A Few of my Favourite Talks From GDC ’12

One of my aims is to update this blog regularly, at least once a week. So we’ve hit Wednesday, the day I randomly decided was update day and I haven’t got anything prepared. Just about all my waking hours are currently dedicated to finishing Fable Heroes, leaving little time for anything else. So I thought I’d do a quick post sharing some of my favourite talks from GDC last month, once again I wasn’t there so I’ve been catching up with these any spare moment I get.

Inside GlassBox

This is a great talk by Andrew Willmott and others about the new simulation engine Maxis have developed for Sim City 5.  As someone who played a lot of Sim City & Sim City 2000 growing up and having worked on the simulation for Black & White 2, Fable 2 & 3 I find this stuff fascinating.

Slides for the talk can be found on Andrew’s site.

And there are videos of part of the talk, showing some of their new systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsjYTTMds9E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9QYdwkXo4Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQsF2Ag63I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhKBorpg0-M

It Stinks and I Don’t Like It: Making a Better Engine Experience At Insomniac Games

This talk covers how they changed their tools at Insomniac to improve the user experience and speed up development.  Annotated slides for the talk can be found here.

Do (Say) The Right Thing

Josh Sawyer’s talk about narrative and choice architecture in games: http://diogenes-lamp.info/GDC12_Do_Say_The_Right_Thing.pdf

Portal 2 Post Mortem

Definitely worth an hour of your time to watch.

And finally…

All of GDC in 90 seconds