By the time he started to gain that understanding, he was already inclined to protect the core of what he had created. Roberts didn't know the rules, but having that knowledge may have pushed him down safer, more familiar paths. However, this approach to the game's development - so far away from the finely tuned pipelines indies working with limited resources are encouraged to have - is unquestionably part of what makes Gorogoa feel so distinct. A big part of the challenge was working with what I had, and adapting and expanding what I'd already made, because I couldn't start fresh with all of my new understanding." "I had to absorb all of that information and still make a finished game, but I was never starting from scratch. It's not like all that effort just disappeared" "The game was hard to make in a way that looks like it was hard to make. "A lot of it was seeing what people said about the demo, and understanding their points, but they were referring to principles of design that I hadn't given a lot of thought. "So I encountered that criticism from other designers - I mean criticism in the constructive sense - after I'd already built something," he says, recalling the moment he showed that demo to people for the first time. Roberts started with the intention of writing a graphic novel, and simply followed the idea wherever it took him - very often into uncharted waters. Indeed, when he created the first demo in 2012, he did so "in total isolation as a developer." No feedback from a peer group, no education in game development he had never so much as read a book on game design theory. There is no question that Roberts struggled to finish Gorogoa and bring it to market, and that's largely down to a "bespoke" development process that was defined as much by naivety and inexperience as it was by his abundant talent. Every piece of Gorogoa was a new problem." If you build a game with a particular mechanic, not every story makes sense to tell that way. "The lesson, I hope, is about that thought process, by giving an example of what I went through to figure that out. Jason Roberts collecting a BAFTA for Best Debut Game The overall theme was about my struggle, over the years, to make the content of the game the themes work with the mechanics I had made. "I don't know which of the things I did I should encourage people to emulate, and which I shouldn't. "When I try and talk about it, it's just this confusing word salad that comes out of my head," he continues. Gorogoa is, he says, "a non-verbal experience" by design, and one created almost entirely on his own. In addition, the level of interest in hearing him explain his process since it launched to rapturous reviews in December 2017 is difficult to square with the way he sees the game. Roberts' speaks with a measured, even tone, and one gets the impression that he's no great lover of the spotlight. But I don't think I'd advise anybody else to." It's the first big talk I've done at GDC, and I didn't realise how much work goes into it. "But I still stressed a lot about the talk. "A little bit," Roberts concedes, when I ask if that's how the crowd's enthusiastic reception felt. "In a sense, making an unwise decision among wiser people will result in uniqueness" Seven years after work on Gorogoa started in earnest, Roberts is at GDC to take his victory lap. The room, one of the largest at GDC, is teeming with people, his arrival on stage greeted not just by applause, but a generous amount of enthusiastic cheering and hollering. That is very much the feeling during the talk given by Buried Signal's Jason Roberts, the one-man band behind the singular puzzle title Gorogoa, his first ever published game. The most distinctive creators from the previous year are given the biggest stages, and what often feels like the entire games industry gathers to reflect on their achievements - to gain a little insight into how brilliance works. A prominent indie designer once explained the Game Developers Conference to me like this: E3, PAX, EGX and their ilk are the race, but GDC is the victory lap.
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