GDC 2010 Tuesday Notes

These are rough notes and thoughts from GDC.

If you're at GDC, and in middleware or just want to drink with some middleware types, see: http://whatmakesyouthinkimnot.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/middleware-meetup-details/

A general thought: it's noticable that Moscone West isn't being used this year for GDC. This may be due to a reduction in size of the conference, or perhaps the floor area is similar and there are other reasons. It is nice not to have to walk across 4th st. but there is still a lot of time wasted going between North and South.

Also, Tuesday was notable for the insanely long line of attendees picking up their free Google android phone (offered to early registrations).

Some session notes:

Ron Carmel (2D Boy) had a short talk "Indies and Publishers: Fixing ..." which came down to 2 main points: The classic model of publishers doesn't seem relevant with digital distribution, and the remaining need is just fundings. Cue introducing the Indie Fund. There were any new details on that. There were some tidbits of World of Goo costing $120,000 and Braid $180,000.

My takeaway from "Case Studies: AI in Recent Games" was mainly that the future of AI is in handling specialized cases without explicit coding to set them up. That calls for generative AI instead of just expert systems. With online games pouring in huge amounts of human game play data, there's good opportunity for training AI.

The "The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update" was informative for me since I haven't been following the area much. A few interesting bits:
- Asia had $7 Billion in virtual goods business in 2009. In the West social games are growing fast, but still only $.5 Billion last year.
- Zynga is over 700 employees now, and is overtaking Facebook in headcount! (Oh, and $200 Million for them last year)
- Facebook will be introducing their own currency "Facebook Credits", but with a 30% cut!
- To me it seems Facebook's future success is secure so long as they maintain the best social graph platform inviting external app developers to use it.

Unreal on the iPhone was nice to hear. Nothing fancy, except not wanting to actually develop on a mac. So, they moved as much of the build to Windows as possible, running commands on the mac over PuTTY.

p.s. Attending and staying in a hotel near the convention center is way cooler than living in the bay area and having a 1.5 hour commute.