This is a huge step forwards in terms of keeping games innovative and alive. And at some point, they really get it – they look at the movie and recording industry, and they see MySpace and GarageBand and YouTube. They realize that people want community involvement, not a one-way pipeline from the big publishers down to the peons who just shell out money.

MS actually will make their development environment available for free if you’re developing for Windows. And then, in one fell swoop, they lose touch. The XBox 360 development environment is going to cost $99 – per year. That’s not what everybody is waiting for – and it will keep a lot of kids (or their parents) from buying this environment.

To be fair, the XBox version will offer lots of free content, and if they keep adding free content every year, that might just be a viable approach. I guess the all-free route wasn’t palatable to the powers that be.

Overall, it’s still a huge win for game development. After a long hiatus, we’re slowly getting back to the point we were at in the early 80′s. * Computers are getting quite cheap again. (You can get a desktop w/ monitor for around $450) * Some form of computer is the hip thing for kids to have. It was the C=64, now it’s the XBox 360. * There’s a huge trend towards simpler (or Indy, or casual, or whatever you call them today) games. * We now have got a development environment where you can make games run on your home TV – and impress your friends with what you did

If YouTube and the others are any success, we’ll see a huge flood of crappy games – and a constant trickle of things that will amaze us, inspire us, and humble us.

I’m looking forward to it!

Let’s start with the annoying part – the annual whine “There’s no innovation”. It really starts grating by now. There’s plenty of innovation, if you look for it. There’s Guitar Hero. There’s Shadow of the Colossus. There’s Brain Age.

So here’s my message for the complain fraction: How about you actually do something? Greg Costykian is one of the very few to put his money where his mouth is.

And – of course – there’s the one real stinker in the presentation track. This years honor goes to Tim Sweeney and his presentation on “Building a better engine”. I’m willing to forgive that he’s a horrible speaker – he’s mainly a programmer, after all. I’m not willing to forgive a talk that is utterly devoid of content and merely a sales vehicle for the Unreal Engine. (No, it wasn’t marked as a “sponsored” talk.)

If I pay $1400 for a conference, I expect content. Period.

But let’s move to the upsides – there was, as always lots of interesting information to be had. The most interesting keynote goes to Nintendo – funny, lively, entertaining, and a couple of really big news:

• Nintendo will offer the SEGA back catalog on the revolution
• There will be a new Zelda
• Metroid Prime multiplayer on the DS is extremely well done. Excellent control scheme.
• And finally, with “Brain Age”, Nintendo is opening up an entirely new market. Since they were good enough to give away free copies to everybody in the keynote, expect a (mini-) review soon.

Will Wrights’ was, as usual, a thoroughly enjoyable talk. It’s my one guilty pleasure, since he really had nothing to offer that affected me as a programmer enough to justify the lecture. I’ll still attend all his lectures – the man is brilliant.

The PS3 keynote was ho-hum. Not much new info, and the games were not exactly overwhelming. Strange as it is, that keeps me happy – the barrier to entry in the PS3 market is fairly low.

In the non-keynote department, there were three talks worth mentioning:

The Gym: Where the Incredible Hulk Goes To Train

An excellent talk about the scripting/animation editor used by the team developing “The Incredible Hulk”. The slides are available online, but the presentation was even better.

The only downside was the misleading name – I went there because my first choice was packed already, and I had no idea it would be about tools.

Feeding The Monster: Advanced Data Packing for Consoles

Again, a rather misleading title for a great talk. This was, at its core, about load-in-place technologies, and how to use C++ for great effect in that area. Again, with slides online

God Of War: How The Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another

A great overview how to build a flexible game engine with limited engineering resources, and entertaining to boot. (In a nutshell – make the designers do the work instead. Everything is data-driven). Download the slides.

Best quote: “Designers suffer from shiny-object syndrome”.

And that was it. The rest contained only tiny nuggets of information. Combined, more than worth the price, but too small to justify a writeup.

Talks I’ll see at a glance, or subscribe to the calendar

I’ll also, obviously, visit a few parties… If you want to get together, mail me, or contact me on AIM (RobBlum42). If you need my cell number, shoot me some mail – I’m obviously reluctant to post that on the Intarweb.

In any case, you’ll want to get maximum results out of this. To do that, there are a few things you need to know about GDC.

1. It’s not about the talks. If it were strictly about the talks, you could just order the session papers and be done with it. What it is about is about the energy of the presenters (or the roundtables) sparking discussions. It is about the exchange of ideas with your peers.

2. It’s not a good place to job hunt. Yes, there’s the job fair – which is a glorified inbox for resumes. And if you’re new to the industry, and your college has trained you on “how to interact with industry members” – forget that. Every non-HR person I know that’s ever been to GDC is sick and tired of tons of fresh graduates milking them for an “in”.

   That’s not to say you shouldn’t contact them. But don’t talk about jobs. Talk about interesting problems you’ve had. Things that you’re curious about. Ideas that you’d like to try. As I said above – it’s about the experience exchange, and that’s why we all go there. If you know about your field and contribute to a discussion, people will remember you. (It helps to have a business card, though!). If you just want to drop off your resume, HR is a better contact.

With that out of the way, here are a couple of survival hints.

Meeting people

It’s about the people. So make sure you meet them. Go to the parties. Participate in roundtables. Introduce yourself to your seat neighbors. Talk to people at breakfast and lunch. (OK. If you’re a programmer, make that lunch only – most programmers only grunt at breakfast). Don’t hang only with the ones you know. You want to hear fresh ideas.

Also, plan ahead who you want to meet. Contact the people you’re interested in meeting, schedule a quick get-together. GDC is a busy time, and most calendars are full enough that you usually don’t meet by chance.

Oh, and bring business cards. If GDC is going well, you’ll meet tons of interesting people. They will meet tons of interesting people, too. If you exchange business cards, it’s easier to remember all those names.

Session Planning

It’s important to pick the right sessions, because many are dull enough to numb you before you go to the dentist. There are a couple of hints that might help you pick the right one, but be warned – there’ll always be a few sessions that make you feel like you want that time of your life back. (To minimize those, use the review forms. Make sure the bad presenters are weeded out)

• Choose by Speaker

  There are people that will always be interesting, no matter what. It doesn’t even matter what they talk about. If Will Wright is speaking (Or Chris Crawford. Or Brian Moriarty, or whatever your speaker of choice is…), go there. You will enjoy the talk, and you will take many ideas and inspirations out of it, no matter the topic. In general, it benefits you to keep track of the speakers you like and dislike – chances are this isn’t your last GDC

• Skip the readings

  If something sounds like it’s going to be the reading of a paper, and not much more, forget about it. Get the paper and read it at home. You’ve had enough of that at college, right?

• Choose by experience level

  If you’re an artist interested in programming, don’t go to the advanced talks. If you’re a programmer interested in programming, skip the introductory programming talks. Choose by your level of experience.

• Add some spice

  Go see some (introductory!) presentations of a field you don’t usually work in. It will help you communicate better with other team members, it’ll give you new insights, and it has a good chance of being quite interesting. Don’t skip all the talks in your field, but broaden your horizon.

• Make a plan

  You will not be able to choose sessions on the spot, and be happy with it – there’s too much going on. Plan out where you want to go (why else would this be called session planning?). Make sure you have backups – sometimes, a talk is not what you expect it to be, and you’re better off switching sessions. Sure, it is somewhat rude, so don’t overdo it. But the point is, you want to learn something.

  And plan the roundtables last. They’re usually repeated several times, so you can find an empty slot without shuffling things around too much.

Parties

GDC after six is all about the parties. There are the official parties, and there are lots of “invitation only” ones. Usually, you just have to go and ask for an invitation on the expo floor, though – it’s PR, after all.

If that’s your kind of thing, have a blast. They’re fun, the drinks are usually free – what’s not to like? Just don’t expect to make interesting contacts or have deep conversations. It’s, at its core, a bunch of geeks having fun. So you’ll mostly hear slightly drunken repeats of old slashdot standbys. But, as I said, if that’s your thing, it’s quite funny.

That’s all, folks!

So that’s it, pretty much. Make sure you’re well rested when you get there – you won’t be when you leave. It’s physically and mentally draining – but extremely rewarding. It’s the one chance for us all to meet during the year. So go there, have fun, meet new people, and maybe I’ll see you there. (I’ll be posting my schedule Sunday)

The original plan was to blog live from every single session at GDC and keep you all up to date on the comings and goings in our industry. This didn’t happen for quite a few reasons – but one of the core problems was lack of wireless in the actual conference room.

Now that didn’t stop better bloggers than me, but it certainly kept me from posting all the time. So, instead, I’ll give a short summary of my experiences.

As usual, the best things happened outside the conference room – I had lots of interesting discussions about game development in general and the role tools play in it. I even managed to run into Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame – thanks to the charming Alice from Wonderland.

The conference itself was OK – it finally didn’t have the doom and gloom atmosphere of the last few years, but except for Microsoft’s presentation, it wasn’t all shiny happy people either. Everybody was very much focused on the tasks ahead, created by the console transition.

Let me add the caveat that I focused very much on tools only – a mistake, in the light of the absolutely fabulous (or so I’ve heard) presentations by Will Wright, Greg Costikyan, and other luminaries. And, of course, given my combination of bad luck and disdain for marketing, I missed the MS keynote – where they gave away about a 1000 HDTVs.

Coming back to tools, though, it proved to be a very valuable conference. Games are becoming really large. Unless we create the tools to manage that immense of data, we are most certainly doomed to cross the $20 million line for game development – Epic’s Tim Sweeney was one of the people who clearly realized that. And unless we expand into a much bigger market, this is not something that we can afford.

Another clearly visible trend is the impact that agile methodologies had. Everybody is talking about SCRUM and XP. Lots of people are actually (gasp!) writing unit tests for their code. The production track people started realizing that communication is the key to any healthy development cycle. (Unbelievable – we need to talk to each other? What an insight! )

On the technical side, reliance on databases is emerging. More and more development houses realize that the amount of data they are handling requires tools that are made to handle large amounts of data – i.e. databases. In a quick show of hands, about 50% of the tools developers at a round table where using a database (and many others plan to do so).

Yes, some still dream of makefiles and directories full of assets, but those days will be coming to an end. A quick look at the numbers reveals that current games have around 50,000 assets – up from around 10,000 for first-generation console titles.

Now if we even assume a modest increase of a factor of 4 (given that main-memory is up 4 times), we are looking at 200,000 assets. This is way beyond manual control. Unless we get assistance, we will drown in our own assets.

Of course, there were lots of other, smaller ideas and trends – but database based tools is where the game development industry is heading. We have to face it sooner or later – it’s not the programmers who make games, it’s the people who create the content. It’s our task as programmers to enable them to do the best they can do.