GDC 09: Day 3

This is later than I intended because last night I spent sleeping trying to get rid of a headache and instead just slept through until this morning. Hopefully that won't happen again. At least not until I'm home in my own bed.

Yesterday started off with a keynote lecture by the president of Nintendo Satoru Iwata. The first half of it was Mr. Iwata explaning how their top designer Shigeru Miyamoto (Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, Nintendogs, Wii Fit, etc) designed games and what his process was. Hopefully I can take a lot of that and use it in my future game designs. Then he started announcing things for Nintendo such as a new menu system for the Wii that allows use of higher memory SD cards and loading games directly from an SD card. He also announced that after the keynote, we would all get a free copy of the new DS game coming out in a couple weeks called Rhythym Heaven. It's from the makers of various Wario Ware titles so it's got a real mini-game feel to it, but it's all rhythym based. Oh and we got it for free so that's AWESOME. Oh yeah and he also announced a new Zelda game for the DS called Spirit Tracks. And I got to be there in person for the announcement. 5 rows or so from the front of the room. I'll beat you to it, Adam. LUCKY!

After the keynote, I went to a couple lectures that weren't as interesting to me as I'd hoped they'd be. One was on an open source project by Sun Microsystems (creators of Java) called Project Darkstar. It's basically a library that makes creating an MMO easier because it takes out all the stress of dealing with servers and communication. I'm not sure how we can use that with our game engine, though, especially because the server code is in Java.

Next up was a discussion on how to make games look good without a lot of bloom or motion blur. I was very interested in this just because I'm tired of how nearly every modern game now has crazy angelic glowing characters with all the bloom and nauseating motion blur to make things look cooler. Unfortunately, I'm not a graphics programmer, so a lot of it was over my head. But after talking about it later with my co-workers I realized I did get more out of it than I thought at the time. It was all about subtle little shadows (contact shadows) and details. There should be details on everything at all sizes. When you get a chance, go somewhere with a good view and look at the objects up close and far away. Both of them have tiny details that make them interesting. Right now I'm looking out over San Francisco and the windows in the buildings far away are all different because of how people's curtains are. So if a game were to portray that, they shouldn't have one really flat uninteresting texture for the far away things because that's: A) not interesting and 2) not how it would be if that place existed in real life.

To cool my brain off a little, after lunch, I went to a game design challenge where four top game designers were told the specifications of the challenge a couple weeks ago (or due to some crazy shenanigans, 36 hours ago...). The theme of the challenge was "My First Time", which was essentially an autobiography on the first time they had sex. It was highly amusing and only one of the designers had entirely inappropriate slides up at one point. I don't think I really got anything out of that lecture, but it was a lot of fun to watch and it was highly amusing.

The last lecture I attended that day proved to be the most interesting non-keynote lecture. It was all about the software engineering behind the tools of Insomniac Games. They did a lot of clever things to make their tools very modular, which makes things easier for programmers, and user-friendly, which makes things easier for the content creators. I won't really get into the details, but it was good to find out that programming tools seems to be where I want to focus on at my job. Previously I wasn't finding any aspect of programming that really grabbed my attention and made me say "Ooh! I love programming this!" But making powerful tools that are easy to use and not scary or hard to learn is a new goal of mine because good tools help the users do better at their jobs.