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Lazy 8 Studios founder Dr. Rob Jagnow speaks frankly about the design of Extrasolar and the value of turning your technical constraints into strengths during GDC 2014.

June 13, 2014

2 Min Read

"Find the gem at the heart of your game, and set your core design values around that gem to let it shine through."

- Lazy 8 Studios founder Dr. Rob Jagnow encourages developers to focus on what makes their game unique at GDC 2014. Rejecting your players, long mandatory delays, antiquated monetization models and a remarkably generous demo -- these might all sound like terrible design ideas, but the team at Lazy 8 Studios made a conscious choice to add them into Extrasolar as gameplay mechanics. Inspired by a desire to bring a game with photorealistic graphics to a browser, Extrasolar was designed with an unusual set of goals and constraints. Lazy 8 Studios founder Dr. Rob Jagnow spoke about the team's guiding design principles and the challenges they faced in practically applying them to create a unique interactive story game during the Independent Games Summit at GDC 2014. We've taken the liberty of embedding the free video of "Extrasolar postmortem: Game design at 0.0003 FPS" above, but you can also watch it here on the GDC Vault.

About the GDC Vault

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers. Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech

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