In her role as a senior game designer on Assassin's Creed Unity, AI and systems design ace Christine Blondeau wrestled with the problem of developing a system for marshaling crowds of hundreds of NPCs to create "crowd events" for the player to interact with -- fistfights to stop, pickpockets to catch, and the like.
She and the rest of the Unity team pulled it off, and in March Blondeau will be at GDC 2015 to explain how they did it. During her talk, "Postmortem: Developing Systemic Crowd Events on Assassin's Creed Unity", she'll present the team's initial vision for the system, the difficulties they faced, and the solutions used to trounce them.
Blondeau will also go beyond the crowd to explore how the Assassin's Creed Unity crowd events tech was integrated with the needs of both level and mission design, as well as lay out some potential avenues of improvement for future iterations.
If that's not for you, don't worry -- conference officials will be announcing more GDC 2015 sessions covering a diverse array of topical game industry issues in the months ahead.
A list of all announced talks is available in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to build your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.
For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is January 21, 2015. GDC 2015 itself will take place March 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
