{"id":68,"date":"2009-03-30T23:41:14","date_gmt":"2009-03-31T06:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/?p=68"},"modified":"2009-03-31T09:18:48","modified_gmt":"2009-03-31T16:18:48","slug":"gdc-where-smart-people-come-to-gloat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/?p=68","title":{"rendered":"GDC: Where Smart People Come to Gloat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Discovering New Development Opportunities<\/strong> – Satoru Iwata<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>GDC kicked off with a keynote by Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo. \u00a0The talk included a variety of new software announcements which you can read about in the official coverage, but to me the most interesting content was Iwata’s comments on the business of game development. \u00a0He discussed how companies can fall into the “death spiral” of development where they are forced, due to financial pressure, to ship early and compromise the quality of their product. \u00a0This, in turn, leads to lower sales, less money, and increased financial pressure for the next project. \u00a0He then discussed how\u00a0Shigeru Miyamoto’s approach to design creates an “upward spiral.” \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>He described how Miyamoto always has multiple, simultaneous projects in a prototype stage and that only when Miyamoto is satisfied that all the necessary elements are perfect will he allow a project to progress to the next stage. \u00a0The prototype stage may take as long as two years and sometimes, when it isn’t showing progress, it is suspended and restarted later. \u00a0Although Iwata tried to make this sound like a repeatable recipe for success, his talk was intertwined with comments about how Miyamoto is a genius and sees fantastic new gameplay opportunities in every aspect of life. \u00a0What happens if I implement the process without a genius? \u00a0Do I still end up with Super Mario Sunshine<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Media Molecule: ‘Winging It’ – Ups, Downs, Mistakes, Successes in the Making of LittleBigPlanet<\/strong> – Alex Evans, Mark Healey<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I\u00a0consider this talk by Alex Evans<\/a> and Mark Healey<\/a> to be a perfect reflection of the team at Media Molecule and the development process for LittleBigPlanet<\/em>. \u00a0The talk was completely unstructured and Alex and Mark admitted they hadn’t really prepared for it. \u00a0Additionally, Alex doesn’t like PowerPoint so the talk was delivered on a collaborative presentation application that he wrote on the plane. \u00a0Despite the two presenters frequently talking over each other and moving randomly from topic to topic, they had a certain chemistry and the talk never got boring. \u00a0My takeaway from this talk is that all the principles at Media Molecule are multitalented geniuses. \u00a0Everyone has an equal voice in design and they all seem to have some background in coding and some talent in art. \u00a0As far as I can tell everything they touch turns to gold.<\/p>\n

Stop Wasting My Time and Your Money: Why Your Game Doesn’t Need a Story to be a Hit<\/strong> – Margaret Robertson<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Margaret Robertson<\/a> returned this year after her much-praised talk in 2008 Treat Me Like a Lover<\/em>. \u00a0Her focus this year was game stories, specifically the wasted time and money involved in pursuing them. \u00a0In theory her talk was about how difficult and expensive adding story to a game is and how games don’t need stories to be good, so why bother. \u00a0That isn’t really the message that came through in the content of her talk, however. \u00a0She did the obligatory highlighting of bad stories in games, but she spent most of her time praising the really subtle and clever ways in which really great stories have been told in games. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Half-Life<\/a>She argued that very short, simple stories can be cheaper to produce than their long-winded brethren and that they can have more impact and wider appeal. \u00a0She used Hemingway’s famous six-word story as one example, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” but she also praised the lambda resistance decal in Half-life 2<\/em>, the church turned field hospital in Eternal Darkness<\/em>, and what could be The New Zealand Story<\/em>‘s own entry in the six-word story contest,\u00a0“a walrus has stolen my friends!” \u00a0What she failed to do was convince me that coming up with good tiny stories is any easier than coming up with long ones. \u00a0I’m totally convinced that the best and most effective game stories are small, immutable, and highly evocative, but I think we end up with long, convoluted, drawn-out epics because they’re far, far easier. \u00a0After all, despite many attempts, in 80 years no one has come up with a six-word story to rival Hemingway’s. \u00a0It’s only six words, how hard can it be?<\/p>\n

Rasterization on Larrabee: A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions in Action<\/strong> – Michael Abrash<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Mike Abrash<\/a> proves that one of the most experienced and respected optimization specialists in the industry can, given enough time and pressure, invent a software rasterizer for Larrabee<\/a> that is competitive with a traditional hardware solution. \u00a0Woot?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sarcasm aside, this was a very interesting talk. \u00a0Larrabee rectifies enough of the mistakes of the Cell processor<\/a> that I think it actually has a future in mainstream computing, particularly game development. \u00a0It isn’t so different from the Xbox 360 processor<\/a>, in fact. \u00a0It offers lots of parallelism and a beefed up vector unit at the cost of out-of-order execution. \u00a0The hardware can’t afford to extract parallelism, the compiler isn’t smart enough to, so guess what? assembly programming is back in fashion! \u00a0Luckily graphics has been dealing with the problem of high-level parallelism for about forty years and has established a framework that allows everyone–processors, compilers, and programmers–to achieve maximum parallelism with minimal effort. \u00a0We can wet our feet with Larrabee the graphics platform while they figure out how to make Larrabee the general-computing platform palatable.<\/p>\n

Great Games Made Easy<\/strong>\u00a0– Adrian Stone<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I’ve come away from GDC with a new understanding of what it takes to make top-tier games. \u00a0First,\u00a0blah blah blah;<\/em>\u00a0next, add a small team of passionate creative and technical geniuses; finally, blah blah blah<\/em>. \u00a0Wait three years and out pops Super Mario Sunshine<\/em>, LittleBigPlanet<\/em>, or Half-Life 2<\/em> running at 60 Hz in perfectly vectorized assembly. \u00a0The only downside is you don’t get to pick the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Discovering New Development Opportunities – Satoru Iwata GDC kicked off with a keynote by Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo. \u00a0The talk included a variety of new software announcements which you can read about in the official coverage, but to me the most interesting content was Iwata’s comments on the business of game development. \u00a0He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gameangst.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}