Visit at GDC - Europe 2009

Hey! Me and my friend Tobias was attending Game Developers Conference in Cologne. We where participating as volunteers and because of this had full access to the event with free food, parties, drinks and all that. We went to cologne by airplane and then went couch surfing at two very kind and very generous hosts who showed us the awesome parts of cologne we would never had found otherwise. It also cut down the costs of the trip to only paying for the food and travel!

I had the opportunity to visit the following lectures:

Keynote: From Max Payne to Alan Wake: Creating Intellectual Properties the Remedy Way

This keynote was all about the important company values that Remedy uses on a high level to keep all the employees happy, motivated and what stuff the company thought was most important. It was obvious they came from Scandinavia as their values was very close to what schools teach in Sweden and Finland about how to relate to one another. The company focused on each individual and let them do what they did exactly the best, instead of forcing them to do other things that made them average. One example of this was for example not forcing a brilliant artist who had little interest in planning and was too focused on his own work to always be able to meet deadlines. Instead of forcing this artist to deliver on time, they would let him do what he did best; make beautiful art. He also talked about trying to get off peoples backs as a producer when things were going downhill and about trust to and between employees. Finally he talked about Remedy not really being interested in doing the same thing as everyone else and about creating innovative IPs instead of just another Counter-Strike. The company believed in story, and games that looked and felt very much like movies to reach a bigger audience. This can of course be done in many ways, but one thing he mentioned was having as little hud as possible. The focus on Alan Wake was to create the first true action thriller game he finally stated.

Keynote: CCP: Winning The War

This keynote was fun and interesting in many ways as CCP except for showing how much the company has grown and all the super-interesting stuff that had been going on in EVE since its launch also announced a brand new title called Dust 514; a first person shooter for consoles. The aim with the game was to create a competitive “massively multiplayer online shooter” within the that also had connections to the EVE online. He was very vague about how this would work, except for the fact that players fight about territories on planets, and that this war also affects what happens in the EVE online universe. Somehow alliances between Dust 514 and EVE online could cooperate to gain dominance of the EVE universe. I’m very curious about how this would work.

Crytek: Build a level in 45 minutes in CryEngine 3.0

This was simply a tech demonstration of Cryengine 3.0. During the lecture the lecturer created a small, but nice looking map with pre-created brushes and assets to show how time efficient and streamlined CryEngine was. He used no magic new tricks, but the result was kind of cool and during those 45 minutes he actually did manage to create a couple of minutes of gameplay. With that workflow, how much gameplay could one create in one week? With good planning and if you know what youre doing you really can make lots of stuff during that time.

Choice: The Ultimate Game Mechanic

This keynote was given by Peter Molyneux and was about choice in computer games. Choice in computer games was something that could be a bit difficult since too small choices only took time to implement, and too big choices forced the player to make choices that they would later regret and have to reload the save and play it all over again. Molyneux was a great speaker and talked a lot about their next title: Fable 3. The last game in the series. In this version the player plays as a revolutionist who later on takes the throne and then plays as a ruler during the second half of the game. He didn’t go into much specifics but the theme and general idea sounds interesting.

Creating Visual Identity for Games

This lecture was given by Victor Antonov one of the guys coming up with the visual theme of Half-Life 2. He spoke a lot about the pre-production and some of the mistakes that usually are made during this period. He tried to emphasize not to be afraid and go crazy. The crazy stuff would normally be tuned down as the time went on anyways. He also talked about what you normally do when creating visual styles is taking away all the visual noise and emphasize what’s important for the product. His lecture was very inspiring and I got very interested in continuing to work on one of my old projects called “the battery level”. Well see how that goes :D.