Games from Within

Spring was supposed to be the season of flowers, new leaves, and good weather returning. Here in San Diego we don't get much of that, or rather, we get it all year around. So Spring can really sneak up on you, and before you realize it, it's already gone. Spring also seems to be the season for game-development conferences and travel. [more]

SIGGRAPH is a window into a different world, and as game developers, we can only benefit by trying to look through that window and even participate and share some of our own experiences. [more]

This year's GDC, for a change of pace, was held in San Francisco. It was also the last GDC dealing mostly with the current generation of consoles. Yet again, GDC managed to live up to all expectations. I walked away totally exhausted, but at the same time energized and inspired and full of new ideas. [more]

It's that time of the year again: days are getting longer, the weather is slowly getting warmer, and a hint of change is in the air. That can only mean one thing: the Game Developers Conference is approaching again! This article will help you navigate your way around GDC more successfully and help you get the most out of this year's conference. [more]

The GameTech Leadership Summit was the second part of this year's Game Tech Seminars. Underneath a somewhat confusing name, it really was an analysis of the tools and technology in games today. The first day is where the real meat of this second part was. It was a postmortem/analysis of the tech involved in some of the most successful games today (Halo 2, Half Life 2, The Sims 2, and Stranger) done by the tech lead for each of the teams. [more]

They say good things come in small packages. That was certainly true of this year's Game Tech Seminars. It was a four-day intensive conference dealing with very specific topics (realistic characters and engine/tools technology) with a very impressive list of speakers. I've been saying for a while that the "next frontier" of game technology is going to be characters. Not fancy graphics. Not physics. Not online play. It is no surprise then that the first two days of the GameTech seminars were dedicated to characters. [more]

What do Neverwinter Nights, Splinter Cell, and Prince of Persia have in common? They were all developed in Canada. The latter two right in Montréal. Some of the giants of the game industry either originate, or have large studios in Canada as well: Ubi Soft, Electronic Arts, Microïds, Softimage, and ATI among others. People might not realize it, but our friendly cousins in the North are quite influential in the games industry. [more]

The days immediately following GDC are always decidedly hectic. Not only do you need to play catch up with the life you left behind for a week, but you also try to get back all the hours of lost sleep between parties and red-eye flights, email all the people that you met (or missed to see) at the conference, prepare roundtable summaries or put up session slides, and deal with all the emergencies that happened at the office while you were gone. With all that now safely behind me, it's time to look back on this year's GDC. What was hot and what was not? What were the underlying themes and trends of the conference? [more]

It is true that no tools are necessary to apply good software engineering techniques, but they can often be a big help. The third and last session of "By the Books: Software Engineering in the Games Industry" concentrated exclusively on languages and tools, and participants shared their favorite tools and warned others about potential duds. [more]

The second session of the GDC 2004 roundtable "By The Books: Software Engineering in the Games Industry" concentrated on processes and methodologies. In particular, we had a good look at agile development and how it can be applied to game development. [more]

This is the summary of the first session of my GDC 2004 roundtable: By the Books: Software Engineering in the Games Industry. Unlike other years, each session focused on different topics. This one starts with a general discussion of what we need software engineering for in the games industry and then looks into specific techniques that teams can adopt as part of their development process right away. [more]