- Giorgi Shelegia
- Dec 29, 2022
- 2 min read
On December 17-18th, I was taking part in the Georgian Game Developers Conference. The first presentation, was about game production, a general overview of the process, which was much simpler to plan than the Unreal Engine Masterclass that was to be held during the second part of the event.
The main challenge was the following: I have 90 minutes, How do I capture the audience?
Some are developers, some are just people who are interested in game development, how do I keep everyone's interest during that time?
After some thought, and some improvisation, I came up with a plan, and everything went well.
I made the workshop as interactive as it can possibly be.
At first, I started with a question? What is your favourite game?
That led to a discussion of different games across different genres. The next question went towards exploring their favourite parts of those games, slowly moving the conversation to game mechanics. After that, we decided on which game mechanic to recreate - and the workshop started.
During the process, I ensured to make the audience feel more like participants, rather than listeners.
By frequently asking questions, waiting for suggestions, and holding discussions, the audience felt that they were being listened to.
I responded to every wild idea that was thrown out, at least considering them for the workshop topic, so that way, the audience would feel motivated to stay engaged, instead of feeling like their suggestions were left unheard.
As the process continued, I decided to make the process more fun, by requesting voice acting from the audience members. This made the masterclass even more engaging.
I made sure to do the actual masterclass part as well, discussing different variables, flow control, functions, custom events, materials, input and so on.
By the end, we recorded an "Ambience" soundtrack for our game, which was about a person who entered the event late, and was looking for the room with food. The ambience was a minute and a half of everyone speaking about different topics at the same time, recorded near the end of the masterclass.
As the masterclass ended, I was happy to hear all the positive comments from the participants, proving that the plan was successful, and the event had great results all around.
