With each year, GDC becomes an increasingly more important event for anyone interested in keeping on the cutting-edge of the gaming industry. Courtesy of Christopher Harz.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year [March 20-24, 2006] came back to San Jose, California, and everyone seemed glad of it. The San Jose Convention Center was packed with an energetic and serious but happy assortment of people that constantly streamed back and forth between a very crowded show floor and an overwhelming array of multiple tracks of panels and presentations that covered every conceivable aspect of game production. The GDC has a very different culture than its larger brother, the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in Los Angeles. The E3 is all about the presidents — how many copies of major game franchises can be sold in a toe-to-toe slugfest between giant gaming companies. The GDC is all about how games are made — and the audience will cheer as wildly for a game produced independently on someone’s credit card as they will for the latest and greatest version of a major blockbuster.

The Diversity of Gaming
The first thing that really hits you is the sheer diversity of the game industry nowadays, as you look through a conference brochure with panels on Serious Games, Casual Games, Mobile Games, Online Games, games played by individuals or by fifty thousand people at the same time, Simulations, RPGs, MMOGs, FPSs, Gaming Environments (such as Second Life) — the list stretches on and on.

To walk through the GDC is to walk through the history of gaming, all in the same place. Many mobile casual games are similar to the state of the art games of the 1970s, with relatively crude graphics and 2D characters (sprites) and flat face-on backgrounds — think Space Invaders. The online mobile games resemble the games of the 1980s, with “2 D” characters and backgrounds and a lot of movement seen in view, but with obvious limitations to the number of polygons per character that are dictated by the rendering power and bandwidth of the medium (cell phone or PDA); a lot of inexpensively produced indie games are at this level, as well. The online games for PCs and game platforms resemble the best-resolution games of the 1990s — thousands of polygons, dozens or even hundreds of characters running around the screen, and decent quality audio.

The high-end games for 2006 are in a category all their own, defining a new generation. They incorporate features that were only dreamt of a dozen years ago — very detailed surfaces with deformation, reflective lighting and high-resolution texturing and hair (or fur), very fast motion, and true 3-dimensionality for characters and set elements. The characters have detailed faces, and can show different emotions, which may play a crucial part in the game.

Supporting all this detail requires a new generation of hardware, including CPUs (Central Processing Units) that may be dual core or better (the new Sony PlayStation 3 CPU has 9 processing cores on it, making it a state of the art grid computer), GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, which have evolved from simple “graphics boards” to being highly specialized processors with independent memory and power), and storage — the few kilobytes of years past have evolved into the gigabytes available on a game stored on a DVD (around 4.5GB) or the new generation of BDs (Blu-Ray DVDs hold up to 25GB in single-layer format). An Xbox 360 or PS3 easily outclasses the aircraft military simulators that are their forebears, and which cost tens of millions of dollars. Welcome to the new millennium.

Face Robot was the hottest software advance buzzed about at GDC. Especially its $95k price tag! © Softimage.

Character and Story Development
What has remained constant across history and gaming platforms is the need for a compelling story and characters. But how the story can be told and how complex the characters are has changed a lot recently. It is of course possible to produce a great story without high-res graphics. As Dr. Jim Gee, one of the Serious Games presenters, noted, “Look at Final Fantasy 4 — it has crappy graphics, but it’s a great game!” But there are some limits to this. Think of trying to produce Jurassic Park III with sock puppets — the story would lose a lot of its impact. Characters in games have become a lot more detailed, just like the digital creations in movie blockbusters. They now have hair and clothing that can move, and their movements can follow the laws of physics — they no longer look like something out of South Park. But the biggest change evident at the GDC this year is in the faces. Faces can now be photorealistic in a game (in fact, some games allow you to map a photo of your choice onto a game character — you can literally “be in the game.”) Faces now move while speaking, and show emotion.

Whereas animation of bodies has been perfected over the years, with techniques such as motion capture in common use, detailed animation of faces (including mocap) is still a relatively new art, and a very demanding one, as humans can pick up very subtle cues from faces. Capturing facial movements has turned into an industry of its own. High-end tools are starting to emerge, such as Avid Softimage’s Face Robot, which can simulate how facial tissue slides and deforms during emotional episodes. The full-up version of Face Robot costs $95,000, which may be daunting for some studios. Softimage is investigating a rental program to help small studio budgets; another alternative is for studios to outsource such work to specialty boutique shops.