Gamezebo was at GDC this year, catching up with our favourite mobile game developers and meeting new favourites. We’ve covered the event extensively so far, including news of upcoming games, updates, and these diary entries. You can check out all …
Gamezebo was at GDC this year, catching up with our favourite mobile game developers and meeting new favourites. We’ve covered the event extensively so far, including news of upcoming games, updates, and these diary entries. You can check out all of our coverage so far below:
Or, you can read on for our third, and final, GDC diary entry. We meet some exceptionally talented Brazilian developers, listen to Tencent give a talk on how it fixed PUBG Mobile, and actually spent some time on the show floor. Enjoy!
On the morning of day three, we caught up with a few of the finalists of the IMGA Awards, which were held at GDC. Both developers hailed from Brazil and we were struck by just how beautiful and tactile their games were.
We first met Cafundo Creative Studio, who told us all about its beautiful upcoming rotating world puzzler, Tetragon. You can read our full report on this game by following the link in the list above.
For a short summary, it’s a breathtakingly beautiful game that gave us a real cerebral challenge. You rotate and manipulate 42 different levels that take place in a tiny world as you strive to make it to the end of the game and rescue your son.
We also met Ludic Side, who are most famous for puzzler Mr Square. Right now, the team is hard at work on Hoppia Tale, a Zelda-like RPG that challenges you to navigate a bunch of levels, defeating enemies, solving puzzles, and gathering loot.
Again, we were blown away by the gorgeous visuals and attention to detail. Every animation was very detailed and had wonderful sound effects to boot. We also appreciated the creativity of the experience, which allowed you to build your own farm, house, and even series of levels.
You can release your levels to the masses, who can vote on them if they like or dislike them. You’ll then place on a leaderboard.
When PUBG Mobile first launched, the reception wasn’t particularly warm. While we really enjoyed it, and actually thought it was a better version than the official release, it suffered from a number of technical issues that set it back.
Tencent held a talk during GDC, which detailed exactly how they managed to fix the mobile version and get its initial App Store rating from a three all the way up to the impressive 4.4 rating it currently sits at.
We’ll go into more detail about Tencent’s journey in a future article, but it basically involved a bunch of testing. The team tracked a number of different metrics from crash reports to death heat maps to figure out where the problems lay and how to solve them.
Right before we had to leave for the airport, we actually spent some time on the show floor. It was absolutely packed with developers showcasing their upcoming games, hardware, and services and there was a very positive buzz.
We watched a Clash Royale tournament take place live, with a number of experts teaming up with members of the public. We also saw the recently announced Google Stadia in action, which was pretty impressive.
One member of our team spent the afternoon raiding booths for freebies too. He got some great swag but refused to share any of it with us, who were too hard at work in various meetings. There’s always one, isn’t there?
Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed this year’s GDC. We met a number of exciting developers, enjoyed checking out Google Stadia, and got a real kick out of bringing all of our coverage to you, our audience.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage. Stay tuned in for more articles over the next few days. We’ll be back next year with more GDC coverage!
