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It\u2019s been about 4 years since I last attended GDC, but some interesting trendlines seem to have solidified\/gone away since last time I was there.\u00a0 Winning mobile developers was THE topic for the show. Sessions continued to be very good \u2013 but I noticed that almost (if not more than) half of them are now related to art, gameplay, or business concerns (not technical).\u00a0 The Indie game scene appears to be moving beyond just closet developers and becoming a big and energetic movement in the industry.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Hiring appears to be back judging by the energy and sheer number of interviewing\/companies interviewing on the show floor.\u00a0 Attendance seemed to be at record levels at 19,000 attendees.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Details:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Data Management For Modern Game Pipelines<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 Two fellows from Autodesk\/Maya went over the state of current content pipelines from Maya to game engine.\u00a0 They are apparently hard at work at Autodesk trying to make these converters and content back-and-forth between engine and Maya easier with a project called DNA.\u00a0 It is a system of metadata and a database that, once integrated into your engine, allows you to quickly get assets out of Maya into your game engine, and back into Maya quickly.\u00a0 It was likely too cumbersome for most game developers, but it was a good recognition on their part of the needs of the industry.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n 2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Noon poster sessions<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0 Real-time music generation was well done (for what it was) and the \u201910 things to know about usability testing\u2019 was a good list of resources for those trying to understand what doing usability testing was.<\/span><\/p>\n 3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>One hour 10 speakers<\/span><\/strong> talk had a lot of great ideas.\u00a0 One of best was why consoles are failing: 1. In age of instant-on mobile\/PSP-type devices, waiting 15 minutes to get into a game is intolerable.\u00a0 2. Too many cutscenes, license agreements, booting, etc.\u00a0 Want instant-on wake-from-sleep into my game just like a laptop.\u00a0 3. Wants no more 40+ hour games \u2013 they\u2019re just too long. 4. Update sizes and frequency are just ridiculous \u2013 you only should have 1 update per quarter.\u00a0 Period.\u00a0 Many other good thoughts if we ever want to go into that realm.<\/span><\/p>\n 4.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Multicore Memory management in Mortal Kombat<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0 EXCELLLENT talk on a multi-threaded memory manager.\u00a0 Takeaway is that it took them 11 months to get it done (3 months of that was just to get the multi-threaded\/lockfree library built they needed), but it\u2019s a really fantastic system they are using in all their games going forward and shows some amazing speed, efficiency, and debugging features.<\/span><\/p>\n 5.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Dice talk about Data Oriented Design<\/span><\/strong>.\u00a0 Very good talk with good analysis and results.\u00a0 Takeaway: throw away all your fancy data structures and line up your data for SSE manipulation.\u00a0 It\u2019s much more performant than non-cache friendly data structures, orders faster, and can easily be threaded.<\/span><\/p>\n 6.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Kinect skeletal tracking deep Dive<\/span><\/strong>. \u00a0<\/strong>Very interesting talk on the problems (and solutions) unique to skeletal tracking\/Kinect given by Microsoft AE.\u00a0 Some good general solutions for multi-threaded timing issues.<\/span><\/p>\n 7.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Halo Reach Effects. <\/span><\/strong>Excellent talk on the special effects in Halo Reach.\u00a0 Excellent new way to do dynamic particle systems that interact with geometry in the real world, shield effects, and a few other really visually stunning, and very realtime, techniques.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n 8.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Mega-Meshes<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 modeling\/rendering worlds of 100 billion polygons.\u00a0 Very interesting talk that seems to be along the lines of last year\u2019s ID siggraph talk on streaming massive geometry.\u00a0 The second half had to do with getting pretty decent spherical harmonic lighting techniques on Xbox and other consoles.\u00a0 Lots to digest in the talk \u2013 so I\u2019ll likely look at the slides when published.<\/span><\/p>\n 9.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Experimental gameplay<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 10 or so people positing or showing interesting gameplay techniques and ideas.\u00a0 This session really showed what the Indie scene is about \u2013 trying to create unique experiences.<\/span><\/p>\n 10.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Marble Madness, Pitfall, and Doom postmortems 1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Mobile<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 the real energy this year was clearly behind winning developers into each camp\u2019s mobile and tablets.\u00a0 Unity showed extensively.\u00a0 Free hardware galore, tons of sessions, and big parties were being thrown. \u00a0\u00a0With years left to go before another console refresh \u2013 it was mostly just quiet, incremental changes from the big players like Xbox, Sony, and Nintendo.\u00a0 With smartphones getting such sophisticated graphics hardware, it does make me seriously wonder if the days of PSP or DS-like gaming devices are limited, which could spell big problems for console companies that see such large revenue streams from them.<\/span><\/p>\n 2.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Monitizing<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 Lots of financial companies on the show floor and session talks focused on micropayments and new revenue streams.\u00a0 The fact there were old-school financial and credit card companies on the show floor was a real shock.<\/span><\/p>\n 3.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Indie culture<\/span><\/strong> \u2013 The indie area of the show floor was packed every time I went by it.\u00a0 Lots of young energy and it\u2019s more than just hype judging by the awards Minecraft won.\u00a0 Attended 2 classic game post-mortems which really clarified in my own mind the shift in game dev culture. \u00a0Used to be programmers ruled the roost in developing games, but now I think we\u2019re seeing that most of the current game developers in the indie scene are content with using off-the-shelf engines\/tools and focus 90% their attention on the gameplay and creating unique experiences as opposed to focusing on the newest\/greatest tech.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n 4.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/span>Hard-core technical<\/span><\/strong> talks seemed to be diminishing in number, but not quality.\u00a0 Still excellent work being done, but I wonder if this large trend towards younger developers just using more off-the-shelf engines and simpler mechanics will create a two-tiered system in which the majority of smaller Indie games will use low-end\/runs on just about anything techniques, while AAA titles will always continue but just get more technically impressive, but (with fewer studios able to afford it) smaller in quantity and more insular. \u00a0Do we turn into a world where there are a few engine makers and game houses are primarily programmers that write games in scripts on top of them?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s been about 4 years since I last attended GDC, but some interesting trendlines seem to have solidified\/gone away since last time I was there.\u00a0 Winning mobile developers was THE topic for the show. Sessions continued to be very good \u2013 but I noticed that almost (if not more than) half of them are now related to art, gameplay, or business concerns (not technical).\u00a0 The Indie game scene appears to be moving beyond just closet developers and becoming a big…<\/p>\n\n
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