Her presentation is good. At the beginning, she’s got great confidence, but then she does get a tad quivery.
She’s entertaining to listen to and funny. People didn’t laugh at the right moments though. The audience seemed a bit dead really, and they also cough a lot.
I find when a speaker opens with a really good joke that everyone can laugh at, to break the ice at the very beginning, then people will laugh readily at the right points throughout.
Nonetheless, she makes quite a few good points in her pres.
Timestamps for highlights:
- 6:40: students have advantage when making class project they should use: you can take a high risk innovation for your project, and have the execution fail (it was a bad idea after all), but its not always possible to try high risk projects once in a company
- 9:00: Design simplicity – pick one core piece of gameplay and iterate on it. “one piece of gameplay used in a whole different bunch of permutations.” – e.g: the portal
- 11:30: Design Democracy.
* All designers on team. - 13:40: Getting to Valve.
* Here she summarizes the story of how the Valve team picked up the Narbacular team. - 14:40: Valve Lessons
- 18:00: Coworkers will determine your growth
* True that. - 19:20: Playtesting
* Playtesting rigor – not rigorous testing doesn’t yield value
Here’s a link to the original narbacular drop demo. I really liked it when I played it. When you first open narbacular, its like WOW. This is brilliant.
So to sum, Kim swift. If she were available at taverns in DOTA maps, I would use her.
