[In her latest Bosslady Blog update, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio discusses some of the newly-confirmed lectures, revealing the art and science of games like Killzone 2, Brutal Legend, and the newest Fable and Far Cry titles.]
Happy 2009, everyone! While the holidays tend to disrupt the workflow of a good portion of the world, the Game Developers Conference team never takes a break. It’s like a coal mine over here. In a good way! A good coal mine.
So what have we been working on? More sessions, of course, and here are some of the newly-confirmed highlights coming to our March 23rd-27th event:
- Freshly added to the Programming Track is 'The Rendering Technology of Killzone 2'. Michiel van der Leeuw and Michal Valient from Guerilla Games will present an overview of the extremely pretty rendering techniques used in their highly anticipated 2009 PlayStation 3 shooter. As they explain in the session description: “We put the main focus on the lighting and shadowing techniques of our deferred shading engine and how we made them play nicely with anti-aliasing.â€
- The Production Track has added “'Producing Fable II', presented by Louise Copley and Jonathan Taylor from Lionhead Studios. This likely to be enlightening postmortem looks into the timeline, production methodology, team structure and organization of one of 2008's best-received games, revealing what went right, as well as their biggest challenges building the major project.
- Just announced in the Game Design track is a talk from Ubisoft Montreal’s Patrick Redding, who was most recently narrative designer on the critically acclaimed Far Cry 2. It's entitled “'Read Me: Closing the Readability Gap in Immersive Games'. His lecture argues, provocatively: "Game output appears information-rich, but how much of that information can the player actually use to play better, and how much of it is just there to be spectacular or cinematic?" - and then goes on to suggest some solutions to make games more 'readable'.
- To round out this week's update, we head down the street to Double Fine Studios to bring you 'The Brutal Art of Brütal Legend', as part of the Visual Arts track. Double Fine art director Lee Petty gives us a behind the scenes look at creating the art for their (pictured) "lovingly-crafted", Jack Black-starring original IP. He'll also touch on how the Tim Schafer-headed small, independent studio has evolved with the current generation of game development.
More soon!
[Meggan and her colleagues will be posting regular updates from behind the scenes through the lead-up to this March's Game Developers Conference 2009, including content reveals and other helpful information. You can subscribe individually to the GDC News blog via its RSS feed.]
