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Ways to Put Emotions Into Games
by Brad Kane [03.08.03] At "34
Ways to Put Emotions Into Games," one of the closing sessions
of GDC 2003, screenwriter and producer David Freeman discussed the
key role that emotion plays in any entertainment experience, interactive
or otherwise. At the heart of his talk was an explanation of the
thirty-four-pronged classification scheme that he uses to identify
the various techniques for endowing a game with emotion - what he
calls "emotioneering".
 Postcard
From GDC 2003: Interview With Weta's Jon Labrie by Daniel
Sanchez-Crespo
[03.08.03] Coming
off of a seven-year stint as Weta Digital's CTO during the production
of The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy, Jon Labrie just formed
a company in New Zealand to make massively-multiplayer games for
mobile devices. We pulled Labrie aside after his keynote at the
GDC and talked to him about his experience on the LOTR, and his
plans in the game industry.
Postcard
From GDC 2003: Visual Arts Keynote By Bill Kroyer by Jennifer
Olsen [03.08.03]
Rhythm
& Hues Studios' Bill Kroyer, veteran animator who worked on
the 1982 cyber paean Tron as well as recent films like Scooby
Doo and Cats & Dogs, delivered the Visual Arts keynote
address Friday afternoon. He discussed dimensionality in animating
characters and shared his set of secrets for success for the audience.
Postcard
From GDC 2003: Working With A New Publisher by Everard
Strong
[03.08.03] When
working with a publisher for the first time, or working with a new
publisher, there are a number of problems that can arise. This roundtable,
moderated by Ray Muzyka of Bioware, touched on ways to keep the
relationship between publisher and developer on the right track.
 Postcard
From GDC 2003: The 12 Principles of Traditional Animation, Applied
to 3D by Brad
Kane
[03.08.03] In
the early 1930s, Walt Disney and company codified their work process
into the "12 Principles of Animation." This morning, Disney's
Isaac Kerlow argued that the principles now need to be adapted for
3D.
 Postcard
From GDC 2003: Programming Keynote Delivered By Fred Brooks
by Daniel
Sanchez-Crespo
[03.08.03] As
a software development veteran and the author of the seminal book,
The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks is legendary in software
development circles. Today he spoke to a packed hall of game programmers,
lending insights about software organization processes.
 GDC
2003: Designing Original Games Based On Licensed Properties
by Chris Charla [03.08.03] Despite their generally bad reputation,
licenses are here to stay. In this article, Charla explains some
of the disadvantages and advantages of using licensed properties,
and how to evaluate a potential license and licensor to determine
if it's something you want to work on. He also goes over some rules
for successfully designing licensed games, the potential pitfalls
of licensed development, and some of the opportunities to turn a
license to your advantage.
 Postcard
From GDC 2003: Experimental Gameplay Workshop by Alex Dunne
[03.07.03] What
happens when 18 game developers hole up in a converted barn for
four days and create games based on the same game engine? The Experimental
Gameplay Workshop answered that question, demonstrating over a dozen
different games that all used human shadows as the game input mode.
Postcard
From GDC 2003: FilmGame - Adapting The Lord of the Rings
by Brad Kane [03.07.03] Neil
Young, executive producer of Electronic Arts' forthcoming
The Return of the King, speaks about adapting films into
games. His central point: that adaptations, rather than being the
embarrassing derivatives that they often turn out to be, have the
potential to be the pinnacle of a given entertainment property.
 Postcard
From GDC 2003: Crack Character Creation: The Mad Pufferfish Panel
by Brad Kane [03.07.03]
The
concept: four industry artists design different versions
of the same character, for use in a make-believe game, and then
present their creations at a GDC panel, along with some thoughts
about the process. And so was created Cuddly the Mad Pufferfish.
Postcard
From GDC 2003: Academic Summit by Daniel Sanchez-Crespo [03.07.03]
The
second annual Academic summit, an event working to establish relationships
between academics and the games development industry, focused on
specific problems related to working the relationship between the
game industry and academia. Here's a wrap-up of the discussions
that concern the developer and academic communities, and interesting
case studies that were presented.
 GDC
2003: Porting a PS2centric Game to the Xbox: A Case Study of State
of Emergency by Peter Brace and Jonathan Dobson [03.07.03]
State of Emergency (SOE) was developed as a PS2 game;
the underlying rendering and animation technology consists of over
5000 lines of hand written vector unit assembly code. The biggest
hurdle to overcome was the fact the entire game was built around
code that was hand-tuned to derive the maximum performance from
the PS2 architecture. This article describes the challenges that
were encountered when porting SOE from the PlayStation 2 to the
Xbox. This article shows that the approach taken was to develop
a very specialized Xbox rendering engine that was optimized to perform
extremely well in areas of the engine that had relied on the high-performance
of specific PS2 hardware. In particular, the code that previously
had utilized the vector unit processors.
Postcard
from GDC Mobile: Mobile Challenges Mean Opportunities by Olga
Zundel [03.07.03] At
the first-ever GDC Mobile, handset manufacturers, wireless carriers,
and operators sat down with game developers and publishers to discuss
the business opportunities and challenges. Here are some of the
themes that stood out at the event.
 GDC
2003: Building an AI Sensory System: Examining The Design of Thief:
The Dark Project by Tom Leonard [03.07.03] This
paper describes an approach to designing and implementing a high-fidelity
sensory system for a stealth-oriented first-person AI system. The
techniques described are derived from experience constructing the
AI for Thief: The Dark Project, as well as familiarity with
the code of Half-Life. The paper also examines the more stringent
sensory requirements of a stealth game design and explores the sensory
system built for Thief.
GDC
2003: The Seven Secrets of Voice-Over Production by Chris Borders
and Matt Case [03.07.03] This article focuses on the latest
Hollywood production methods being adopted by game producers to
create better voice-over assets. From getting the right start by
ensuring that you have a well-polished script (because paring the
world's best actor with a poorly written script leaves you with
nothing more than bad entertainment), to securing the ideal actors
at below-market rates, dealing with the unions without dealing with
the unions, directing professional actors to capture your characters'
personalities, all the way through to systematically managing the
dialogue files.
Postcard
from GDC 2003: Convergence -Feature Film and Games by Brad Kane
[03.06.03] EA
producer Bob Nicoll spoke at length about the growing similarities
between traditional film production and cinematic game production
with particular emphasis on the effect that the rapid progress in
game technology has had on the cinematic feel of games and how it
bodes for the future.
Postcard
from GDC 2003: Gordon Walton's "10 Reasons You Don't Want to Make
a Massively Multiplayer Game" by Jennifer Olsen [03.06.03]
Gordon Walton, executive producer of The Sims Online and
former VP of online services for Ultima Online presented
10 caveats for creating MMOGs to a standing room crowd of game developers.
GDC
2003: How to Build a Better Cutscene by Adam Schnitzer [03.06.03]
There are some very beautiful cutscenes out there...and there are
lots of bad ones. Some suffer from confusing or unnecessary cuts,
hyperactive camera work, violations of basic rules of screen direction,
and shots that don't effectively express story points. Learn how
you can avoid these pitfalls.
GDC
2003: Neverwinter Nights Client/Server Postmortem by Scott Greig,
et al [03.06.03] Neverwinter Nights (NWN) was supposed to be
the best multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) role-playing
game (RPG) ever made. Not only were we going to tell a story of
our own creation, but we were going to enable others to tell their
stories, on their own servers. It sounded pretty cool to us -- then
we realized that we had the task of making it! This article addresses
the design for user-created content, design limitations imposed
by the multiplayer focus of the game, the staffing requirements
required to fulfill this vision, developing the game for multiple
platforms simultaneously, and reputation systems.
GDC
2003: Art Management For Artists by Doug Oglesby [03.06.03]
What is a "lead artist"? How is a lead artist different
from a production artist? Lead artists are less "artists who
manage" than "managers who are in charge of artists".
A lead artist is, first and foremost, a manager. Are you stepping
into this role? Here's a head-up on what it entails.
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