I’ve been traveling all over the place this past month, but I’ve finally compiled some notes from one of my trips: the Game Developers’ Conference 2009! I went with my company to help run the recruiting booth and attend classes there, and it was a blast. The following are impressions of the lectures I’ve attended along with a link to my .doc file with all my typed notes. I tried to include links to the slide or videos whenever available. Hope you find them useful!

Overall, I had a great time and learned tons at GDC. The last time I attended GDC was as a student volunteer, trying to break into the industry. It’s eye-opening on how different it is from the other side of the coin. 😉

Download: GDC 2009 Lecture Notes (Word .doc format)

I was very excited for this lecture because I am a huge fan of LittleBigPlanet and really admired everything about Media Molecule’s game from physics, art direction, to a very open game design aesthetic. I was under the impression this session was going to be a post-mortem of their title, along with explanations of their process of conceiving such a creative art/design direction with a small staff. Empowering players to create their own levels and share them sounded like a hefty task from a design perspective since you can’t always predict your user base’s actions. The speakers, technical director, Alex Evans and creative director, Mark Healey, are brilliant for their work on LittleBigPlanet, but I felt that the whole session was delivered impromptu. Perhaps the other LittleBigPlanet sessions were better since they were more focused on one particular aspect of the game.

This talk, led by David Hunt, discussed the rigging tools and techniques used for Bungie’s Halo games. Wow, talk about an overwhelming amount of information! There were so many fantastic ideas on how to wrangle the animation assets of a large scale project, in addition to various techniques used for scripting rig components. I really wished this session was 5x longer so we can go into greater detail on how the Bungie TD team developed these animation tools. I’m not well-versed in scripting and creating custom tools, but going to this session makes me want to learn more. The slides (which are linked in my .doc file) are definitely worth a read if you want to learn more about their process.

It was interesting comparing the “Modular Procedural Rigging” session to the “Self-Limiting Rigging Methodology” session because both studios tackled AAA projects with different perspectives. While the MPR lecture advocated having a rigging toolbox that animators can customize to better suit their animation needs, the technical artists of the GOW team (which were a really small team compared to Bungie’s) tried to standardize one rig to cover a vast variety of bipedal characters. The methodologies were almost counter to the previous lecture. It was neat to see the differences, and it shows that there’s never one ‘right’ way to solve a problem. Unfortunately, I don’t have any notes for this lecture in my .doc file, primarily because the lecture went by so quickly. If anyone can find their slides, I would greatly appreciate it!

Hideo Kojima + very entertaining slides + simple, yet insightful design explanations for Metal Gear Solid series = AMAZING presentation. I highly suggest watching the presentation for yourself on Gametrailers.com. I have the link on my .doc file.

One of the ties for favorite lectures at the GDC, the presentation for the PS3’s Naruto title delivered everything I wanted to learn about the art pipeline and process. I’m not sure if I can find the slides for these since the speaker, CEO/Representative Director, Hiroshi Matsuyama, requested that no pictures be taken during the presentation (unless you were press). There was a chock full of information for how Cyber Connect 2 achieved the anime look of Naruto and ensured that it lived up to its license’s visual style. I loved how their solutions for emphasizing the stylized art direction were very practical. I took a lot of notes for this lecture in my .doc file, so enjoy!

The last lecture I attended was the “Cinematic Game Design III: Action!” where the speakers, Lead Single Player Designer of Kaos Studios, Richard Rouse III, and Cinematic Director of Big Huge Games, Marty Stoltz, described various cinematic techniques from movies developers can use to heighten the action for their titles. It was very well presented; they would first give a film example illustrating the technique and then a game title that successfully achieves the desired effect. Check out the link in my .doc for their slides.