GDC 2008 – Wednesday
Back home after a long day. GDC was super busy this year, the busiest I’ve seen it. Every session I was in was packed, with Chris Hecker’s in particular being standing room only. Here’s the sessions I saw:
Master Metrics: The Science behind the Art of Game Design
Two academics going over research from various academics & companies about “metrics” for game design – quantifying information about game design & the practicalities of it. This was beginning to look really dull with comparisons to early flight experiments, but it got more interesting. Some great data on measuring the first five minutes of games vs movies, quantifying what ‘beats’ they hit with regards to gameplay & storytelling etc. Some great thoughts on brainstorming ideas from Dave Perry (of all people) & Naughty Dog for example. I liked this.
MS Keynote
Dull was my reaction & everyone else I talked to said the same thing. Ho hum.
Automating Regression Discovery: Finding the Wrenches in the GEARS OF WAR
How can game developers automate their build process to improve their code + data stability, and improve their runtime performance? CCTray + automatically generated build reports are your friend. Turns out we’re doing almost all of the same things as Epic, which is good to know. They’ve got some interesting uses of heat maps (see Halo 3) too.
Lunch
Turkey sandwich with ex-co-workers I haven’t seen for a while. Fun!
Your Shameful Secret Addiction to Crunch
A talk by the owner of Relentless (devs of Buzz!) about the structure of the company & how they do no crunch (aka overtime). Regurgitating a whole bunch of articles/discussions from the same company, so this was a little dull. Once again, he skips the question of “what about us doing games that aren’t quiz games?”. Session was utterly packed.
Structure VS. Style
Fantastic talk by Chris Hecker (of Maxis/Spore fame) about key “things” in development that have helped us step forward (such as the tri) & how we need a similar leap forward in AI. Really interesting, really forward thinging & possibly completely wrong – as Hecker even said himself. Great talk though. Dumb question session after.
Beer
Met a few friends from Dallas. Guinness. Yum.
