GDC 2007

This year's GDC was very valuable to me. It was great to meet more Bioware and Pandemic Australia folks. Project Bravo sounds very cool, and it sounds like they have a fantastic team working on it. The dinner was nice, and getting to see Mass Effect was great, I'm really excited to play it. Some notes on some of the stuff I saw.


Playstation 3

Since I'm going to be starting PS3 development soon, I focused mainly on Sony's PS3 talks. I actually came away very impressed. Going into GDC I had assumed that the PS3 was barely more powerful than the 360 on the CPU side and definitely slower on the GPU side. I'm still pretty sure the 360 GPU is quite a bit better (mainly due to shared memory and processors), however I'm now fairly convinced that the PS3 CPU is quite a bit faster than the 360. After seeing the Edge demo and hearing some of the statistics it's pretty clear that you'll be able to do quite a few things on the PS3 that the 360 will likely be too slow for. Unfortunately for Sony, this seems to only be very useful for first party teams. Third party teams will likely end up with better looking 360 games due to availability of memory and extra graphics card power. Edge does look fantastic, however.

Sony Keynote

The Sony keynote was entertaining, if not totally relevant to developers. It really felt like an E3 keynote, not much about actual development or the development process. I'm going to reserve judgement on the Home stuff, but at this time it seems kind of annoying, I'd rather just use menus, I think.

I think people are kind of underestimating what's going on with SingStar PS3, because people aren't really talking about it, but this product could be huge. It has very broad appeal and a youtube like quality with the availability of uploading videos. Also having a song store that you can buy any song from could be a huge positive for Sony. Particularly since their parent company owns a record label.

Little Big Planet looks absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to mess around with this game. Great graphics, interesting gameplay, the ability to create my own content? Where do I sign up? And it looked like a lot of fun, too. Sony, Please don't let me down.

Miyamoto Keynote

The Miyamoto keynote was interesting, if perhaps overly long. I was also disappointed by the way the GDC people handled these "big talks". They didn't allow people to go straight in and wait for the talk, but instead opted to create a huge line that ended up having the same effect. The first people in ended up getting the best seats.

That aside, it was an interesting keynote. There was no information about new nintendo products (which I enjoyed), and he mainly talked a lot about Nintendo's business strategy and his own personal vision for making games. It was an interesting talk, but there wasn't a huge amount of new information. Miaymoto is a very engaging speaker (though it was translated), and he showed an amazing facility with the wii remote (which he used for his slideshow).

Odds and Ends

All in all, it was a great experience, I love San Francisco, and I was really glad to have the opportunity to attend this year's Game Developer's Conference. Even if I hadn't learned anything from the sessions (I did), I would have really enjoyed networking with the people from Pandemic and Bioware and just experiencing the event.