Event Preview: Paris GDC

PARIS GDC 2008

When: June 23rd & 24th, 2008
Where: Coeur Défense, Paris, France
Web: www.parisgdc.com

K­EYNOTE: Little Big Planet, Little Team, Big Ideas
Media Molecule founders Mark Healey and Alex Evans will address the breadth of ways in which game developers can incorporate creativity into their designs. From god-games and sim-games to full-on modding, they will discuss the past, present, and future of user-generated content.

KEYNOTE: In the Eye of the Blizzard: a Keynote Q&A with Rob Pardo
GDC Events executive director Jamil Moledina interviews Pardo on his inspirations, challenges, and next steps at Blizzard. The discussion is informed by Blizzard’s lessons learned, resources unlocked by its success, and the raw talent in evidence in the company’s development team. Moledina will also include questions submitted online via the myGDC forums.

KEYNOTE: Scenes from Battlefield: The Past and Future of the Core and Casual
Ben Cousins, Battlefield Heroes’ project lead, talks about the business and consumer trends that lead to the creation of this new service, and in his role as the executive producer for the Battlefield franchise he shares his thoughts on the future crossover of core and casual gamers and the supposed ‘death’ of the PC as a gaming platform.

A Portal Post-Mortem: Integrating Writing and Design
GAME DESIGN TRACK
A repeat of her massively popular GDC session, Valve level designer Kim Swift examines the iterative process behind integrating story and gameplay to create a satisfying, seamless experience, discussing how they approached the symbiotic relationship between the story and gameplay that made Portal successful.

Designing a game for multi-core platforms: pitfalls & performance tuning
PROGRAMMING / CODING TRACK
Lionel Lemarie, of SCEE’s research & development team, will discuss multi-core programming on multiple platforms. Using code inspired by the PlayStation 3 platform, he will offer ideas of good practice to get code running efficiently on PC and Xbox 360, highlighting the hurdles he had to jump over and point out the challenges yet to overcome. A real-time on-screen profiler will be used throughout the presentation to illustrate a game that is running efficiently in theory but not in practice.

Level Design Challenges in Crysis: The Long Journey to Open Worlds
VISUAL ARTS TRACK
Sten Huebler, lead designer at Crytek, will deliver an insight into the challenges of creating levels in parallel to developing an engine, the process of restructuring the level design team to keep up with the game’s growing complexity, and the long journey of delivering compelling gameplay in a variety of unique environments, including zero gravity.

Digital Distribution: what is really happening, and how does it impact your studio?
BUSINESS / MANAGEMENT TRACK
This lecture, helmed by game lawyer Vincent Scheurer, considers the reality and the future of the digital distribution of games directly to consumers. It addresses the economics and the commercial realities of digital downloads for PC, console, casual, episodic and mobile games. The lecture pays particular attention to the impact of digital distribution on small and large independent development studios.

Ultimate Graphics Performance for DirectX 10 Hardware
PROGRAMMING / CODING TRACK
Getting the ultimate graphics performance from DirectX 10 and the latest generation hardware can be an exciting and demanding challenge, so AMD European Developer Relations bod Nicolas Thibieroz uses his extensive experience of recent games technology to show some of the key pivotal decisions which can lead to ultimate graphics performance.

Keep Calm and Carry On: The History of BioShock
GAME DESIGN TRACK
2K Boston technical director Chris Kline provides an overview of the many conceptual, technical, production and marketing challenges that were overcome during BioShock’s five-year development history. Footage of several early prototypes will be shown alongside a discussion of the many difficulties encountered, mistakes made, and lessons learned during the project’s various incarnations.

SingStar: The Game Factory
PRODUCTION TRACK
How does one team manage to ship 32 SKUs in a year? By being Sony’s SingStar team, and having a dedicated approach to targeted localised releases. In this talk, SingStar senior producer Tamsin Lucas talks about the processes in place at the Sony London Studio and how it manages to grapple with such a complex pipeline, one that spans not only multiple platforms but also disc-based and electronically-distributed content.

The Right Tools for the Write Job
GAME DESIGN TRACK
Great dialog needs great writers, but in the games industry you need great tools to support your writers, tools that allow your writers to share content across the project. How does dialog get translated into scripts for the VO actors? How do your plots and missions get turned in to gameplay? How does an idea for a cutscene become a reality? What about localisation? This session, by Bioware’s Mac Walters, will take a close look at the tools and systems used at BioWare to create truly collaborative writing.

Training as a Productivity Multiplier
BUSINESS / MANAGEMENT TRACK
In this talk, Blitz’s art manager John Nash explains how failure to acknowledge and embrace training in the development environment is tantamount to long-term strategic suicide. This presentation will demystify training by presenting some hard-learnt facts and methodologies that will help you to unleash the hidden effectiveness of your development teams that will result in higher productivity, better quality and a healthier bottom line.