GDC Report Day 3

[Begin Day 3]
2003 GDC Coverage - Day 3 (March 7)

Well, I've been here for three days so far, and only one more left to go. Today wasn't quite as interesting as yesterday, though. I primarily went to lecture sessions, a few of which were really interesting.

Day started off the usual way. I got up, showered, got dressed, and headed down to the convention center. I didn't go as early this time, though, so I didn't have to wait as long to go to the first session. The one I went to was called "Crack Character Design: The Mad Puffer Fish Panel". Basically, four different artists were chosen and given a very rudimentary idea for a character and asked to design it. This had occurred some time before the conference, and the lecture was the artists showing their final character and the process they went through to come up with it. It was very cool, and the ideas from each artist were VERY different (they hadn't had any contact with each other prior to this panel). It was really interesting to see the steps and process they went through, especially since this is the type of thing I want to get into.

The second thing I went to was the IGDA Student Group Gather. Basically, a girl from a college in Utah talked about how she had organized a student game design club at her school and gave suggestions and took questions on how other students might do the same in their own. This too was of interest to me because I've been considering seeing how much interest there might be in a game design group at my school.

After the student gathering, I went to another panel titled "Stepping away from the Pack: Resources and Methods for Developing Art Styles that are Memorable and Attention Grabbing". It really could have been an interesting panel, but the two presenters were, quite honestly, rather boring... Their information was good, but they just seemed disorganized and didn't put much feeling into the presentation... I nearly fell asleep a few times, and ended up leaving before it was finished...

It was about 1pm by this time, so I went back onto the expo hall to grab some lunch (they provide a semi-decent lunch for free, so I'm not complaining). However, there were still a couple of hours left until the next session I wanted to go to at 3pm. I wandered around the expo exhibits a bit more, and ended back at the consoles they ad set up with all the game nominees from the Choice Awards last night. They had Kingdom Hearts running on one of the PS2s, which I had heard a lot about but never played. I tried it out and played for a little while. It's not that bad of a game, from what I saw, but the contrasting styles of Squaresoft's quasi-realism and Disney's cartoon characters still bugs me a bit. *shrugs* I don't own a PS2 myself, so I can't really judge until I get a chance to play it more.

Anyway, at 3pm I went to see a presentation by one of the Keynote Speakers, Bill Kroyer. Kroyer's currently working with Rhythm and Hue Studios. They're the group that did the Coca Cola Polar Bear commercials. Also, they're the ones that did the animation for the movies "Cats & Dogs" as well as the recent live action "Scooby Doo" movie. Kroyer originally worked for Disney, and for any of you old-timers that might remember it, he's the guy that was the first to use 3D graphics in the movie Tron. This session was called "You Can Fool All the People All of the Time" and was Kroyer talking about his experience in 3D Animation. This is probably one of the best sessions I've been to so far, and it was really interesting. He basically explained how his studio did the effects in a lot of their work. Apparently with the movies "Cats & Dogs" and "Scooby Doo", instead of using the traditional polygon mesh method, they actually built the animal models from the inside out. They constructed a rather accurate skeleton, then created muscles on that, and then skin over the muscles. The end result is very realistic and accurate to the real thing. It was very cool.

After that panel was over with, I wandered around the expo hall a little more and played a little more Final Fantasy XI. It doesn't seem to be too bad of a game, although I'd like to get more time to see more of the features at some point. Also, it would be nice to see a translated English.

That's pretty much all I did today. I came back to the hotel after that. There was a "Suite Night" tonight, but I was feeling tired, and I unfortunately still have some homework I need to do...

Oh, but before I forget, there were a couple of things I forgot to mention last time. While it seems like most of the actual displays in the expo hall are from development tool places, I did catch a glimpse of some stuff from Everquest 2. I may be a bit biased, but personally I think that the graphics in AC2 are a lot better at the moment. *shrugs* And speaking of AC2, when I was talking to Jason Booth the other day, there was one other thing he mentioned. As I was talking to him about the music system, he said that they did play around with a player generated music system. Before you get too exited, these were just experiments, and it wasn't really "composed" music. Basically, it allowed the player to create a curve pattern that would alter aspects of the music they were playing. Jason said that they did some tests with some random scribbles, and it actually sounded kinda cool. However, there don't seem to be plans to implement something like this in the near future. I'm sure as you all know, there's quite a bit more important things that they're concentrating on at the moment.

That's it for today. Tomorrow will be my last day at the convention, and I'm heading back to Cincinnati early Sunday morning. (My flight from San Jose leaves at 6:35am...) Once I get back to Cincinnati I'll try to write up an overall summary of the convention and my impression of it. Until tomorrow!

Cas Emerjy
The Magus Knight
<End Day 3>