 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
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
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
Hello everyone, welcome back from the break! I had hoped to get an update out to you last week, but I had to focus on actually developing GDC. In the meantime, I hope you had a chance to check out our Thursday keynote announcement of luminary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who we've challenged to propose the next 20 years of games.
Today, I'd like to follow up on that theme of where games are going, and look at the broadening of the game-playing audience. One of the first movers in this space, who has since built a dynasty of intelligent historical strategy games, is Sid Meier. We just put out a press release announcing how proud we are to award him the Lifetime Achievement Award at our Game Developers Choice Awards. The one thing the press release doesn't mention though, is that while he is knee-deep in developing Civilization: Revolution, he will also be giving a talk at GDC, in the form of an interview. Veteran LucasArts designer and Civilization fan Noah Falstein will take us through the 25 years of his inspirational designs and career choices, in a session titled Standing the Test of Time: A Q&A With Sid Meier.
Now while Sid's games consistently attract an audience who may not call themselves gamers, The Sims Studio has been working on this angle for a while too. While we can't go into much detail now, and admittedly the session description is a bit vague, I would highly recommend that you make time to attend the session titled The Emergent Gamer. The session is being delivered by the head of the Sims Studio, Rod Humble, who is one of the visionaries behind EverQuest. All I can tell you about the subject is that there will be a closed beta at GDC, and you'll want to be there. Okay, now let's pretend I've artfully segued into the next thing I want to tell you about.
One of the other trends we're observing this year is the transmedia synchronization of film and game processes. Similar to Sid Meier, we have a session from a veteran who has been involved with transmedia for decades, and has much to present. Flint Dille, who wrote television series like Transformers (he killed Optimus Prime), writes games such as Escape From Butcher Bay, and is now adapting Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novel into a game, will give a detailed expose of the inner workings of the transmedia experience. His session is titled The Blur: Creating in the Eye of the Storm.
Finally, we have what I believe is a first for GDC, a interdisciplinary programming and design talk from Sony Pictures Imageworks on their most recent assault on Uncanny Valley, the film Beowulf. Software architect Parag Havaldar will present his session A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of Beowulf. He will detail the choices he and his team made in developing a custom motion capture system for the film, that could brings groups of interacting people believably onto the screen. Creating believability is a challenge that both game* and film animators and programmers face, and we're expecting to see many more lessons and tricks cross over between the shrinking divide.
So that's it for this Tuesday. There's still a handful of featured sessions in the pipeline, as well as our Wednesday keynote still to announce, so stay tuned!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
* You may also want to check out the game side of the believability challenge, with the previously posted session Uncharted Animation: An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline presented by Judd Simantov and Jeremy Lai-Yates.
Hello! While I had been saving this particular announcement for Christmas Day, the team convinced me to open this package a few days early.
Ralph Baer, who created the world's first video game console, will be giving a postmortem on the device and its first game, PING PONG. During the same session, Allan Alcorn, who later designed Atari's PONG for the arcades, will also present a postmortem of that device and game. Talking and working with these gentlemen on developing this session has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life, and I can only imagine the impact this session will have on everyone attending. The session is titled, appropriately enough, How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG.
Of course, GDC also features the Game Developers Choice Awards. Granted there are many awards shows out there, but this one, like the GDC itself, is built on the input of professional game developers. It's this open, peer-based structure that lead developers to truly appreciate these awards. This year, the Choice Awards are going through a couple of changes. We are consolidating the First Penguin and Maverick awards into a single Pioneer award, celebrating an individual responsible for a breakthrough in the game industry. Inventing that industry certainly qualifies, and so we are honored to give out our first Pioneer Award to Mr. Baer while he's at GDC.
Another new category is the Ambassador Award, which honors an individual who advances the game industry from within, or reaches outside as an advocate. As games take a more prominent role on the global stage in popular culture, politics, and the media, it became more important for us to recognize our unsung heroes who fight the good fight. Again, we are proud to announce a winner who defines the category by example, the executive director of the IGDA, Jason Della Rocca. Jason tirelessly fights for quality of life, accessibility, and creative freedoms, and we are pleased to give him the thanks he deserves.
The timing here is perfect. Not only are we creating this award now for an emerging area of recognition, but this is the first time Jason has been eligible to win a Choice Award. Our colleagues at Gamasutra.com are stepping up to handle general voting management and special awards committee management. They're replacing our friends at the IGDA, who are now free to focus on their advocacy and training activities at GDC, which also opens IGDA staff for recognition. While I'm on this point, I would like to thank our in-house Renaissance man Simon Carless and the Choice Awards Advisory Committee for their objective deliberations in managing the voting process.
A press release detailing these announcements should follow this morning. Now just wait until you hear who's getting our Lifetime Achievement Award!
Happy Holidays,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
p.s. Please remember to vote in the Game Developers Choice Awards. We'll be back with a new update on Wednesday January 2.
Good morning! In the spirit of the holidays, we're debuting a handful of sessions today focused on some of our favorite games.
Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson worked on ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION together, and are giving a talk on Collaborative Writing and Vast Narratives: Principles, Processes, and Genteel Truculence. Writing frequently has a black box aura to it, and being able to apply a reliable process to something as purely creative as writing is a model that should be relevant to any discipline in game development. Plus, if you've ever met Ken and Mark, you know you're in for an incredibly mind-altering time!
Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design for Blizzard and a member of our advisory board, has kindly agreed to present a talk on tuning for player to player experiences, in a session titled Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design. Chris Hecker makes the strong point that AI is the ultimate technical challenge in creating athentic experiences in games, but then the ultimate AI is that which isn't artificial at all, but consists of real people in real time. Rob has had the opportunity to iterate on best practices for online multiplayer over several successful titles such as WORLD OF WARCRAFT, and will present some of the lessons learned and applied forward.
Finally, in what is shaping up to be one of the most coveted games of 2008, we have a revealing session by Haden Blackman, Executive Producer for LucasArts, titled STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED: How LucasArts is Building a Game, a Development Team and a Technology Pipeline... At the Same Time. This session has been a long time coming, in that the converged pipeline story has been presented in many ways but rarely with proof behind it. Finally, we will learn what worked and what required a Force push to combine Industrial Light and Magic, LucasArts, Euphoria, and a Star Destroyer, across both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.
Since next Tuesday is Christmas Day and the following Tuesday is New Year's Day (why did I pick Tuesdays?), I'll post again this Thursday, with a very special holiday treat, and again on Wednesday January 2. In the meantime, please check out the Game Developers Choice Awards and register your nominations, your colleagues rely on your professional opinion to win!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
Good morning! Let's get right to it. A characteristic of the GDC is that it enables leading developers to share their experiments with their peers. Typically, this is presented as a postmortem of a compelling aspect of a released game. Ken Levine's Storytelling in BIOSHOCK talk, already posted to the GDC website, is a great example.
Yet one of the things we're seeing more is the interest in developers to present theory and example in the context of an unreleased game, thereby advancing the edge of GDC's learning forward several months into the future. This collision of past, present, and future is evident in Peter Molyneux's talk, FABLE 2 The Big Three Features Revealed, just posted moments ago. As you may recall, Peter revealed at GDC 07 the introduction of man's best friend into the experience of his new epic. However, as many of you know, Peter is an incredibly thoughtful and prescient creator, with both the genre-creating POPULOUS and BLACK & WHITE under his belt. Given that background, he has a collection of ideas that he's looking forward to presenting. Furthermore, he will present the design concepts live, in-game, to provide the level of proof one gets from a traditional GDC postmortem.
Another example is one that represents a running theme at GDC, which is the collaboration between film and games. When Neil Young announced that EALA would be working with Steven Spielberg, it signaled a change in the landscape of Hollywood collaboration. By bringing AAA talent from both worlds together, this partnership has the potential to produce experiences that combine the best of both worlds.
The first result of this collaboration -- a Wii puzzle game -- is almost here, and executive producer Lou Castle has graciously agreed to share his experiences co-developing the game, in a session titled Creating Steven Spielberg's Will Puzzle Game. Yet, Lou is an extraordinary creative leader in his own right, having created the COMMAND & CONQUER series, and we got even more confirmation of it at our stealth studio head event, GDC Prime. We asked him to share some of the zero-documentation, heavy prototyping, and failure-friendly principles that resulted in a highly efficient design and production process. We think this session will be well worth your time.
Stay tuned for additional must-attend session announcements next Tuesday!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
Good morning! It's Tuesday, so that means we have some more GDC news to share with you, this time focusing on the rapidly evolving world of MMOs.
Dave Jones, the creator of Lemmings, Blood Money, the original Grand Theft Auto and the Xbox 360 hit Crackdown, will be giving an MMO design theory talk at GDC 08. While the first three credits were under the classic DMA Design banner influencing a generation of games and game designers, Dave and his team have been hard at work on breakout innovation in modern game design at his Realtime Worlds, where he presides as CEO and Creative Director.
Now, none of these titles is an MMO. However, I recently had a chance to catch up with Realtime Worlds' Mario Rizzo, whom you may recall from his pioneering work on the EverQuest games. He and the team have been kind enough to clue me in as to the goings on at Realtime, and all I'm going to say here is that the GDC audience is in for a real treat. While there is some information out there, I'd encourage you to also scrutinize Dave's description of his talk for clues:
My First MMO
Another proven, veteran developer is Raph Koster. In Raph's case, he's already had the chance to design huge groundbreaking MMOs such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. But now he's through the looking glass. We caught up around his presentation at TechCrunch 40, and he shared the structure of his new venture, Metaplace. He modestly described it as a cross-platform standard for anyone to develop their own online worlds and games. As he continued, I slowly realized that he was effectively describing the holy grail of games, namely a game experience that can be shared on multiple platforms by players anywhere (the game equivalent of hydrogen cars) as well as the holy grail of the Web 2.0 industry, namely a user created experience that can retain loyalty through community interaction and fun (the open web equivalent of WoW).
The game industry has admittedly lagged behind YouTube and social networking sites in creating what Sulka Haro calls "gamer created activity" -- even though we have the edge in interface and gameplay design. At this year's GDC, we intend to rebalance things on that front, starting with Raph's postmortem of his game/platform/community. Maybe we can invent some new words too to describe these experiences, but for now we'll start with how they're made:
Metaplace Postmortem: Reinventing MMOs
On a slightly different note, we'd like to remind everyone who attended GDC in 2007 that your discounted alumni rate is still available through end of day tomorrow, through your e-mail link. Thank you for your continued support!
Cheers,
Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference
Welcome everyone to the official GDC blog! I'm Jamil Moledina, the executive director of the GDC. As you may have noticed, the next GDC is much earlier than usual, in February 2008, and we're only a few short weeks away from the show. As we approach the launch, one of my goals is to post every Tuesday with some new developments on GDC. You'll also hear from other key members of the GDC team working on new items for GDC 08.
To get us started, I'm pleased to announce that Jesse Alexander, executive producer of the breakout hit TV show Heroes will be giving a talk on creating each season of that show. I've found Jesse to be incredibly passionate about his work, while at the same time he recognizes the achievements and challenges of game development. Having been involved in the game adaptation of Alias, he has not only applied those lessons to his transmedia approach to Heroes content across TV, web, comics, and games, but also to the creation of serial content on the Heroes TV show itself.
While transmedia is an important growing trend between Hollywood and games, when Jesse told me he uses game development processes in managing the writing on Heroes, that struck me as a process very much ahead of the curve, and worth greater elaboration. So that is the focus of Jesse's talk. Here's a link to the session, live as of today:
How Heroes Are Made: A Collaborative Approach to Serialized Content in a Transmedia World
Another development in games that's attracted our interest was Prototype. Part of GDC's charter is to highlight breakthroughs in game development, and members of our advisory board had noticed the design of this game. I had the chance to meet the Radical team at Leipzig, and it was clear that executive producer Tim Bennison and lead designer Eric Holmes have taken the new generation challenge and produced gameplay that more closely mimics true behavior.
In kind of a pre-mortem of the unreleased game, the team has agreed to discuss the choices they made, the experiments and the evolutionary dead ends they iterated through in order to arrive at their preferred result. This should be interesting from both design and production execution perspectives. Here's the link to the freshly posted session:
Prototype: Open World, Open Mind, Next Generation Thinking
More news next week, and we'll look forward to seeing you at GDC!
Cheers,
Jamil
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