It’s Day One of the Game Developers Conference. As you probably already know, we were not allowed to attend the conference as members of the press, but we can still report on what happened, by jingo!
Day One started out with Nintendo’s big presentation, which involved a showing of Super Mario Galaxy 2—ha ha! I’m just kidding! Day One was super boring, as it contained the “conference” part of GDC. There were over 60 lectures/seminars, where you got to sit in a room and hear someone talk about a fascinating topic, such as “Investing in New Game Companies” or “Standardizing the Localization Process.”
Suddenly, being denied a press pass to this event doesn’t look so bad!
Popular topics—that is, topics that were discussed at multiple panels—include:
- Localization: They’re always big on localization at GDC, which you can probably guess from the fact that there’s a GDC Europe, GDC Canada and GDC Emerald City.
- Script Writing: Today’s best-selling games all have great scripts. Just take a look at the latest sales records from this week, if you don’t believe me. Final Fantasy XIII, BioShock 2, and Mega Man 10. All big sellers, all with super-great scripts.
- AI: Behavior trees have become the industry standard for AI development. I don’t know what that means, but this is probably important.
- Social Networking Games: Have you heard about Farmville? It’s a Flash game that debuted on Facebook last year, and it has over 82 million users. That’s impressive for a game that took five weeks to make, so naturally, other companies are interested in duplicating its phenomenal success.
We also saw some combinations of these topics, such as AI and Interactive Storytelling, which is one of the few conferences that actually sounds somewhat interesting. And of course, there were 50 other conferences I didn’t tell you about. Day Two is also nothing but seminars, so you can…er, look forward to my report on that.
