GDC Report

I just got back from a tiring week at GDC. Actually it was quite a bit of fun, but standing around all day for three days straight can make the soles of your feet hurt a lot.

This year I didn’t really get to any sessions that are related to this site. I really wanted to see the talk about building fear in the player in Darkwatch (the slides are available), but I had other business obligations. I also missed a talk on cinematic game design by Richard Rouse, the brains behind The Suffering series, because it was also at the same time (slides).

I did see several technical talks, including a pretty interesting one about the AI in F.E.A.R, but the content wasn’t about the game itself. Most of the rest of the talks I went to were development related (tool chain, engineering, AI, game design). They were mostly pretty good this year… I only got stuck in one or two yawners.

I should mention that the Nintendo keynote was really quite uplifting (the message: Nintendo knows what they are doing, and they’re doing the right thing), and Will Wright’s game design keynote was extremely interesting and hilarious (the message: astrobiology is cool, spore will rule, Wright thinks about 2000 things at once). The PS3 keynote was quite depressing: they showed some graphics demos and that was about it. PS1 games on PSP sounds cool, and God of War 2 looked cool, but otherwise there was nothing to be learned.