GDC06

As usual, GDC was a blast. This year should have been dubbed “The Year of Guitar Hero”, because we were freakin’ everywhere. It was kind of shocking to see your game on other developer’s flyers or in their booths as a way to attract people. Red Octane had hooked up some demo stations outside the G.A.N.G. awards, and they even arranged to get many of the musicians featured in the game up on stage for a medley. I think my favorite moment, however, was a little side crack by Tommy at the Developer Choice Awards claiming that we had won a category we weren’t even nominated for.

Some of the sessions I attended were quite good as well. My favorite was the Advanced Prototyping session held by Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold. It contained a ton of extremely practical advice on using prototyping to solve both technical and design issues in game development. I originally met Chris and Chaim at last years independent Game Jam and was quite impressed with both of them (among many other people at the jam), and this session really spoke to their experience on the topic, while remaining quite entertaining. I highly recommend that anyone involved in game production get the proceedings from this session, as I suspect more and more games will be using these types of processes in the future, and there advice was so simple I found myself wanting to smack my head for not realizing it first.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me this year was a subtle feeling that the industry is being changed by a small group of maverick developers. Developers that believe in iterative processes over large design docs, developers that believe next-gen doesn’t necessarily mean 10x budgets and 10x art detail. EA has been hiring some very smart people; and they seem to be putting some very smart processed into place. In some ways, it seems as if the next few years will be make or break time for these mavericks. From my perception, it seemed as if all the cry for change is finally being taken seriously, instead of in previous years where those doing the complaining were simply labeled as curmudgeons. My perception may be skewed, of course, but it at least seemed this way to me, and that’s exciting for a fellow curmudgeon ;)

This years buzz term to avoid: Don't go to sessions with "Next-Gen" in the name. It almost always translates into "Here's this thing I did in the last generation which is still valid, but not as interesting if I don't put the words next-gen in front of it"