Well as some of you may know I used make games back in the 90′s then switched to web development from 2000 to 2007, and have recently jumped back into creating games again. I was recently at the Game Developers Conference here in my home down of San Francisco and wanted to write up a small preview of what I saw.

Why games again you ask? Well as some of you may know I love technology and was able to work with some of the top 3d game engines back in the 90′s and now have a chance once again to work on projects pushing the boundaries of game development.

What did I see at this years GDC 2008? Well for once think I went to a lot of talks and sessions one of them being about BioShock and its story, I thought this was quite a good session, and it covered the bases of empowering player to care about your stupid story. Well thats the title of the talk that Kenneth Levine gave at GDC this year. I don’t have my notes in front of me since I left them at work but to recap they really scaled down what BioShock was originally. They wanted to span a great time period but scaled it down and also scaled back the number of characters in the game. One thing that stood out was the evolution of the little sister.

Pictured below is a few slides from the session, I missed one concept and sorry for the blurry photos but I didn’t want to be rude and use a flash during someones talk.

       

You can it changed quite a bit from the original design, and they eventually settled on the little girl, which worked out well since they Big Daddy was sort of a father figure type of monster that would protect the little sister like it was his daughter.

Next up…

I also went to many sessions dealing with technology and the buzz word this year seems to be destruction.  I guess the game developer industry thinks that players want to blow everything up?  Is this true?  I think so, however this creates a huge challenged for game developers both on the design side and tech side.   Most destruction in the past has been smoke and mirrors and what I mean by that is the player would shoot something and then all of the sudden a massive explosion, smoke and dust particles would happen, ie a the cover up as we call it.  Now people actually want to shoot a wall and have it destroy at the spot where they hit it and see it all break apart like it would in the real world.  Below is a small video I shot from a talk that Havok gave at this years GDC.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This shows off some new middle ware technology that allows game developers to plug in their system and allow for more destruction in games.

Will we see more destruction in games?  From a few of the talks I went to yes, so gear up and get ready to blow the hell out of your new gaming worlds, but be aware it might be slow.

I was also pretty impressed about the Uncharted postmortem, they discussed many of the issues they had while working on this game.  One of the key points they talked about was using motion capture data for animation of game charactors.  As some of you may know that have worked with mocap the data you get back is extremely hard to work with as an animator, and you usually need some tools to massage this data into something more managable for the animators to use.

So on Uncharted they used about 50% standard keyframe animation and 50% motion capture data.

One funny thing was to see while they where working on concepting the main character they looked at pictures of Johnny Knoxville and I have a picture from from one of their slides.

Once again sorry for the blurry photo, but I thought you guys would enjoy this.

The other noteworty talks I went to were “Crysis – The making of”, “Crysis – Next generation Effects”, id Tech5,  Prototype and a few others.

I do have to say one thing, from not being officially in the game industry for some time things have changed it takes bigger teams and a lot more money to pull of these blockbuster titles, and I don’t think the average gamer is aware of all the blood, sweat, tears, divorces, babies all go into making a game.

anyhow I’m running a bit short on time so Ill wrap up by saying it was really nice to run into some of my old school game developer friends from Dallas and other places and I have set up a old school game developer group on facebook, so if your one of those guys hit me up and join the group.

Ill leave you with some more photos from the 2008 Game Developers Conference.

One of my good friends who works for Factor5 spoke at the latest Game Developer Conference (GDC) about “Creating Next-Generation Materials for Lair”. This presentation gives you a bit of incite on the next generation of game development and the directions the top developers are going in order to create great visuals for you gamers.

Screen Grab from Presentation

This is more of a technical presentation geared towards artist but if you have any interest in game development its worth checking out the PDF that Matthias Worch released recently.

BTW this screen shot the full 1080p was hidden somewhere in the presentation.

Links:

Lair GDC Presentation Page
Factor 5 – Developers of Lair
Lair HD Trailer

Keep and Eye on this game to hit your PS3 some time this year!