GDC - Wednesday

I started today off with a nice breakfast omlet from a cafe down the street from the convention center. Then I went and checked out our company's booth on the exhibition floor. We're selling our game engine to other developers so we've got a booth to show it off. Here's a link to the engine web site if you're interersted:

The Vicious Engine

My first session was on cinematic game design put on by a couple of guys at Midway. The point of their presentation was that game design should borrow techniques developed in cinema to enhance game presentation while still maintaining what makes game unique - the interactivity. They showed 9 specific cinematics techniques from film and explained how they translate into games and can push the cinematic quality of a game without turning the game into a real-time rendered movie.

Next I went to the PS3 keynote speach. It was ok, but I didn' see anything that really inspired me. You can read more details on the keynote here.

I finished up the morning in a session by ATI entitled, Efficient Shader Tricks to Impress Your Friends. The presenter showed two shaders he had written and explained how they worked. The first was written for materials that are semi-tranparent and have a volume. It used a variation of offset mapping to create the illusion of depth and looked very nice. The second was a method of lighting terrain with dynamic area lights. It involved a ton of math, but the results were very nice. This presentation will be added to ATI's developer site within a few weeks. After this session I spoke to the presenter about the seams that I'm getting in my skin shader at UV borders. He offered me a few solutions and asked me to email him about it. I'm looking forward to working with him on it to make it work without the seams.

In the afternoon I attended a very inspiring session on character rigging by Steve Theodore. It was two hours long and Steve just really cranked through the material. He has placed his slides online here and I'm planning to study them for the next few months and use the info to improve my character rigging script. That will be fun!

I finished up the day by spending a few hours at our engine booth talking to people about our game engine. That was pretty cool. It's easy to talk about the engine because it's so powerful. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's sessions!