Exhibitors, are you planning to ship materials to the show? Please keep the following dates and options in mind to ensure a smooth process.
GES Advanced Warehouse
The easiest way to ensure your items arrive in Austin is to send them to the GES Advance Warehouse prior to the event. GES will hold your items for you and place them in your booth during move in. The warehouse will accept shipments from August 15-September 10, 2008. The Advanced warehouse shipping label can be found in the Exhibitor Service Manual in Section 4.
Direct Shipments
Direct Shipments are only accepted between September 14 and September 17, 2008. The Austin Convention Center does not accept packages on behalf of exhibitors, so any shipments MUST be sent c/o GES Expo Services. The direct shipping label can be found in the Exhibitor Service Manual in Section 4.
Labels
Please use the shipping labels in the Exhibitor Service Manual in Section 4. Even if you use a mail carrier’s label (like Fedex, UPS, or DHL) it is still important to also affix the GES label somewhere on every box. This will help us to identify your box(es) onsite and will help prevent lost boxes.
Timing
Be sure to time your shipment right! The advanced warehouse closes on September 10 and direct shipments won’t be accepted onsite until September 14, 2008. During that 4-day window there will be no place to send shipments.
Mark Healey and Alex Evans, co-founders of Media Molecule, will deliver a keynote speech titled, “Media Molecule, Little Team, Big Ideas,” at this year’s Paris Game Developers Conference (Paris GDC). Healey and Evans will address the breadth of ways in which game developers can incorporate creativity into their designs. From god-games and sim-games to full-on modding, they will discuss the past, present, and future of user-generated content as illustrated through the story of Media Molecule’s conception and its first title, LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation 3.
Paris GDC, the second French edition of the Game Developers Conference - the premier event for developers and publishers in the videogame industry - is scheduled for June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre in Paris.
A veteran of the games industry since 1988, Healey is currently the Creative Director at Media Molecule. He has coded, designed, and contributed to game audio for Bullfrog Productions and Lionhead Studios. Having contributed to acclaimed titles such as Fable, Theme Park, and the Black and White series, Healey then led the development of the cult hit title, Rag Doll Kung Fu, which became available through Valve’s digital distribution system Steam, in 2007.
After writing software renderers for Bullfrog Productions, Evans joined Lionhead Studios where he worked on the 3D engine of the milestone title Black & White. In 2006, Evans and Healey formed Media Molecule, where he is the Technical Director, in hopes of bringing creative gaming to life on PlayStation 3. The result was the world-renowned LittleBigPlanet.
“The first build of LittleBigPlanet was the most fun and exciting game I played in 2006, leading up to its iconic reveal in Phil Harrison’s GDC keynote in 2007,” said Jamil Moledina, Executive Director, Game Developers Conference Events. “Yet one of the most tantalizing and little-discussed elements of the game is the degree to which the toolset empowers the gamer to become the developer. This represents a turning point in the game industry, and we anticipate the Paris GDC attendees taking voluminous notes in this detailed examination of the building blocks of this highly coveted title.”
“We are thrilled to have renowned industry figures Mark Healey and Alex Evans kick-off Paris GDC with the opening keynote address,” said Pierre Carde, Executive Director, Paris GDC. “This visionary talk encapsulates the main issues and trends developers are interested in hearing about and sets the stage for two days of exceptional content.”
Paris GDC 08 offers more than 50 sessions presented by industry experts and designed for developers looking to expand their expertise, network, and learn from their peers. Visit the Paris GDC website for the complete list of confirmed sessions. Videogame professionals who wish to take advantage of the Super Early Bird Rate and save more than 50% on their pass have until April 23rd to register online at www.parisgdc.com.
Ben Cousins, Executive Producer of EA DICE’s Battlefield franchise, will deliver a keynote titled, “Scenes from the Battlefield: The Present and Future of Core and Casual,” at this year’s Paris Game Developers Conference (Paris GDC). Cousins will address the business and consumer trends that have led to the creation of the new Battlefield Heroes service and will share his thoughts on the future crossover of core and casual gamers and the supposed death of the PC as a gaming platform. Paris GDC, the second French edition of the Game Developers Conference, the premier event for developers and publishers in the videogame industry, is scheduled for June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre in Paris.
As Executive Producer for Battlefield titles at DICE in Stockholm, Sweden, Cousins most recently led the development of Battlefield Heroes, EA’s first “Play 4 Free” game. Cousins recent history involves work exclusively on digitally delivered entertainment – serving as Creative Director on PlayStation Home, Design Manager for the EyeToy group and Lead Designer for Beats at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
“The game industry is in a state of rapid and exciting change today, as developers grapple with adapting to free to play models and bringing gameplay to universal audiences,” said Jamil Moledina, Executive Director, GDC Events. “Ben has a successful history of coaxing our industry into the 21st Century, and we expect that his experiences fomenting evolution with Battlefield Heroes will prove highly illuminating to our audience.”
Continue reading "EA's Executive Producer of Battlefield Franchise, Ben Cousins, To Keynote Paris GDC 2008" »
Paris Game Developers Conference 08 (Paris GDC) has published its roster of featured speakers and sessions. The second French edition of the Game Developers Conference, the premier event for developers and publishers in the videogame industry, is scheduled for June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre in Paris. More than 50 sessions designed for developers looking to expand their expertise, network, and learn from their peers will be presented by industry experts and thought leaders at Paris GDC 08.
Highlighted sessions from the call for papers include:
- The Right Tools for the Write Job, by Mac Walters, Bioware
- Your Music Is the Game: Designing PHASE, the Other Project at Harmonix, by Chris Foster, Harmonix Music Systems
- The Free to Play Revolution, by Howard Marks, Acclaim
- Tackling High Level, Scalable Physics for Next Generation Game Engines, by Adam Moravanszky, NVIDIA
“It’s a very exciting time right now in the game industry, as developers are creating blockbuster hits for both the core market and for those who don’t call themselves gamers,” said Jamil Moledina, Executive Director, Game Developers Conference Events. “This cross-section of the sessions we intend to field in Paris should provide a taste of the range of global breakthroughs that are driving European development today.”
Sessions were selected by the Paris GDC advisory board, composed of international experts of the game industry, as well as the event organizers Think Services and Connection Events.
Continue reading "Paris GDC Reveals Content for 08 Session Lineup" »
 Good morning everyone! I haven't updated my column here recently, it's been a bit crunchy for us around here with the final load-in on GDC. However, it's all locked down, and there's only a few remaining things to mention, all of which revolve around bringing the GDC firmly into the 21st Century.
One element that speaks to this is our work with our newest partner, Charles River Ventures. CRV is a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm backing many of the interesting game startups we've been hearing about lately such as Raph Koster's Metaplace. Specifically, CRV partner Susan Wu has been pursuing innovation in game startups for several years, and is dedicated to seeing this trend become a core value of the game industry. This syncs up nicely with our interest in fostering innovation in game creation. With that in mind, we are developing a long-term thread we're calling the Startup Launchpad Presented by GDC and CRV, to host startup workshops and analysis at the Game Developers Conference events.
First out of the gate, at the GDC next Friday, is the 1st Annual Startup Showcase. The session consists of a handful of entrepreneurs presenting their new game businesses, some of which will be revealed for the first time. For example, Dennis Fong, who sold XFire to MTV in 2006, will be revealing his new venture publicly for the first time. Other presenters include Andrew Schneider, president of LiveGamer, Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou, and Gabe Zichermann, CEO of rmbr, and Lee Crawford, CEO of Twofish. In true sporting fashion, each of the presenters has agreed to be judged by a panel of game industry professionals who analyze new game concepts and businesses in the course of their occupations. Susan Wu will be moderating and participating in the panel consisting of Owen Mahoney, SVP Corporate Development for Electronic Arts, David Wallerstein, EVP International Business for Tencent, and myself. We'll select an honorary winner at this session, although this is all a prelude to an actual prize awarded in a Startup Contest to be presented at Austin GDC. More on that as it develops!
So taking that startup spirit in a different direction, the GDC is also integrating some Web 2.0 characteristics into our website. Attendees have already discovered our myGDC social networking system, enabling people to connect and discuss in forums in advance of the show. However, we are also very proud to take the wraps off our online session scheduling system, Schedule Builder (not a moment too soon). Please check them both out on the front page of this site, we're very interested to hear how you're using them and what we can do for next year also.
Well that almost covers it. The show's almost here, and there's just one pre-GDC surprise left.
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
This year the GDC is setting up ALL the tutorial, lecture, and panel classrooms with super fancy HD projectors. These projectors will provide more detailed and brighter images. We want the visual presentations that speakers deliver at the GDC to be as good as the verbal content they provide.
And, as usual, the classrooms in the Audio Track with have Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
Good morning everyone! One of the traditions we work hard to present at GDC is the tremendous wealth of Japanese developers on site. We've already talked about developers from Nintendo and Square Enix, but we've got a few more luminary folks to share with you. I'll go through them quickly, as there's a lot to cover.
As Ask a Ninja would say, it's time for everyone get on the omnibus! Composer Masafumi Takada has kindly agreed to deliver a retrospective on his work, titled The Music of Killer 7, God Hand, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, and No More Heroes.
Plus, our good friend Ray Nakazato, president of FeelPlus, is going to tell us what worked and didn't work on his latest project, in a session titled Looking Back at Lost Odyssey: The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Development.
In what's shaping up as an embarrassment of riches, we are also very pleased to feature Time Pilot and Street Fighter II creator Yoshiki Okamoto, now President of Game Republic. Okamoto-san has had a dramatic impact on the style of gameplay today, and he's prepared to delve deeply into the subtely of his process in his session titled Creativity in the Form of Improvement.
Finally, we have a couple of talks dealing with Final Fantasy XIII. While most high profile Japanese sessions at GDC fall into the game design track, we are pleased to present advanced sessions for other key disciplines at this year's GDC. Technical Research GM Taku Murata is back this year to give a detailed talk about Square Enix's switchover to a common development platform, their creation of a new engine, and their decision-making process in not going third party. This programming session is titled The Technology of Final Fantasy.
Also, we get a lot of requests regarding the art style of Final Fantasy games, and so we are delighted to feature a companion session, The Art of Final Fantasy (link pending). Final Fantasy art director Isamu Kamikokuryo will talk about the art style of the series, his inspirations, and the flow from concept art to pixels in an interview with Bungie's Steve Theodore.
One more note on Japanese participation at GDC this year: we're going to two rooms with dual simultaneous wireless translation in both Japanese and English, so we've got an open door for Japanese attendees too! Feel free to forward this link to any Japanese developers you know who may be interested in coming to GDC.
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
Hello everyone! A rare Thursday update from me, largely because we're going to push the schedule live early next week (yes, it's true), and we have a handful of interesting talks that need to go live beforehand. I know a lot of folks out there like these updates to have a theme, and so it strikes me that the common theme on these late arrivals is, well, brains.
First up, people have been talking for a while about using game engines to produce linear animation for film, TV, and commercial work. We're very pleased to present a couple of teams using their brains to make this happen. Kim Libreri of the leading LA special effects house Digital Domain and Jerry O'Flaherty from engine and game developer Epic Games will present a session titled Challenges of Creating Linear Content in a Game Engine. They'll explore the issues arising on Digital Domain's output for shorts, cinematics, and feature films and feature examples. Also, the bright people at Blockade are working on TV shows using game engines, and will present a talk on one of them, The Sacred Road, addressing the next stage of selling it to the network and distribution. The talk titled The Future of Animation is Games is presented by Blockade writer/director Bill Kroyer and Voom Networks HD Vice President of Programming, Mark DeAngelis. If you follow transmedia, game engines, or feature animation, you'll not want to miss this pair of talks.
The next talk has as much to do with guts as it does brains, since it's about Puzzle Quest. Infinite Interactive's CEO and Lead Designer Steve Fawkner will present a postmortem of the game, is his session Conquering Bane's Citadel: The Collision of Casual and Hardcore Gaming in Puzzle Quest. Blending hard core RPG elements with casual mechanics was huge leap of faith, and Fawker will describe the design process, lessons learned, and lessons applied moving forward.
Taking a step back from the direct nuts and bolts of making games, the next session we have to talk about is one that is literally about the brain and the human computer interface (HCI). As you may know, Emotiv systems is working on a technology to control in-game objects using only the mind. Yes, I know it sounds like flying cars. However, getting to the product required a significant degree of understanding about the brain and research into how we think about objects in a virtual space that could be relevant to everyone looking to close the gap between gamer and virtual world. With that in mind, Allen Snyder, PhD, Director for the Centre of the Mind and Co-Founder of Emotiv Systems will present with Randy Breen, Chief Product Officer also from Emotiv, are doing a session titled Semantic Interactivity - Virtual Coherence Using Next Generation Human Computer Interface.
Finally, we are presenting a chance for developers to give game journalists a piece of their mind. Newsweek editor N'Gai Croal has put together an all-star panel of game journalists including Kotaku's Brian Crecente, Spike TV's Geoff Keighley, 1Up Yours's Garnett Lee, Game Informer's Andy McNamara, and MTV News' Stephen Totilo to address the issues and conflicts in game journalism today in a session titled Up Against the Wall: Game Makers Take on the Press. This issue has largely been filtered by marketing, public relations, game publishing, and media publishing executives, but we felt it was appropriate to bring the media to our stage, so that actual developers can cut through the red tape and get the straight story.
At this point, there's only a couple more sessions coming in, but we know you're anxious to plan your GDC. We're working feverishly to get the schedule live for you, and a couple more surprises too!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
I'm sure you're all scrambling to get your registrations in before the early registration deadline (tonight) - thought it might help to provide a few tutorial suggestions. Just in case you can't decide on what to pick to associate with your pass...here are few of the top rated tutorials:
Audio Boot Camp
Audio for games and other interactive entertainment has grown far beyond simple mash-ups of technical concepts with linear audio design techniques. Today's games require responsive and dynamic musical scores; ambiences, sound effects, and dialog that respond to player actions; immersive and accurate player-surrounding soundscapes; not to mention AI driven dynamic control of the overall mix.
Microsoft Game Developer Day
Topics include: Games for Windows - LIVE – Just the Facts, Getting More from Multicore, Xbox 360 XDK Update, Performance Tools Update, The Evolving Windows Gaming Platform, DirectX Futures.
XNA Game Studio Developer Day
Topics include: Advanced Debugging with XNA Game Studio 2.0, CLR Performance on Windows and Xbox 360, Understanding XNA Framework Performance, Networking with XNA Game Studio 2.0, Extending the Content Pipeline in XNA Game Studio 2.0, Xbox LIVE Arcade Extensions for XNA Game Studio 2.0.
Physics for Game Programmers
This lecture continues the tradition of the "Math For Game Programmers" and "Essential Math" tutorials and deepens it, by focusing in on the topic of physical simulation. Particular attention will be given to dynamics, numerical robustness, collision, and destruction.
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Shader Programming
This tutorial presents techniques that are used in leading games. It covers the currently most important global illumination models, probability-based shadow mapping methods that will ship soon in several games, a real-time grass approach that has proven to be useful on multi-core CPU/SPUs, a new data structure to store texture maps and a flexible material system.
View all Tutorials here.
Hello everyone! So two very important bits of information are going out today. One is the Wednesday keynote announcement, which I'm not going to talk about here because that actually goes live later this morning. The other is a trio of Nintendo talks going live today, which we're very excited to host at GDC.
While the company usually lets their products speak for themselves at most other venues, we've enjoyed a strong editorial relationship with Nintendo for a few years now. We're particularly proud that we've earned their trust in sharing real development experience and knowledge in our professional forum. Now that all eyes are on this company's successful gamble on the broader market, we are pleased to present their latest example, the development of Wii Fit, Nintendo's new balance-sensing peripheral and game. The session, Wii Fit Creating a Brand New Interface for the Home Console, is presented by project lead Takao Sawano, and the presents the philosophical and cultural ideas as well as the practical challenges behind bringing this title to life.
Another unique element that Nintendo has successfully experimented with is the development of the Wii Menu, all those channels and interactive online elements besides games that exist in the Wii interface. Takashi Aoyama, team leader for Nintendo's Network Group, gives us the inside scoop on the development of this project, in his session Planning the Wii Menu: From Pre-Launch to WiiWare. WiiWare is of course Nintendo's original downloadable game service, and Aoyama is preparing to outline the challenges they experienced in building the portal. On the subject of WiiWare games, you may also want to check out Square-Enix producer Toshiro Tsuchida's session WiiWare Project Lifecycle: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Little King.
Finally, we are very pleased to present the first postmortem of a major 2008 title, Development - Super Smash Bros. Brawl by Kirby and Smash Bros. veteran developer Masahiro Sakurai. With an eye to fine-tuned balancing, Sakurai shares what worked and didn't work integrating a variety of different characters as well as online play in adapting this modern classic to the Wii. Definiitely mark this featured talk on your schedule.
Okay folks, that does it for today's installment. Although I should mention that GDC's early bird pricing expires tomorrow, so I'd highly recommend that you register today!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
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