GDC 2011

The GDC 2011 AI Summit opened up with three heavy-hitters from the AI world (Brett Laming, Joel McGinnis, and Alex Champandard) discussing the merits and motivations behind component-based architectures.

Although the term has gained popularity in recent years, and most people in the room expressed at least some familiarity with the concepts, there...

So another GDC has come and gone - my fourth, personally - and it seems that the same old patterns held true yet again this year that have dominated the GDC experience so many times before:

Count down the weeks, then days, then hours before GDCI fail to sleep properly the night before flying outSomething goes wrong with the flight out (this...

A group of IGDA industry professionals and attorneys gathered yesterday at GDC to formalize the new Business and Legal SIG. The meeting was moderated by Dan Rosenthal; approximately 20-30 IGDA members and industry professionals were in attendance. Topics included goals for the new SIG, events and organizational structure. In addition to informational white...

Patrick Redding, of Ubisoft Montreal, has formerly worked on Far Cry 2 (ie, best first-person game), previously directed the co-op component of Splinter Cell: Conviction. He is now the game director at the new Ubisoft Toronto studio. He started by making a distinction between player cooperation as opposed to systemic...

Day 3 started, much like Day 2, at 5:00am, because for some reason I'm under the false assumption that I should continue waking up at my normal time all week.

That is a poor...

Clint Hocking gave a thought provoking and interesting talk -- complete with allusions to electric elephants, communism, and russian film icon Lev Kuleshov -- in an attempt to answer a question Chris Hecker raised during earlier GDC's. Specifically: How do games mean?

No that's not a grammatical error or a joke. It's a play on the question...

Kyle Gabler opens the failure workshop with the story about a game entitled "Robot and the Cities That Built Him" which was to be a project based off of a seven day experimental gameplay project. "Because we're game developers, we started by making a bunch of different units," he said. "This is...

I am sitting now at the AI Roundtable, between Mike Lewis and Dave Mark. These guys were part of the crew running the full AI summit, which I unfortunately missed. Roundtables are something I discovered late at last...

Waiting right now for Christina Coffin's talk on SPU based deferred shading in Battlefield 3. I hear they use DX11 compute shader heavily on the PC side, so it'll be interesting to see how they leverage the SPUs.

* Previous DICE games were forward rendered, just a few lights....

Satoru Iwata started his keynote by highlighting the worries of developers in the development community concerned with job security.

"You are the center of the video game universe," he said to the...