This past weekend, I attended the PRACTICE Conference in New York City. If you’re not familiar with it, PRACTICE is a conference organized by the NYU Game Center that focuses specifically on game design.

This year was the 4th year the conference was organized. Despite this, I hadn’t heard of it up until two months before the event, when Zach Gage announced on Twitter that he was going to be one of the speakers.

If you’ve been following this devlog, you’ll know that I’ve been writing about all the conferences and festivals I’ve attended. I’m going to write up about my experience at PRACTICE as well, sharing about how the conference is set up, why I went, what I learned, etc.

I’m not going to dive into the specific details of the talks themselves, as all the talks were recorded and will be posted online for free, so you can judge the quality and content for yourselves. I’m going to focus more on my point of view of the event, as an independent game developer/designer, who went with a very specific intention.

Why I Went

Between February and October of this year, I went to 11 game conferences and festivals. The first one I went to was IndieCade East in NYC. It had a tremendous impact on the development of the game, and made me realize the importance of getting regular feedback from players and other game developers. This is why for much of 2014, I went to every single show that I could.

However, while it is beneficial to show at these events, there is a decreasing rate of return. For example, the first few events gave me very high-level ideas that resulted in massive changes to the course of the game. I was rewriting entire levels and changing the progression system. Towards the end of the year though, most of the changes were more about finetuning and tweaking details – making a hallway shorter here, adding a window there, putting stairs here, etc.

By October, the game had been playtested by about 1,000 people, and I was starting to feel like I had a very, very solid first hour of the game. It had allowed me to sort out major design issues, and the game had improved tremendously. However, I was also noticing the limitations of this development process:

1) It’s hard to make large changes to infrastructure – After each festival, I would try to implement fixes for all the issues I observed, so that I could have a new build in time for the next festival. Technically, I could just show the same build I showed last time, but then I’d see the same problems, and wouldn’t get any new data. Each festival was an opportunity to try something new and see if it works.

The problem is that if there was a big infrastructure issue in the project, I couldn’t risk rewriting it from scratch, because what if I took it out, and couldn’t get it working again in time for the next showing. As such, even though I was able to make design changes on the surface level, it was all being held up by really bad code underneath.

2) Showing at Festivals really only allows you test the beginning of the game –  I would always have a few people at festivals who would play the game for over an hour, but most people played for between 5 and 15 minutes. This meant you got a lot of feedback about the early parts of the game, but not the late parts. It’s not even about whether your game is good or not, it’s just the nature of the setting.

After 10 conferences, the intro wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and it was time for me to move on to the mid-late parts of the game, which festivals/conference weren’t going to help.

So I had decided Gamercamp in October would be my last event.

Of course, the next day I saw Zach’s tweet and learned about PRACTICE. When I saw that it was a conference specifically about game design, and that the list of speakers included Jonathan Blow, I knew I just had to go.

I was struggling with creating progression between levels (I will go into the specific problem a bit later), and this conference seemed like the perfect place where I could ask about this problem and get feedback on it.

Conference Structure 

PRACTICE happens over the course of 3 days. I’ve gone ahead and posted the schedule for this year here:

Everything happens in the same building on the NYU campus, and it’s a single-track conference, so you don’t have to choose between talks. I really liked this aspect of it, as it felt like all of us who attended got the same experience, and were able to discuss everything that went on together.

Friday – Opening Talk / Reception

On Friday, the first day of Practice, there was an opening talk by Holly Gramazio, and a reception afterwards. The reception happened just outside the lecture hall, and there were several stations set up with games for people to play.

Here are some people playing a social game designed by Holly Gramazio, which involved learning to insult each other in Old English.

Here are some other pics from the reception, taken from the Game Center’s tumblr.

After the reception, a bunch of us went out and got ramen!