My trip to gdc

[Shadowrat]

Yay! Work sent me to gdc!

So far, our first flight was late causing us to miss our second flight.

We just arrived to find out our bags are on an even later flight.

To make matters worse, I can't go back to the good looking food area with sushi. Instead I have to spend the next 40 min outside a crummy coffe shop and subway.

At least I'm in San francisco. And tomorrow I'll be rubbing elbows with the cool hip game development world!

[Tai]

=P Have fun, gets lots of good loot.

[Creole Ned]

You show those fancy developers a thing or two! Like, whatever you have in your pockets or something.

[Shadowrat]

Today was absolutely awesome.

I was a little nervous coming out here. I didn't know if i would get anything out of it. I wasn't sure if i would understand anything or be able to apply any information.

Well it was totally worth it. The sessions i went to were great. The vendors i talked to were great. The people here are great.

I've had this giddy high all day. I'm not really one to acknowledge my own successes. Coming out here and being able to talk to people makes me realize that i'm actually part of this industry. When someone asks me what my job is, i can hold my head up high and say i'm a game developer.

Of course, my parents still don't really know what that means.

Anyway, enough about that. I know that you guys really want some goods. Well i got to play wii punchout. Here's a nice pic:
lil mac wins (http://twitpic.com/2gbc5)
King Hippo (http://twitpic.com/2g02m)

This game is great. It's going to be a must have for the wii. It's exactly what you hoped nintendo would make the first time you saw wii sports boxing. Only they devs finally learned to keep the motion controls simple. none of that tilting + horizontal swinging + vertical swinging. flicking the controller throws a punch. It's simple and it feels great. You punch high or low by holding a modifier button, not the crazy full motion control attempted in wii sports boxing. lil mac does what you want, when you want.

as an aside, i find it interesting that lil mac was orriginally little because of the limitations of the nes. Now, it would be trivial to make a full size translucent boxer, but they keep him lil' anyway.

I also played new bionic comando. Wow! this game is intense. I'm a huge fan of the NES bionic commando, and i loved the xbox live version too. I did not have high hopes for this game, but it works and looks fantastic. They wouldn't let me take pictures at that booth.

[Shadowrat]

I'm sad that tomorrow is going to be the last day. I love going to these conferences.

Today i saw Hideo Kojima give his keynote about working on nothing but metal gear for 20 years. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of metal gear. I only played the ps1 and nes versions, and while i like the nes one a lot, according to kojima, it's crap because he had nothing to do with it.

Just the same, it was a really inspiring speech. I feel motivated to make great things.

I also went to a session on experimental gameplay. At this session they show bizzare games made mostly by students who just want to see if they can make something bad.

Actually there were a few really impressive games. Spy Party was basicly a game based around the turing test. On the screen were a bunch of avatars milling about and doing stuff. One of them is the player. The second player is a sniper observing the party. It's his job to decide who the spy (player 1) is and shoot him. meanwhile player 1 has to accomplish certain goals without getting shot. It was a really fascinating dynamic.

Another cool one was Achron, a time travel game. It was an rts where you had the ability to send your units forward and backward in time. That way you could build up a huge army, send it back to the start of the game, and kill your enemy at his base before he had anything. It was pretty mindbending as your actions in the past would change the future. plus you could play it against another human.

Even more mind bending was this 4d game. Its mechanic involved rotating the world to bring a 4th dimension into view, thus revealing features that you couldn't see before. The developer started with a demonstration of a character existing in a 2d plane that was a slice of a 3d world, and this idea basicly carried over to the character existing in a 3d hyperplane of 4d space. Mathmatically i understand it. I got a headache trying to visualize it though.

Also, rts fans should look out for Ruse from ubisoft. It has an absolutely stunning engine that handles the scale of huge battles by seamlessly zooming out of the world to this table with little markers in a war room. I have a movie, but i can't get it off my camera right now.