This was my fifth year at
GDC, and as always, it’s a lot of fun to take a break for
a bit and immerse myself in an entirely different world. It’s also a little
overwhelming, so I had to take a few days to let the sleep deprivation and
hangover(s) wear off before I could type up my notes.
Other sites have much more detailed coverage, including
Gamasutra,
Slashdot, and
GameSpot. I can’t beat that, so I’ll
link to their coverage when they have more detail on a particular talk. Instead,
I’ll lay out some of the common themes I noticed.
Also, the full proceedings will soon be available online at
GDCTV and GDCRadio. I was actually
lucky enough to snag the 2005 and 2004
proceedings on CD for
$30 each. They list for upwards of $400, but they had excess inventory, so they
had to slash prices to get rid of it. I might not listen to NPR again for
months…
Big budgets and the return of the garage developer
A common refrain at last year’s GDC was the unstoppable
ballooning of game budgets and teams. Due to the need for higher and higher
quality assets, as well as marketing and IP licenses, a next-gen AAA game can
easily cost upwards of $10M. Among other things, this means that publishers are
less willing to take risks with gameplay or content.
At the same time, as with other media, there’s been lots of buzz about digital
distribution. This wasn’t commercially viable until the last few years, with the
mainstream adoption of broadband and ecommerce. Free from the traditional costs
of publishing, distribution, and traditional marketing, casual and downloadable
games have flourished. Smaller, online-only titles like
Bejeweled, Diner
Dash, Puzzle
Pirates, and Darwinia
have become huge hits.
Microsoft followed this trend with Xbox Live
Arcade, one of the most exciting console
developments in years. In addition to trailers and microcontent for retail AAA
games, you can download demos and full-fledged games to your Xbox 360. We’re
seeing both ever-expanding budgets for AAA games and a boom in games made on a
shoestring. I don’t know what this dichotomy means in the short term, but it’s
bound to be an interesting ride.
Fun and games? Or strictly business?
Microsoft‘s Xbox 360 was
the platform keynote last year, so it was only natural that
Sony and Nintendo would give
this year’s platform keynotes. Apart from the content, though, I was surprised
at how much the tone of the two keynotes reflected the companies
themselves.
Phil Harrison gave
Sony’s keynote
(more at Slashdot,
Gamasutra,
GameSpot). He started by patting
himself and Sony on the back with graphs of the retail lifespans of the PS1 (12
years!) and the initial growth ramp-up of the PS2 and the PSP. He went on to lay
out Sony’s Playstation 3 roadmap, emphasizing
Epic, Havok,
Ageia (why two physics providers?), and SN
Systems, which Sony recently bought.
Next up was the spec sheet, including the obligatory
Cell, Blu-Ray,
and NVIDIA cheerleading. Phil also spent a few slides on
Sony’s as-yet-unnamed online
service for the PS3.
He tried to get excited, and implied that Sony was doing something new and
important, but in the end it was just a direct copy of the Xbox
Live feature set. Matchmaking, trailers,
demos, micropayments, downloadable content and games…check. I thought this was
hilarious. Sony had flatly refused to build a service like this for the entire
lifespan of the PS2, and for the PS3 at first. They claimed it was the
developers’ job, but they really just couldn’t be bothered. They only gave in,
begrudgingly, after Xbox Live exploded and third-party developers felt more
justified in demanding it.
Last up, Phil showed a number of graphics, physics, and game demos, including
the first ever live, realtime PS3 gameplay demos.
Incognito‘s shooter
Warhawk,
Insomniac‘s FPS
Resistance, and
Evolution‘s deformable terrain racer
MotorStorm all got the big
screen treatment as their developers came on stage. It was a fitting end to a
keynote that, for all its hard-headed business and glitzy eye candy, broke no
new ground whatsoever.
He started, as he always does, with stories from his early days at Nintendo. He
was earnest, sincere, and passionate about his love for games. Iwata spoke about
Nintendo’s goal of expanding the market beyond existing core and casual gamers
with new, accessible game experiences. As an example, he briefly discussed the
research that went into the Revolution
controller to make it
fundamentally more immersive, yet as easy to use as a TV remote.
Following in the “disruption” vein, Iwata showed off
Nintendogs,
Electroplankton, and his newest project, Brain
Age.
It’s a puzzle game designed to exercise your mind, and it’s already a huge hit
in Japan with people of all ages, especially seniors! Iwata joked that like all
good ideas, it came from a board of directors. One of Nintendo’s directors had
complained that they didn’t games for seniors.
The contrast was striking. As opposed to Sony’s business partnerships, growth
projections, and engineering muscle-flexing, Iwata’s message came from the
heart. Nintendo loves games and wants to share that love with as many people as
possible. Hell, he actually brought people up on stage to play games together on
the DS! They couldn’t be bothered with eye candy; they were having too much
fun.
Sony will still likely be the market leader in the next console generation, and
Nintendo will still likely be third…but you have to admire their
sincerity.
It was all business. We discussed fraud, session and chat logs, interaction with
law enforcement (proactive, e.g. death threats in chat, and reactive, e.g.
subpoenas), ethics vs. legality, and how to use demographic and technical
information. We even discussed SoX! I’ve gained a fair amount of
experience with this stuff at work, so I
even contributed a little.
I was particularly encouraged to hear that many companies are separating
personally identifiable information, usually billing info, from game data and
session and chat logs. It’s far from the sexiest topic, but it is a sign that
the game industry is maturing.
Games go data-driven
I didn’t go to many programming talks this year, but I still noticed a common
theme. Bigger budgets for AAA games mean more opportunities for designers to
influence each game’s experience. However, Fred
Brooks taught us that we can’t scale
design just by adding more programmers. Instead, programmers are making their
games more and more data-driven,
so that designers can take the reigns and create the game experience
themselves.
Tim Sweeney of
Epic Games drove this home in his
talk. Like
last year, he described how Epic consciously designed
the Unreal 3
toolchain to empower artist and designer productivity, even when it meant
sacrificing performance. He showed the UE3 shader, materials, level, and script
editors as concrete examples. This is made possible by UE3′s component system,
which is basically mixins, and its design goal
of orthogonality, ie component interoperability in all modes without
constraints.
The engineering team behind Shadow of the
Colossus boiled
this down in their
postmortem:
Whenever you find a variable that affects design or gameplay, expose it to
non-programmers. They cited their inverse kinematics system as an example. They
needed its physics, but their designers kept control over the blending between
physics and animation, and set thresholds for the IK input.
Immersion was paramount, they said, so they were determined that their game
look good and feel right. In true Japanese pixel-painting style, when reality
conflicted with their design, they cheated reality. Reality lacks direction. To
get true emotion, you need artistic
control.
Tim Moss, the God
of War lead programmer,
took this to an extreme. In his
talk (more at
GameSpot), he called the God of War
design “a special case at every turn.” Custom animations, sounds, weapons,
collisions, mechanics, cameras, you name it. He modestly said that he “gave up”
and “dumbed down” the engine so it had no special case logic at all. Instead,
the artists had to tell it which animations, sounds, and cameras to use for each
situation. In essence, he made the designers do his work for him. The final
executable was under 1MB, and even that was mostly rendering
code!
The Ninety Nine Nights team had an interesting spin on
this. During their talk on character
design (more at
Gamasutra), they
played two different edits of in-game cutscenes side by side. They needed the
same in-game events to convey different emotions, depending on which character
the player had chosen. It was amazing how cuts and camera angles alone could
change the tone of the scenes.
Most of my favorite GDC talks each year come from the game design track, and
this year didn’t disappoint. There were lots of interesting new mechanics and
innovations, both in the game design talks and in the IGF.
Midway‘s Harvey
Smith (Deus
Ex,
Thief) went first. He
mentioned some of his original ideas, then identified the inspiration for his
Nintendo DS game Peacebomb: flash mobs! He described Peacebomb as a “platform
for generating flash mobs.” The game would overlay a corrupt, totalitarian
government on the real world. Players would use Peacebomb to congregate in the
real world and organize protests and peaceful uprisings. They’d use the game’s
social network and microeconomy, along with the DS’ wifi and new GPS peripheral.
This was a striking idea, and Harvey ended up winning the prize.
Epic Games‘ Cliff Bleszinski
(Unreal) went next. He talked about his research
methodology: he went to the Nobel Peace Prize web
site and found that, wonder of wonders, it has
games! He couldn’t steal them
whole cloth, though, so he presented Empathy. It places you at the head of a
family in a country on the brink of war. You must keep your family together a la
The Sims and gather resources to survive, RTS-style.
In a fun twist, CliffyB said he’d require all world leaders to play Empathy
before they were allowed to start a war.
Koei‘s Keita
Takahashi
(Katamari Damacy) went last. Strangely, he didn’t
present a coherent game design at all. Instead, he opted for a cute, whimsical,
animated presentation on love, of all things. He followed a group of animated
characters as they spread their love of games across the world to poor people,
sick people, and even soldiers and hawkish politicians. They all proceeded laid
down their weapons, help each other, and play games together happily ever after.
It was too sweet for words.
:P
Will Wright,
creator of the Sim games, is a legend in the game industry. His talks at GDC are
always standing room only, and this year was no exception.
Will’s game design
keynote (more at
Gamasutra,
Slashdot,
GameSpot) was even more frenetic
than last year. Free of the burden of presenting a single game,
Spore, Will described how he comes up with concepts and
does game design research. The presentation was as scattered as his process,
bouncing from Drake’s equation to
The X Files to comic books to
terraforming to
Bagger, the German
highway-eating machine. Really!
Will emphasized front-loading risk, throwing away ideas, and prototyping. He
tries to identify the main risks in any game very early – in the case of Spore,
procedural content. He and his cohorts at Maxis then
prototyped almost 70 gameplay mechanics, content systems, and other ideas to
remove the unknowns from that risk. This helped them focus their design, as well
as clearly identifying what they needed to cut. Less than 10% of their original
ideas survived, which Will thought was
typical.
Apart from new gameplay ideas, I was struck by how often I heard about metrics
and analysis for something as ephemeral as gameplay. Many game developers were
actively using quantitative tools to build and tweak the “sweet science” of
their games’ mechanics.
Jay Stelly spoke
about how he and the other Valve designers created
the physics-based gameplay of Half-Life 2 (more at
Slashdot,
GDC). He
defined gameplay as teaching players skills, then letting them use those skills.
He believed each game has a limited capacity for new skills, so it’s essential
to narrow them down to the most valuable. How do you value a skill? By the
amount it interacts with the game world and especially with other skills.
Stelly described this as a living, breathing game design economy that can be
measured and optimized. He used this methodology and Excel (no joke!) to
compare skills in Half-Life 2: crates, the gravity gun, the glue gun, Dog. Valve
used that to help decide what to keep and what to
cut.
Meanwhile, Ernest Adams spoke about the
present and future of interactive
storytelling. He
quoted Ken Perlin: the cost of an event is
relative to its improbability. That is, every story has a “credibility” budget.
If too many unbelievable things happen, the story will blow its budget and its
suspension of disbelief.
When you apply this to interactive stories, it gets more interesting. Both the
author (designer) and the reader (player) create the story, so they’re both
constrained by the credibility budget. He gave
Facade as an example. As a result, IF designers
don’t need to account for all possible actions, sandbox style. If the player
doesn’t play their part and blows the budget, the story is over.
Adams also described some technical approaches to IF. Traditional branching
structures hard-code both time and behavior. To support emergent behavior, as is
currently fashionable, plot events should be treated like functions and
characters like pass-by-reference variables. That way, plot points can take
place with anyone, and affect them accordingly.
I also saw the Writers Guild of America‘s
panel on
writing for games, which also touched on IF. It wasn’t nearly as memorable. It’s
uncharitable of me to say so, but much of it was simply complaining that game
writers (still!) don’t get enough
respect.
Robin Hunicke led off with a
hilarious retread of the cliched, age-old tradition of using women and sex to
sell games – and this year, the Graphic Impact
Competition.
CAA‘s Seamus
Blackley then told
developers to suck it up and at least learn something about business before
complaining about being rejected by publishers.
…and a couple of games: Crysis,
with its jaw-dropping good looks, and
Dreamfall,
sequel to The Longest Journey, which I
loved.
Extracurriculars!
One of my favorite parts of GDC every year is the extracurriculars – the awards
ceremonies, the booth crawls, the concerts, and the late nights drinking with
people all over the industry.
As expected, Darwinia swept the IGF
awards (more at
Gamasutra), and
rightly so. It’s really, really
cool.
Before going out Friday night, we went to the Video Games Live
concert, which featured music from
games past and present. (More at
GameSpot.) It was a lot of fun,
even more than I expected.
I’d write a pithy conclusion here, but I’m too tired. See you at
E3!
GDC 2006
updated 8/4/2010
This was my fifth year at GDC, and as always, it’s a lot of fun to take a break for a bit and immerse myself in an entirely different world. It’s also a little overwhelming, so I had to take a few days to let the sleep deprivation and hangover(s) wear off before I could type up my notes.
Other sites have much more detailed coverage, including Gamasutra, Slashdot, and GameSpot. I can’t beat that, so I’ll link to their coverage when they have more detail on a particular talk. Instead, I’ll lay out some of the common themes I noticed.
Also, the full proceedings will soon be available online at GDCTV and GDCRadio. I was actually lucky enough to snag the 2005 and 2004 proceedings on CD for $30 each. They list for upwards of $400, but they had excess inventory, so they had to slash prices to get rid of it. I might not listen to NPR again for months…
Contents
Big budgets and the return of the garage developer
Fun and games? Or strictly business?
Sony’s PS3 keynote
Nintendo’s DS and Revolution keynote
Security and privacy meet SoX and the Feds
Games go data-driven
Tim Sweeney on building a game engine
Emotional character control in Shadow of the Colossus
God of War: lead designer vs. lead programmer
Different perspectives in Ninety-Nine Nights
How the pros invent games
Game design challenge: Nobel Peace Prize
Will Wright’s keynote
Best game research of 2005
Peter Molyneux goes MIA
Metrics and analysis for…gameplay?
Playing with physics in Half-life 2
Ernest Adams on interactive fiction
Burn, baby, burn
Talks I missed
Extracurriculars!
Independent Games Festival
Game Developers’ Choice Awards
Video Games Live concert
A common refrain at last year’s GDC was the unstoppable ballooning of game budgets and teams. Due to the need for higher and higher quality assets, as well as marketing and IP licenses, a next-gen AAA game can easily cost upwards of $10M. Among other things, this means that publishers are less willing to take risks with gameplay or content.
At the same time, as with other media, there’s been lots of buzz about digital distribution. This wasn’t commercially viable until the last few years, with the mainstream adoption of broadband and ecommerce. Free from the traditional costs of publishing, distribution, and traditional marketing, casual and downloadable games have flourished. Smaller, online-only titles like Bejeweled, Diner Dash, Puzzle Pirates, and Darwinia have become huge hits.
Microsoft followed this trend with Xbox Live Arcade, one of the most exciting console developments in years. In addition to trailers and microcontent for retail AAA games, you can download demos and full-fledged games to your Xbox 360. We’re seeing both ever-expanding budgets for AAA games and a boom in games made on a shoestring. I don’t know what this dichotomy means in the short term, but it’s bound to be an interesting ride.
Microsoft‘s Xbox 360 was the platform keynote last year, so it was only natural that Sony and Nintendo would give this year’s platform keynotes. Apart from the content, though, I was surprised at how much the tone of the two keynotes reflected the companies themselves.
Next up was the spec sheet, including the obligatory Cell, Blu-Ray, and NVIDIA cheerleading. Phil also spent a few slides on Sony’s as-yet-unnamed online service for the PS3. He tried to get excited, and implied that Sony was doing something new and important, but in the end it was just a direct copy of the Xbox Live feature set. Matchmaking, trailers, demos, micropayments, downloadable content and games…check. I thought this was hilarious. Sony had flatly refused to build a service like this for the entire lifespan of the PS2, and for the PS3 at first. They claimed it was the developers’ job, but they really just couldn’t be bothered. They only gave in, begrudgingly, after Xbox Live exploded and third-party developers felt more justified in demanding it.
Last up, Phil showed a number of graphics, physics, and game demos, including the first ever live, realtime PS3 gameplay demos. Incognito‘s shooter Warhawk, Insomniac‘s FPS Resistance, and Evolution‘s deformable terrain racer MotorStorm all got the big screen treatment as their developers came on stage. It was a fitting end to a keynote that, for all its hard-headed business and glitzy eye candy, broke no new ground whatsoever.
He started, as he always does, with stories from his early days at Nintendo. He was earnest, sincere, and passionate about his love for games. Iwata spoke about Nintendo’s goal of expanding the market beyond existing core and casual gamers with new, accessible game experiences. As an example, he briefly discussed the research that went into the Revolution controller to make it fundamentally more immersive, yet as easy to use as a TV remote.
Following in the “disruption” vein, Iwata showed off Nintendogs, Electroplankton, and his newest project, Brain Age. It’s a puzzle game designed to exercise your mind, and it’s already a huge hit in Japan with people of all ages, especially seniors! Iwata joked that like all good ideas, it came from a board of directors. One of Nintendo’s directors had complained that they didn’t games for seniors.
He then brought a few of the speakers and conference organizers up on stage to play Brain Age and Metroid Prime: Hunters live. Finally, he showed a roadmap for the Nintendo WiFi network, then quickly jumped back to games with trailers for the Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass (video) Zelda games.
The contrast was striking. As opposed to Sony’s business partnerships, growth projections, and engineering muscle-flexing, Iwata’s message came from the heart. Nintendo loves games and wants to share that love with as many people as possible. Hell, he actually brought people up on stage to play games together on the DS! They couldn’t be bothered with eye candy; they were having too much fun.
Sony will still likely be the market leader in the next console generation, and Nintendo will still likely be third…but you have to admire their sincerity.
It was all business. We discussed fraud, session and chat logs, interaction with law enforcement (proactive, e.g. death threats in chat, and reactive, e.g. subpoenas), ethics vs. legality, and how to use demographic and technical information. We even discussed SoX! I’ve gained a fair amount of experience with this stuff at work, so I even contributed a little.
I was particularly encouraged to hear that many companies are separating personally identifiable information, usually billing info, from game data and session and chat logs. It’s far from the sexiest topic, but it is a sign that the game industry is maturing.
I didn’t go to many programming talks this year, but I still noticed a common theme. Bigger budgets for AAA games mean more opportunities for designers to influence each game’s experience. However, Fred Brooks taught us that we can’t scale design just by adding more programmers. Instead, programmers are making their games more and more data-driven, so that designers can take the reigns and create the game experience themselves.
Immersion was paramount, they said, so they were determined that their game look good and feel right. In true Japanese pixel-painting style, when reality conflicted with their design, they cheated reality. Reality lacks direction. To get true emotion, you need artistic control.
On a different note, why is Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Sonic Team, United Game Artists), following up brilliant games like Space Channel 5, Rez, Meteos, and Lumines with a tired-looking Gauntlet clone?!?
Most of my favorite GDC talks each year come from the game design track, and this year didn’t disappoint. There were lots of interesting new mechanics and innovations, both in the game design talks and in the IGF.
Midway‘s Harvey Smith (Deus Ex, Thief) went first. He mentioned some of his original ideas, then identified the inspiration for his Nintendo DS game Peacebomb: flash mobs! He described Peacebomb as a “platform for generating flash mobs.” The game would overlay a corrupt, totalitarian government on the real world. Players would use Peacebomb to congregate in the real world and organize protests and peaceful uprisings. They’d use the game’s social network and microeconomy, along with the DS’ wifi and new GPS peripheral.
This was a striking idea, and Harvey ended up winning the prize.
Epic Games‘ Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal) went next. He talked about his research methodology: he went to the Nobel Peace Prize web site and found that, wonder of wonders, it has games! He couldn’t steal them whole cloth, though, so he presented Empathy. It places you at the head of a family in a country on the brink of war. You must keep your family together a la The Sims and gather resources to survive, RTS-style. In a fun twist, CliffyB said he’d require all world leaders to play Empathy before they were allowed to start a war.
Koei‘s Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy) went last. Strangely, he didn’t present a coherent game design at all. Instead, he opted for a cute, whimsical, animated presentation on love, of all things. He followed a group of animated characters as they spread their love of games across the world to poor people, sick people, and even soldiers and hawkish politicians. They all proceeded laid down their weapons, help each other, and play games together happily ever after. It was too sweet for words. :P
Will’s game design keynote (more at Gamasutra, Slashdot, GameSpot) was even more frenetic than last year. Free of the burden of presenting a single game, Spore, Will described how he comes up with concepts and does game design research. The presentation was as scattered as his process, bouncing from Drake’s equation to The X Files to comic books to terraforming to Bagger, the German highway-eating machine. Really!
Will emphasized front-loading risk, throwing away ideas, and prototyping. He tries to identify the main risks in any game very early – in the case of Spore, procedural content. He and his cohorts at Maxis then prototyped almost 70 gameplay mechanics, content systems, and other ideas to remove the unknowns from that risk. This helped them focus their design, as well as clearly identifying what they needed to cut. Less than 10% of their original ideas survived, which Will thought was typical.
Apart from new gameplay ideas, I was struck by how often I heard about metrics and analysis for something as ephemeral as gameplay. Many game developers were actively using quantitative tools to build and tweak the “sweet science” of their games’ mechanics.
Stelly described this as a living, breathing game design economy that can be measured and optimized. He used this methodology and Excel (no joke!) to compare skills in Half-Life 2: crates, the gravity gun, the glue gun, Dog. Valve used that to help decide what to keep and what to cut.
When you apply this to interactive stories, it gets more interesting. Both the author (designer) and the reader (player) create the story, so they’re both constrained by the credibility budget. He gave Facade as an example. As a result, IF designers don’t need to account for all possible actions, sandbox style. If the player doesn’t play their part and blows the budget, the story is over.
Adams also described some technical approaches to IF. Traditional branching structures hard-code both time and behavior. To support emergent behavior, as is currently fashionable, plot events should be treated like functions and characters like pass-by-reference variables. That way, plot points can take place with anyone, and affect them accordingly.
I also saw the Writers Guild of America‘s panel on writing for games, which also touched on IF. It wasn’t nearly as memorable. It’s uncharitable of me to say so, but much of it was simply complaining that game writers (still!) don’t get enough respect.
Robin Hunicke led off with a hilarious retread of the cliched, age-old tradition of using women and sex to sell games – and this year, the Graphic Impact Competition. CAA‘s Seamus Blackley then told developers to suck it up and at least learn something about business before complaining about being rejected by publishers.
The other navel-gazers included Frank Lantz of area/code, Jonathan Blow of Number None, Jessica Mulligan, Chris Crawford (formerly of Origin), Jane Pinkard of Game Girl Advance, and Chris Hecker of Definition 6. The Wonderland transcript is pretty thorough.
There were many more talks I wish I could have heard. Here are a few.
Ronald Moore on Building a Better Battlestar (more at Gamasutra, Slashdot)
The game ethics and laws panel (more at GameSpot, Gamasutra)
Localization and i18n in Final Fantasy XI (more at Gamasutra)
Test-driven development for games (more at Gamasutra)
Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein of The 400 Project on game design rules (more at Gamasutra)
The digital distribution panel (more at GameSpot)
Implementing an Adaptive, Live Orchestral Soundtrack
Building the Open World – The Level Artists’ Conundrum
Xbox Live Marketplace and Future Directions, which you already know I think highly of.
…and a couple of games: Crysis, with its jaw-dropping good looks, and Dreamfall, sequel to The Longest Journey, which I loved.
One of my favorite parts of GDC every year is the extracurriculars – the awards ceremonies, the booth crawls, the concerts, and the late nights drinking with people all over the industry.
I’d write a pithy conclusion here, but I’m too tired. See you at E3!