What were the best sessions at GDC?
I didn’t go to GDC this year. I stayed home to fight fires and keep the team from partying the whole week. Most of the sessions are available as audio downloads, though and I would like to hear some of the best ones. Which talks did you think were the best? Which of those are worth $8 to hear?
~Joe
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Clint Hocking did a great talk on some high-level design stuff. Which you did just say you don’t really care for, but he’s posted it online, so:
http://clicknothing.typepad.com/Design/hockingc_GDC07_Exploration.zip
I like that stuff too, I just think the mix is all wrong, and there should be more talks about stuff I am really into.
- Robert Gutschera’s Magic talk was excellent, if you’re interested in how to determine costs for player choices. I think it was the most immediately useful design talk I’ve ever attended at a conference. (To be fair, I do a lot of balance work.)
- The dynamic difficulty talk was really neat — mostly useful for us in its dicussion of quantifying player skill.
- Likewise, the “Emotions in FIFA07″ talk was about quantifying emotion. I thought it was really interesting, but nobody else did — there were about six of us in the audience.
- If you’re interested in marketing, the one on the “visual marketing of Gears of War” was fascinating.
- If you played Gears of War, Cliffy B’s talk on the iterative process would be cool. He didn’t talk so much about the iterative process as he shared anecdotes about how things to go to work they way they did. (Personally, I was kind of lost because I didn’t play the game.)