Primordial Ooze

Last week I went to the GDC 2007. This is the first time, though, that I’ve had even a moment to try and write something down about it. Hey, four kids and gamer friends keep you pretty busy.

During the conference, I managed to finish reading The Power of Events, by David Lukham and I put a good dent in Networking and Online Games by Grenville Armitage, Mark Claypool, and Philip Branch.

Last week was a blast. I spent a lot of the before and after convention hours with my friend Martin who went to the GDC to check out the Indie developer scene. I went to the GDC to see what the gaming industry did about scale. It seems that managing 8 million subscribers shares a lot of similarities to managing millions of trade executions per hour.

I went to the GDC in 2000, also with Martin, while we were developing our first game, Iron Dragon. As I sat through the sessions of this new GDC, I thought a lot about my current work experience and what I did to pump out the Iron Dragon game. This was a huge case of “if I knew then what I knew now…” that left me constantly thinking about how I might attack a new game title if the opportunity ever presented itself.

So, below is a whirlwind tour of what I saw and what I thought as I made my way through GDC 2007.

My flight was easy and uneventful (is there a better variety?). I arrived early enough on Monday March 5 to attend some of the Indie sessions on Monday. This was just filler, really, since Tuesday was the day I was most interested in. At night, I went to a nice brewing restaurant/bar called Gordon Biersch. I ordered up some of their garlic fries (on a friend’s recommendation) and two pints of their Blonde Bock. The blonde bock wasn’t as “blonde” as I expected, but it was a delightful malty beer which left me quite satisfied. Our walk to the restaurant took me to a small part of the Embarcadero, a nice walkway along the San Francisco bay which I would get a LOT more familiar with the next day.

One Day 2, I attended the meat of my attendance at the GDC. A large-scale game development tutorial which talked a lot about coping with large teams, large source code bases, and lots and lots of load.

It was clear that agile development techniques were becoming an increasingly popular theme in all the sessions I attended, and this large-scale app development was no exception. There was an entire segment dedicated to SCRUM, for instance.

The speakers were very experienced and I was delighted to miss the pretentious tone I’m so used to at conferences like this. I got the feeling that these guys have been through a lot and their advice was well-grounded and pragmatic. Topics covered were:

• The importance of rapid iterations, fast build times, and fast game load times. Since C++ is still so popular in this industry, there was a ton of emphasis on build performance. Not a lot of specific pieces of advice… though. Perhaps everyone knows what to do (dependence injection!) but just needs a kick in the ass to start doing it.
• The importance of automated testing, both for unit tests and system-wide “functional” tests.
• The importance of a repeatable process for performance management/monitoring.
• And much more…

The part on performance management was excellent and the speaker from Alcatel-Lucent executed an engaging presentation on the topic. Perhaps I’ll write a bit more about that in a future post.

That evening, my friend Martin and I went on a wild foot adventure that led us from our Hotel (Parc 55) to the Embarcadero, Pier 39 (and dinner), to Coit Tower, and through the vast mountainous jungle of San Francisco. When I say mountainous, I mean hills of course but these feel like mountains when you’re at the end of your day and you have no gasoline-powered locomotion to help you. Martin “Mr. Fit” didn’t seem to mind, but I thought that perhaps we went a few miles too far in our adventure. Still, now that it’s done, it was a nice experience. Oh, and here is a nice pair of pictures:

(This image is a composite of two separate pictures of Martin and I… since no one was available to take the shot… The bridge in the background is the Bay Bridge.)

(That small silhouette at the base of the Coit Tower is Martin)

On the third day, I guess Wednesday, I attended a lot of filler sessions. One of the topics that interested me was how the designers and artists worked with developers. How do the two teams share in-game assets for example? Also, how to artists feel about the new agile methodologies? At one point, the GDC staffer in charge of entry to the lead artist/art director round table shrugged and asked the artists to be creative and make the packed room bigger. The leader of the session laughed and said something to the effect, “I don’t know, that sounds like a coder problem.”

We all laughed, though I was probably the only one in the room on the butt end of that joke.

Thursday was largely uneventful and my trip home was quiet and smooth. So ended my trip to the GDC, but lots of memories and insight to last me for a long time.