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GDC London is a three-day event. A two-day intensive single-track seminar takes place on 3 and 4 October, with expert developers delivering cross-disciplinary sessions. These sessions will cover individual elements of next-generation games, looking at common challenges such as the creation of believable characters and rich, crowded environments, as well as compelling and innovative gameplay. The conference will also include postmortem format sessions.

The conference will also feature a full-day sponsored tutorial from IBM on 2 October, and one from NVIDIA on Tuesday, 3 October. Access to the tutorials is now included in the GDC Lodnon conference pass.

GDC LONDON CONFERENCE SESSIONS

Scroll down to read descriptions of each session.

session descriptions

KEYNOTE:
Developing for a Networked Experience
Jamie Macdonald
SCE Worldwide Studios

PS3 heralds a paradigm shift in interactive entertainment as we move from today's package-centric world to a network-centric future. Jamie Macdonald explores the impications of this shift on the wider development community. In particular he will focus on: new forms of content; organisation development; talent profiles; nurturing a development ecosystem and new revenue streams.

KEYNOTE:
Unlearn What You Have Learned: Implementing Next-Gen Gameplay
Chris Williams
LucasArts

With the next generation of consoles comes the challenge of creating truly new and innovative gameplay experiences that leverage the power of the new hardware. Simply dressing up the same gameplay with better graphics will not satisfy an audience that expects these games to play differently. LucasArts has committed to being on the cutting edge of new technology that will deliver on those expectations and change the way people play games. By partnering with ILM to build a brand new tools pipeline based off their film technology, working with Natural Motion to pioneer euphoria behavior-based AI, and collaborating with Pixelux Entertainment to create Digital Molecular Matter, LucasArts is delivering a truly simulated gameplay experience that will ensure a gamer never gets the same payoff twice. In this talk see real time demos and get insight into the tools, technology, and development challenges associated with LucasArts' next-gen game development.

Applied Physics: MotorStorm
Scott Kirkland
Evolution Studios

As the visual quality of games has improved, more attention has been given to other aspects of a game to increase the feeling of reality during gameplay. In this session, Evolution Studios focuses on the physical simulation in their PlayStation3 title, MotorStorm. Topics addressed include:
- Building for Destruction: MotorStorm features some of the most spectacular destruction ever seen in a video game. Evolution will reveal how vehicles and objects are constructed (and subsequently destroyed) to produce unrivalled carnage!
- Digging in the Dirt: Persistent, interactive, deformable terrain is one of MotorStorm's (literally) outstanding features. Evolution will describe the techniques employed and highlight how Havok's extensible architecture allowed them to achieve comprehensive integration.
- Character Reference: By combining Havok's key-frame animation, IK and ragdoll behaviours, MotorStorm's riders and drivers move in a startlingly convincing manner. Evolution will demonstrate the benefits of this blended approach, and present practical considerations to maximise its impact.

Combat: The Ninja Way
Duncan Frostick, Nina Kristensen, SaiTong Man, Guy Midgley
Ninja Theory

Key members of Ninja Theory’s cross discipline Combat Team describe and demonstrate how the complex combat system in Heavenly Sword for Playstation3 has been developed. The presentation by Duncan Frostick (Combat Code Ninja), SaiTong Man (Combat Design Ninja) & Guy Midgley (Lead Animation Ninja) will encompass real-time demonstrations of Ninja Theory’s custom combat pipeline and in-depth explanations of how the Combat Team works at NinjaTheory.

From concept to practical implementation, Combat: The Ninja Way discusses how this dedicated cross-discipline team approaches and delivers a high-end combat gameplay. The presenters will cover everything from the fundamentals of combat design to implementation the most extravagant fighting moves and combos.

Heavenly Sword is a Playstation3 launch-window title, originated and developed by Ninja Theory Ltd and published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Creating Emotion in Next-Gen Games
David Freeman
Freeman Games

Games are supposed to be fun. But what is “fun?” Would the “Lord of the Rings” films have been as fun if they didn’t grab audiences and take them on such a varied and rich emotional ride? Yet, when it comes to emotion, games lurk like forlorn plankton in primeval ooze, waiting to evolve. Next-Gen games will look like films, but will they have the same emotional range and depth? Don’t hold your breath. Game designers are often extremely bright and creative; what’s the problem? The answer is that the techniques for creating emotional gameplay are “secret” -- meaning, the better they work, the less you notice them. In this fast-moving talk packed with visuals, game writer and emotional architect David Freeman will show how the holy grail of truly emotional gameplay has been achieved, at least sporadically, in a few recent games such as "Half-Life 2," “Ico,” and “Shadow of the Colossus.” David will project gameplay footage, and then carefully deconstruct the techniques behind these games’ emotional content / experiences / systems. He’ll offer you specific tools that can help you increase the emotional potential of your games, no matter what the genre. Welcome in the new generation of games by taking command of this vital emotional toolset.

Harry Potter: Film Meets Game
Wayne Stables & Will Byles
Electronic Arts

As the industry moves towards next generation games, what art challenges will be faced and how can the experience from the Visual FX world be drawn upon? How has the role of "art" increased and what needs to be done to meet the challenge of producing more sophisticated content while remaining within reasonable timeframes and budgets? How will the traditional roles of Artist and Engineer change? This session looks at these issues and how they are being addressed at Electronic Arts.

High-Def Outdoor Environments
Michael Khaimzon
Crytek

Working on FarCry the team from Crytek admits to making a few mistakes along the way. Unfortunately it was too late to implement changes in FarCry, so they decided to use this learning experience towards creating a much more realistic environment in Crysis. One of the most important things was to organize a field trip to a location similar to the project. The team headed to Tahiti where they spent the trip taking pictures and videos of how the environment looked and behaved. Ironically, by the time the prototype level was finished, they realized most of the footage was only useable as reference and not as workable material. This session reviews the creation of Crysis and addresses the tools and technology needed to make the environments what they are today.

The Imago Effect: Avatar Psychology
Harvey Smith
Midway

Creating an in-game representation often holds a strange fascination for players; for some games, we spend more time crafting our avatars than we do playing. How should writers share character creation, one of the sacred pillars of fiction? On the surface, player-driven character creation seems simple. This session explores the notion that there's much more going on in the player's mind, taking a look into the ways we let our audience engage in self-expression through avatar. Do players really want the game's authorial voice to wholly abdicate creative control of the protagonist? The session will cover associated issues and questions, spelling out various approaches to character creation, using examples from classic and recent games. The session will provide commentary on development considerations, statistical concept test results, and (perhaps foolishly) predictions about the future of game avatars.

Inspirations for Next-Generation Designs
Peter Molyneux
Lionhead Studios

For videogames to make the transition to next-generation platforms, existing genres need to be revisited and evolved in order to maximise the technical potentials of new platform and appeal to a mass market audience.  With this in mind Lionhead Studios has actively been researching potential advances in fighting games. This talk will be focussed on those new advances centering
around the inspiration of next generation combat games using film clips, concepts and animations to show Lionhead’s bold steps toward revolutionising combat in video games. This talk  by Peter Molyneux does not focus on any particular product but instead examines the processes and research  that  went into moving a much loved but very familiar genre to its next iteration. While this talk takes the fighting game genre as its primary example the processes
that have led up to its conclusions could equally be applied to other genres of video games.

Managing Complexity in the Game Production Pipeline
Andrew Oliver
Blitz Games

An efficient and flexible game production pipeline was a major advantage for the previous generation of games but now it is fast becoming essential. Raised consumer expectations and a rapid expansion of hardware capabilities throw up some new challenges both on the tools and engine side as well as ever rising art quality demands.

This lecture outlines how the Blitz Games production pipeline has been extended to cope with new demands concentrating on key productivity tools such as cross-generational cross-platform support, shader and post-process effects editing, real-time feedback and making use of distributed processing to decrease build times and manage memory requirements. Each case is illustrated by real-world examples and an outline of the benefits gained.

Attendees will come away from the session with an overview of key pipeline features to support rapidly scaling requirements and how leveraging an existing well-designed pipeline is highly advantageous without imposing constraints.

Multi-Threaded Rendering, Physics and AI for Multi-Core Architectures
Jonathan Story & Eric Reinhart
Intel GmbH

This session will discuss techniques for multi-threading large game modules, such as physics, AI, and particle systems with particular attention given to potential pitfalls. A live tech demo will show the techniques discussed in action, and the performance deltas between single, dual and quad core CPU's will be measured. The live demo will use the Open Dynamics Engine for physics and OpenSteer for AI modeling. Even though the rendering, physics and AI are decoupled from each other, the demo shows how the AI can interact with the physics simulation.

PlayStation 3: A Parallel Universe
István Fábián
SCEE TEchnology Group

We are increasing the performance of our computing systems, but not exactly the way it's been originally expected: the megahertz (or shall we say gigahertz) myth is now indeed just a myth taking next generation computing into an entirely new direction. PlayStation 3 is one of the first next generation systems to move in this direction utilising the revolutionary Cell Broadband Engine developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM to provide massive computing power consisting of multiple cpu cores on a single chip.

The PlayStation 3 provides a parallel architecture that requires advanced, multi-processing aware applications in order to make the most of the hardware and software design available. This presentation demonstrates the new challenges for developers when developing for multi-processing systems as well as techniques used to solve these problems.

ProFX: Procedural Generation of Textures for Next-Gen Games
Dr. Sebastien Deguy & Gilles Fleury
Allegorithmic

Dr Sebastien Deguy, CEO of Allegorithmic, and Gilles Fleury, Lead Technical Artist at Allegorithmic, will demonstrate the ProFX procedural textures authoring and rendering system. Sébastien will provide a demo of Naked Sky Antertainment's RoboBlitz, the first Xbox360 Live Arcade game which using ProFX under Unreal Engine 3 to render high resolution textures while fitting entirely within the 50Mb game size required by Microsoft. Gilles will propose an in-depth walkthrough of the pipeline of Procedural Textures production for ProFX, covering how to integrate ProFX and MaP Zone 2 into art pipelines, and create a dramatic impact on game team productivity, on memory footprints, on visual complexity, and on the overall aesthetics of a scene.