Game Developer's Conference

FIEA descended on GDC this week, so I thought I'd update you on how it went.

Ron Weaver, Michael Gourlay and I started the week attending the IGDA education sessions where we had fun mingling with other game programs and exchanging ideas. Admittedly, this session was a lot more help when we were creating our curriculum, but it's great to be able to give back now that we're hitting our stride. I talked to several people in the investigation stage of their programs about why having a program with artists, programmers AND producers was a really effective way of teaching the material. Michael spent about half his time in the physics workshop on Tuesday, which he really enjoyed, and Ron said the interactive storytelling workshop was great.

Wednesday's highlight had to be seeing all the new virtual world stuff from Sony. It's clear they've gone from trying to copy XBOX live to innovating in that space, and the fierce competition leaves us gamers as the clear winners. It will be interesting to see if the "Home" really takes off and becomes a place to actually meet people. In Pete Isensee's talk on Wednesday, it was enlightening to see the new C++ features being adopted by people coming out of the Technical Report 1 (TR1). Definitely some useful stuff there for game programmers, including some new built-in syntax for hash tables and arrays.

The awards show Wednesday night was exciting, and even though Opera Slinger didn't win the award, it was great to be included in the student showcase. Since so many of the student games were great, just getting there takes a lot of work. But for those students out there hoping to get into the 2008 student showcase, here's a warning: the competition is getting better and better.

Miyamoto's talk on Thursday was inspiring for up-and-coming game designers (or so I heard). It was neat to hear him talk about the student games in such a positive light design-wise, especially since I think Opera Slinger had one of the more innovate designs in the group. I also enjoyed the Saint's Row talk on multiprocessing architecture; it allowed me to compare what they did with what we did on Madden. It's clear that the second generation of games on the 360 had the time to take concurrency more seriously, and his talk gave me some ideas on how to get more efficient when dealing with multiple processors, in a very generic way.

All in all, it was a great conference and it was nice catching up with all my longtime friends in the industry, as well as making a bunch of new ones. I'm looking forward to GDC 2008 already!