My GDC experience overall was a great one. After going to all the keynotes, tutorials, and sessions that were on my list, I’ve put together the top three themes that were present (granted, the only design talk I went to was Miyamoto’s keynote, so I’m coming at this with the mentality of “how can I make the best art possible?”
1. Programmer support is a must - I saw the Creating HD Environments talk made by the Crytek fellas and I was surprised at how similar their pipelines and ideas are to ours at Firaxis, they just have such a dedicated team of programmers and tech artists there to make their art shine. That is not a knock on the Firaxis way, because where they have the best looking realistic game coming out, the demo of it I saw on the show floor was all about shooting trees and watching them fall, so there’s not much game there where conversely, we’ve mostly got game. The same happened when I saw both of the Lair talks by the Factor 5 guys, a talk on creating a better pipeline which I think was by some Ubisoft fella, the Crytek character pipeline talk, and an excellent excellent talk on creating hair by a programmer at Bioware. They all had (what it seemed like) so much programmer support to create the art they did. For example, in Crysis, it is mostly lush jungle. There is a point in the game where all of that lush jungle environment gets frozen over with ice, frost, and snow. They were talking about whether or not they should create new assets for the ice covered landscapes and in the end, vetoed it and had their programmers write a super complex shader that froze everything with a pass. The consistency between all the art, tech, and pipeline talks that I went to was that their tools needed to be artist driven, real-world behaving tools in order to get the best result, whether it be ultra-realistic or ultra stylized. After all, creating believable stylized art is strongly rooted in reality.
2. Great games are not just about design - Great games are about the full experience that the player goes through during his or her time with said game. I don’t think any aspect of game creation is more important than the other. Gears of War would not have gone triple platinum in 3 months if it were spheres shooting at cubes. The marriage of design, art, and tech made that game the hit that it is. The big guns at the show (Crtyek, Ubisoft, and others) made it sound that in each of their disciplines internally, the leads trust each other to work out whats best for the game as a whole. They set goals for the gameplay, art, and tech and then meet to see how they can marriage those components together into a wholly immersing experience. Sometimes they hit, other times they don’t but it’s usually pretty and innovative. Blizzard looks at it differently. They look at the design of the game first and decide whether or not a certain technological or artistic innovation will enhance the experience. Take WoW for example. That game will run on any computer. Why not flex their muscle and show that they can make the hottest art out there? If they did, they wouldn’t be able to call it World of Warcraft. This was an excellent move on their part because they didn’t want anyone without an internet connection to be left out. This is a prime example of where the focus was on art direction rather than art innovation. I believe when a player turns off the PC or Console on which they’ve played your game, they should leave saying, “Man! Everything about that game rocked!” They should leave with the experience.
3. Enjoy the people around you - This one isn’t really about GDC as a whole, or art, or tech, it is about enjoying your coworkers. If you put it into perspective, when you get out of school and you get a job, you spend 8-10 hours at work. You sleep around 5-8 hours a night, and that leave the other 8-ish hours in the day to be with your family and friends. Roughly 1/3 of your life will be spent at the office. If you’re not happy at the office with the people you’re with, you should re-evaluate your situation. I’m at a place that I love to be, with people that I love collaborating with, making a product that will be played by millions of people. Being able to have such a good time at GDC just drove that point home.
That’s my GDC rant. Please, if you have any comments or counter points or anything, leave a comment or e mail me. I’m definitely interested in hearing what you may have to say.
Thanks for reading,
Sulz