Day 1 - GDC Europe, Köln 2009
Just a few hours after the reception, I was waking up and heading to the Koelnmesse again. I didn’t work today so I wanted to make the most of my free day. Got to the conference through the elevator and wandered around the Exposition Floor, where many spent most of their time away from the sessions. To my left I could see the CCP booth, hiring some talent; to my right a few booths, mostly indie I think, the only name I recognized was ‘Tale of Tales’, though the guys from ‘Sakari Games’ had a really nice lego-like shooter in showcase. Moving on to the over side of the room I passed through the Autodesk booth, and at the end of the hall leading to a open-air social area I could see the Intel booth on my left, and the Crytek booth on my right.
A plethora of monitors pointed towards me from both sides. The Intel booth was actually composed of several partners like Geomerics, Umbra Software and Havok. Crytek on the other hand had 4 big monitors on the wall constantly showcasing their engine, with regular presentations showcasing all the tools, the WYSIWYG editor and runtime editing on remote builds, one on a PS3 and one on an X360.
By then I’d already missed the first presentation by ZootFly, about surviving project cancelation (outch) so I picked up my pace to see Dorian Kieken’s session on Bioware’s living plan. He basically discussed various areas of project management in Bioware. With a team >400 people it was interesting to see how staff friendly they were. They would give up total control over the staff, this he said was false control that would only lead to a false sense of security, in favour of individual teams of 4 or 5 people working in Scrum, that had the autonomy to plan out their work in order to achieve the proposed objective. It was an extensive speech, discussing everything from staff moral to toolsets. The kind of stuff that made me want to work at Bioware.
After a quick walk outside, I was back in CongressSaal 2 for this morning’s keynote from Crytek’s Cevat Yerli on The Future of Gaming Graphics. This keynote started logically by discussing the past and present of gaming graphics, namely the history of Crytek, their naïve approach to game development and how that helped them further along the road. Then he discussed the future of graphics, how and when they’d evolve and why, the areas they were investing for the next iteration of their engine. He discussed how graphics would not greatly evolve in the next 4 years, and how teams should invest on the visual identity of their games instead. He predicted the next big step for gaming graphics to be around the time of the next generation consoles, which he estimated was around 2012.
He moved on to which possible techniques might be the future, addressing point based rendering and raycasting as possible but as of yet unlikely candidates, with some possible relevance for raycasting, dependent on hardware evolution. Another technology he put much faith on is SVO (Sparse Voxel Octrees) and how they would allow artists to ‘go insane’ with geometry details, with the very quick example of a wireframe sidewalk rendered using SVO. Having promised myself to check out SVO in greater detail I went off to lunch and further roam the Expo Floor, now properly set up, to find out other booths only slightly secluded, like Gotland University and Games Academy (with a very nice games showcase, I particularly enjoyed Gotland’s Walkabout), and companies like Perforce and FMOD.
Now, I still don’t know if it was a good idea to try this session, just because I tend to get drowsy after lunch. So I went for the Larrabee session, with a short introduction of certain concepts and techniques, we were soon at the main point of interest, new instructions on SIMD programming, namely vector instructions.
After that, a great keynote by Matias Myllyrinne explaining the ‘Remedy Way’ which I’m obviously a fan of since Max Payne. I also love how they’ve still kept their team rather small (~40 employees). He talked about the past of the company, how they believe they’re mainly an entertainment company (as opposed to a software developer), how they kept working on their projects even though they had other attractive possibilities with mobile apps. He moved on to the stories and how they always put a lot of relevance on strong main characters (so much so, titles were always the characters name). He went on to talk a bit more about their new project ‘Alan Wake’ as well as an overview of the development process at Remedy.
After this I procrastinated for a while, chatting with the good people at the Intel booth. Unfortunately, I ended up missing Kellee Santiago’s session on the Design Postmortem of Flower. So that was the end of the conference for Monday. Well except for the GDC Club Party that like the previous one went on ‘till about 2 a.m. for me.
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