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GDC Trip Report - GamingTuesday
I am stoked to burning-hot waiting for my plane to San Jose for the Game Developers Conference. The waiting area at Seatac airport for my flight is packed with game developers and their myriad gadgets. There is a perceptible hum of anticipation. Alaska Airlines stabs this atmosphere in the heart when they announce our flight is cancelled for no apparent reason, apart from the desire to piss on our parade. Then they tell us with a smirk, “Here’s six bucks. Go buy yourself a freaking Twinkie. Losers.” (I may be paraphrasing a bit there, but I’m sure that was the intended gist.) We are able to reschedule for the next flight, thanks to the quick thinking of my soon-to-be ex-coworker, Patrick, and we get to play Mario Kart DS most of the way there.
I arrive exhausted at the Hyatt Hotel at 10:00 pm and order room service.
Wednesday
Once again bursting with excitement, I line up second in line with my room-mate Matt for the shuttle to the conference. The bus arrives promptly, the driver stops, opens the door to mock us, then speeds away. We wait another 45 minutes for the next “15-minute-interval” shuttle. The line behind us eventually extends to a full busload. Bastards, I tell you, bastards!
Finally arriving at the doorstep of the San Jose Convention Center, my excitement meter once again blasts past eleven, and shatters the lens.
9:00 am: Game Design for Alternate Controllers with Ryan Lesser and Greg LoPiccolo of Harmonix Studios
Guitar Hero Rocks! I am so buying this game the next chance I get. This talk was about some of the projects that Harmonix has done using alternate controllers. The gist of their talk is this:
For Alternative Controller Games:
Step 1: Identify the Player Experience
Step 2: Develop and Evaluate the Controller
Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 and 2
The games they did:
1. Karaoke Evolution uses a standard microphone to sense pitch. Pitch and meter are used to drive the game. Volume didn’t work due to the variability of input, and lyric recognition was over the poor Ps2’s head.
2. The hoverboard game, Antigrav uses the Eye Toy to map arm and head movements into controller input, by means of 2D face and hand tracking.
3. Guitar Hero is about being a rock star, reproducing guitar parts of rock anthems, showmanship and firing up the crowd of bobbing hair masses. They really went to town iterating through controller prototypes for this one. It had to be cool, inviting and large enough to use, and provide for the “showmanship” feature. It did all of these things and more, especially with the added whammy bar and tilt sensor. Rock out!
10:30 am: Keynote – Playstation 3: Beyond the Box with Phil Harrison
Boring! What a letdown. Synopsis: PS2 still selling strong, new camera and GPS add-ons for the PSP, a couple of lame-game demos, a little more PS3 hype, and the announcement of Xbox Live for the PS3. I really wanted to see them raise the stakes in this presentation. They merely called Microsoft’s bid.
12:00 pm: Keynote – Building a Better Battlestar with Ronald Moore
First let me say that I have never enjoyed a television show as much as I do the new Battlestar Galactica in my entire freaking life. This was the first lecture I went to purely for unabashed fanboy tendencies. For me, Ron Moore showing up for this talk was like Jesus showing up at church to give the service. I was in rapture.
I was in an endorphin-hazed mind-fog for the duration of the talk, but I believe the main take-away from this talk about adapting an existing intellectual property was to identify the original’s main themes and maintain them. Only adapt the characteristics of the IP that are secondary significance. The original BSG was a dark show, and was about a hunt for the planet Earth. The new show maintains those characteristics, but makes many adaptations to make it original. (Starbuck, anyone?)
Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica Keynote
2:30 pm: Building Project Gotham Racing 3: An Xbox 360 Post Mortem with Paul Kirby and Gareth Wilson
I went to this talk to put faces to names. I also wanted to hear what they had to say about our contribution to this game. On the negative side, they indicated that they had difficulties coming to terms with the new technology. However, they were effusive in giving kudos to Microsoft for all of the help we gave them. That was quite gratifying.
4:00 pm: All about Ninety Nine Nights: Next Gen Character Design with Sangyoun Lee and Tetsuya Mizuguchi
This was another lecture I went to with my fanboy hat on. I was out of my element, since this was mostly an art design talk, but it was very inspirational, and now I can hardly wait for N3 to come out. Here’s a link to the actual talk.
5:30 pm: Booth Crawl
Free beer, snacks, and a cool Playstation Beer glass. What more can I say. I walked around and snagged a few t-shirts, but I didn’t really check out the booths at this time.
6:30 pm: Awards Ceremony
Darwinia (independent game) and Shadow of Colossus (commercial) were the big winners. Psychonauts won a few awards too. I found this event a bit boring, and will probably not return, unless I’m directly involved. PGR3 had a few nominations, but for the most part Microsoft was skunked for awards.
The Xenon TV boys had dinner at Il Fornaio. Not bad, but hardly worth the price.
Thursday
9:00 am: Three States and a Plan: The AI of F.E.A.R. with Jeff Orkin
This was an interesting talk, and challenging to follow, but the gist is that Monolith abandoned the Finite State Machine (FSM) planning logic from their previous games, and went with a modified version of STRIPS planning that is coming into vogue for player AI. There is a lot of info available on the internets on this topic, so I don’t need to blog it here.
10:30 am: Keynote – Disrupting Development with Satoru Iwata
Iwata is inspiring. He talked mostly about the DS and all of the cool and different stuff they’re doing with that platform. We got a free game, “Brain Training”. That’s a hard act to follow. Here's a link.
12:00 pm: Keynote – What’s Next in Design with Will Wright
WTF? Astrobiology? I really enjoyed this talk but it didn’t really seem to have a lot of relevance to the gaming industry. Check it out.
2:30 pm: Odd vs. God: An Interview with David Jaffe and Lorne Lanning
That Jaffe has a potty mouth. This was also a very interesting talk that meandered all over the place. The main takeaway DJ had was to be tenacious to the creative process. Compromise, in his opinion, only leads to an inferior product.
Random notes from my afternoon Booth Exploration
Nintendo and Sony had pretty cool booths. Microsoft was all business. Even the IBM booth was more inviting.
I watched Kornelia work all comers in Quake 4 like a psycho-butcher in a puppy farm. It made me want to curl up in the fetal position and suck my thumb.
I accidentally wandered into the recruiting section of the expo floor. I was accosted immediately by Sony, who threw me a fortune cookie, and then by Nintendo. After this 2 minute experience, I’m pretty certain that it’s a good time to get into the business. The fortune in the cookie told me that I will soon be working at Sony Online. Umm, no.
5:30 pm: Burn Baby Burn: Developers Rant with Seamus Blackley, Jonathan Blow, Chris Crawford, Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman and Jane Pinckard
This was a fun session to go to, but the real surprise was that Jane Pinckard of Game Girl Advance was a last minute guest. She is so hawt!
Parties
The TnT gang went to a few parties on Thursday night. I drank for free all night long.
Friday
10:30 am: Inventing Feature IP and Understanding its Benefit with Neil Young
Neil Young is a great speaker. I took a lot of notes on this talk, but most of that can already be found in this article.
He did some excellent demonstration of new innovative features coming up for Medal of Honor Airborne. I believe the franchise will be getting a much needed shot in the arm with this upcoming release.
12:00 pm: Six Million Dollar Tester with Leander Hasty
This roundtable had too many Microsofties representing. I also had hangover issues, so I declined to offer comment whilst attending. I did come away with some new ideas though: one team used the socket layer for manipulating functionality in multiplayer games, another team uses AppVerifier and yet another team uses a PC Lint server to compare Lint outputs from build to build.
2:30 pm: Game Developer’s Bill of Rights with Jason Della Rocca
This roundtable was very active and interesting. The genesis of the talk was from Eric Zimmerman’s Bill of Rights.
IGDA is planning to establish a code of ethics that developers and studios would follow in order to have “IGDA-approved” certified studios. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
Comments (1)Sounds like a really cool trip. Seriouly jealous.
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