GDC 2008

Hi there, today was my last presentation at school (there’s still my intership presentation at the end of the year but..) about my external activities during my 5th year, meaning my work at Ubisoft. So now I can really say my work ‘at school’ is over!

I’m working in the company for 2 years now, and tomorrow I’ll be flying to San Francisco with my friend and colleague Arnaud to assist to the Game Developer Conference (GDC) 2008. It’s only a 4 days trip, but I’m sure it totally worth it!

There are so many lectures and presentations, we can’t see everything we want to But we’re really looking foward to watch some of them:

• Designing Conflict Resolution without Combat
• Rules of Engagement: Blizzard’s Approach to Multiplayer Game Design
• Pollinating the Universe: User-generated Content in SPORE
• Interactive Actors That Express Emotion (Ken Perlin)
• PROTOTYPE: Open World, Open Mind, Next Generation Thinking
• The Emergent Gamer
• The Next 20 Years of Gaming (with a title like this!)
  

All these are in the Game Design track (remember we’re developers ;)) but seem to be very interesting from a gameplay point of view. And of course technical sessions like:

• Momentum vs. Character Animation
• Semantic Environment Sensor System: Data-driven Interactions of Characters with the World
• Adventures in Data Compilation and Scripting for UNCHARTED: DRAKE’S FORTUNE
• Uncharted Animation: An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline
• STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED: How LucasArts is Building a Game, a Development Team and a Technology Pipeline… At the Same Time
• Designing and Implementing a Dynamic Camera System

And personally, I would enjoy assist to the next ones but it’s often in the same time that to biggest ones above.

• Beyond Printf: Debugging Graphics Through Tools
• Never Say Die: Breathing life into Game Characters with Havok Behavior Sponsored by Havok
• Dynamic Performance Profiling of C++ Code
• Tamarin: A Free, Fast, Open Scripting Runtime
• One Man Army: The Characters of CRYSIS
• MERCENARIES 2: Networked Physics in a Large Streaming World
• Next-Gen Lighting Using Illuminate Labs’ Turtle Sponsored by Illuminate Labs

Here is the programming track (almost 100 sessions) and here is the game design one (about 150 sessions). These are the two tracks we’re really interested in. Too bad we can’t see the Ubisoft’s conferences.

I’m really exited with the idea of going to the United States for the first time! I’ll try to take a few photos of San Francisco, stay tuned.