • Intelligent games
  • Games are getting dumber
    • FPS map design
    • Adventure games
      • The Hobbit (1982)
      • The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
      • Back to the Future (2010)
  • Original games
    • How to achieve originality?
      • crazy theme
        • Muscle March Protein Power (2009)
      • original gameplay
        • Tokyo Jungle (2012)
        • Katamari Damacy
        • Demon’s Souls
        • Sleep is Dead
  • PC vs. Consoles
    • Cobra (1987)
    • Diablo III (2012/2013)
  • Cinematic games
    • KGB / Conspiracy (1992)
    • Space Ace (1984)
    • Inception (2010)
    • Shadow of the Colossus (2005)
    • ICO (2001)
    • Dark Souls
  • Making money
    • Trey Smith
  • Q&A
  • DayZ
  • mobile games
    • City Bus Tycoon
    • Slithering
    • Knights of Pen and Paper
    • Tiny Tower, Tiny Death Star
  • replayability
    • art games
      • Journey
      • Limbo
      • Unfinished Swan
    • Tetris
    • the polygon curse & procedural generation
      • Frozen Synapse
      • Diablo III
    • Dark Souls
  • sandbox games
    • Terraria, Minecraft, GTA V

Vávra’s lecture on Quest design #UPDATED!

The video is again on Amara, watch it here. The slides are available as well (on WriteLatex, INCOMPLETE!). The even numbered slides are in Czech and the odd numbered slides are English translations. Subtitles are editable by anyone (after logging in), if you want to fix something in the slides, just let me know and I will post an edit link for that as well.

In conclusion

The usual disclaimers apply. I am a private individual unrelated to anything concerned; this is a private activity made public in hope someone may find it useful. No guarantees, about the correctness of the translation can be made and I refuse to be held accountable in any way for it.

4 Likes
#2

Good work, but particular this keynote hasn’t much in common with Kingdom Come and this forum. But I think it would be really interesting for lots of people to hear the keynote of Daniel Vávra about quest making or any other keynote by Warhorse, so if you have a time, please do it.

#3

It has a lot to do with the Vavra’s talk later, but I guess you cannot know that :wink:

Large part of the keynote pokes fun at cut-scene driven stories and the speaker wishes that games would try more to tell the story during interactive gameplay. What Vávra talks about is somewhat similar. In the beginning he looks at some previous RPG games and splits the gameplay into combat and noncombat parts. Combat gives the player tons of opportunities and options how to proceed, while the questing between the fights is essentially a funnel which the game designer uses to lead the player to more fights in the future and does not constitute an engaging gameplay element in itself. He expresses his belief that it does not have to be like that, that people will want more from their quests as soon somebody offers it and he wants to rethink that. And at one point he talks about minimizing non interactive cut-scenes during quests and use interactive branching dialogues instead.

Quest design on Extra Credits

We don’t have dragons, but we do have chicken.
                                                               ~ Viktor Bocan

There is a brief two part video on Quest Design at the Extra Credits Youtube channel. They concentrate on MMO’s but I think Vávra would agree with many points made there. But that would be for a different discussion in a separate thread, I guess.

1 Like
#4

=( the questions are not translated

and there is problems in the translation (the text) and the subtitle(it doesn’t play on safari for example).

#5

I know that, I was there and saw both keynotes. But still it doesn’t mean that if the first keynote shares some general ideas of bad game design and solutions to improvement, it is ultimately the one which fits the forum better. Vávra’s keynote may be similar in the topic, but he put it in context of his game, so ppl here could easily make the idea about the style of quest in KC, not only about bad game design in general.

#6

Thanks for sharing. It was especially interesting because he prefers consoles, that’s a foreign but unspent view to me.

@OmarTheBest This is the Off-Topic section, no harm done.

#7

Thanks for your supportive comments.

@OmarTheBest

A keynote is the first talk at a conference. Just so that you know ~_^ Check out Wikipedia or Fuka’s blog (in Czech) for more about that.

I am now working on Vávra’s talk. The link to the video and slides is in the top post.

@Tomohare

I added subtitles for the questions and put the games mentioned there to the list in the first post. The Q&A starts at 41:40 in the video.

I know that the subtitles suck. I already spent a ton of time getting it to the state and quality it is at now. I do not want to further spend the same amount of time polishing it. I would much rather translate another video instead. Or maybe make English notes. That may be more useful. Anyway, if you can point out to me specific lines that need correcting, I will of course correct it.

Regarding Safari, that is probably Amara’s fault. Since know of no other subtitle site that I could be using instead, Safari is out, sorry.

@Fimbul It is funny that the biggest geeks often prefer consumer oriented products (like consoles) to customizable and flexible platforms (that would be a gaming PC). They want to mess with some specific stuff (like the Kernel in case of Linus) but otherwise they prefer to be ordinary users and have little patience for what they consider unnecessary complexity and user unfriendliness. You can see it in the rants Linux Torvalds posts to Google+ or hear in almost every talk Radia Perlman (inventor of Ethernet switching) gives…

#8

I didn’t say it sucked, I found it was nice of you sharing/translating this with us, the ones that doesn’t understand Czech at least. And sorry if I didn’t make it clear about the problem in Safari being Amara’s.

#9

Great idea! I would appreciate subtitles to share the lectures with the world. Can I share the link on our Twitter, please :-)?

#10

#Internet reader’s rights

Some people think that every Internet user is a copyright violator. Downloading a document means making a copy of it, they say; and copying generally isn’t legal without the author’s permission. They argue about whether making material available through FTP or HTTP or USENET grants some sort of “implied license” to download the material—or whether an author can demand payment for the reader’s copies.

Other people advocate a much simpler theory. When an author tells his FTP server to send a document to anyone who asks, he is the one making copies. In legal jargon, the author’s command to the computer is the ``proximate cause’’ of the copying. The reader is merely requesting a copy, not making it.

I don’t know which of these theories will succeed in court. I also don’t think you should have to care. So I hereby promise I won’t sue you for copyright violation for linking to, referring to or downloading any subtitles I published or will publish on the Internet.

Does it bother you that this should even be an issue? Check out Richard Stallman’s essay on The Right to Read.

Is this permission good enough for you?

Just to give credit where it’s due, I have if from here http://cr.yp.to/rights.html . One more thing, don’t read the Czech version of that first link, there are silly translation mistakes.

#11

I take it as yes :slight_smile:

#12

[quote=“WH_JiriRydl, post:9, topic:14942, full:true”]
Great idea! I would appreciate subtitles to share the lectures with the world. Can I share the link on our Twitter, please :-)?[/quote]

Sure, wherever you want. Ease of sharing is the reason why I picked Amara for hosting the subtitles. Quote from their ToS:

You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to improve your Content through the Service by editing and/or translating your Content.

“functionality of the Service” includes downloading the subtitles. Which means the subtitles are free to use by anybody for anything. (At least I hope it does, IANAL)

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