Chris Taylor's talk almost caught me completely off guard. He began by thanking us all for coming to hear him ramble over Cliffy B (who was giving a lecture on Gears of War concurrently) and with a short history of himself in the games industry. Being that it was 9am in the morning I still wasn't all that with it yet. I thought he'd be throwing up some slides at some point and actually start in on the lecture - it took me about 10 minutes to realize he was giving his lecture and scrambled to take out my notepad. Made me wish I had a mini recorder. So I took notes, but the majority of his talk was a lot of anecdotal stories he used to back up various points he made throughout the lecture. So here are the highlights.

On Supreme Commander

Chris wrote the initial design doc for Supreme Commander in two days - and we're talking a few dozen pages here. Obviously that didn't pass a lot of muster so he was forced to redo a lot of it. This was way back in the summer of 2003. It was very hard for Gas Powered Games to convince publishers that the game was feasible thanks to the scope that they were aiming for. They decided very early on that they were specifically going after hardcore strategy gamers and pulling no stops in that regard. So one publisher balked completely, and another one, after going through all the motions and paperwork, simply let the contract sit on some executive's desk for 3 weeks until Chris finally said hey, screw you. They finally found a willing partner in THQ, who wholly supported their vision. When designing Supreme Commander, one of the main things that Chris wanted to differentiate was 'tactics' from 'strategy'. As Chris explained it, when you talk about 'tactics' you're referring to the orders that you give individual units engaged in a single battle. However 'strategy' is when you pull way back from the fight (which you can do in Supreme Commander's zoomed-out view) and manuever groups of units spanning multiple battles on the map. Having played the beta, I think they certainly accomplished this goal, and it's a very interesting distinction.

On Game Development

Chris new this game would suck up his life, but he was also unwilling to ever let that happen. By the time development was in full swing he had kids and was determined not to miss out on them growing up. With a few exceptions, he was home for dinner every night. He also realized that spending time with the spouse was actually a good thing! ;) His goal was for his team to stay healthy and productive throughout development, and they did it by not working so hard. It's been proven time and again that working more than 40 hours a week can very quick lead to diminishing returns as employees get tired and introduce more mistakes and bugs into the development cycle. So Chris made sure that his employees had little or no reason to stay at the office after hours. They had fruit for snacks, and Chris argued that studios with entertainment centers, game rooms, etc all work to provide an environment that encourages employees to stay and work late, which is exactly what Chris didn't want. His greatest success story is a guy he hired from the software industry who had worked 1000 hours overtime at his previous job. While working on Supreme Commander he maxed out at 150.

Get the Audio

Well despite my best searching attempts I cannot seem to locate the audio recordings for this lecture on the GDC website :( This is really something that should have been recorded, as Chris pretty much just rambled on the entire time and didn't use any slides or visuals whatsoever. It was just him telling a story. If anyone comes across the audio proceedings for this lecture please let me know so I can link to it here - while I have the highlights above, his talk in general was inspiring and humorous.