Guess who's back. It's a me Jenny. Had to take this week's devlog too since Felix got sick from con crud.

This week hasn't left us with a lot of time working on Comfort Zone, but it's certainly been a very informative experience none the less.
On Monday morning SIDETRACK (and the first year's) left our school premises and started our cross country journey to attend Konsoll, a game conference held annually in Bergen. Where game developers all around Norway get the opportunity to listen to experienced speakers talk about the ins and out of game development.

After a whole day of driving and some beautiful mountain scenery, we touched ground at Bergen and checked in at our hotel. After that we had Pizza and then it was time to pass out.

Day two, and opening day of Konsoll.
After leaving the hotel it was a harrowing walk to the conference hall, which was just crossed the road. The opening ceremony was quick and to the point with a speech held by the mayor of Bergen. And like that Konsoll 2022 had officially begun.

The first proper talk of the day was from a producer at Funcom, whose topic was team cooperation in a game development setting. What challenges you might face, what tactics you could use to avoid them so on and so forth. I wanted to ask him a question about how to handle issues when you're such a small group. But the questions had to be cut short because of time constraints.

The second talk was by a certain Stuart Sumida, who's a paleontologist that worked on several big production projects. Some of them being Horizon Zero Dawn, The Lion King, How to Train your Dragon and many many more. His talk was mostly about how when designing characters, no matter how alien or grounded they are, it's important to keep the anatomy structure in mind to make the creature seem believable. (This was one of my favorite talks, as I'm a zoologist and animator at heart so it definitely tickled my fancy.

Lunch came later and we got to take this picture.(I hate how my face looks in this.)

After lunch there were a couple more talks, and although I would love to go into detail, I wouldn't want this to be a novel length post. So I'll just give simple summaries for now.
The next talk, held by Nathan Chandler-Gibson talked about the importance of blueprinting, and creating concepts and prototypes at a fast pace to get a proper idea of it all. (This talk also went a bit over my head, since it was a bit too fast for me, but the enthusiasm was fun.)

Then there was "The rest of the F#@&ing Owl" which was a talk about how an animator workflow functioned, and how it goes from a concept, to completed product.  (This was also one of my favorite.)

The last one I was apart of was "Maximizing Your Game's Performance in Unreal Engine" which basically just showed common problems you may face in Unreal Engine and how to fix them. Not very useful for us, seeing as we're using unity, but the enthusiasm of the talker made it an engaging experience still.

There was one more talk that i didn't attend because the battery for both myself and my phone had been depleted so I sat on the floor letting us charge.  Later on in the day we went to eat. They had forgotten about my food and then it was back to the hotel to play some Magic the Gathering and then sleep.

Day three of our journey, the second and last day of Konsoll.

Beginning very similarly to our first day of Konsoll, we left the hotell and then walked cross the road to the conference hall. The first talk of the day was called "Evolving the animation in Horizon Forbidden West", it's quite self explanatory what the talk was about so I won't add much more to it, other than It's extremely comforting to see even AAA games start of with extremely unpolished blocks to... well... block out an idea.

The second talk of the day was  about how to cooperate with your voice actors or general actors to make the quality of the acting sound genuine, and how to keep the actors motivated during production. It also talked about some techniques to use with caution to prevent a line read from feeling flat.

I was not present for the next two talks, since I was busy attending a workshop. It was basically a course on how to use animation direction to build character.

The last talk of the day was on how different narrative techniques can cause unsettling/anxious feelings in the player.

And that was a very quick rundown of Konsoll 2022, at least the parts I got to experience. 

The trip home was a slog, and I had like 17 different hallucinations during the 9 hour bus trip back home. But in the end it was an extremely positive experience that I'm glad I got to take part of. Although it did ruin my sleep schedule so hopefully I can find a way to salvage it one way or another. Leaving off with a message I wrote from the bus trip, where I dozed off halfway through. For no other reason than it amuses me.

Ember, signing off.