GDC: The Future of Story In Game Design – See what I mean about one of the main themes being story? I wasn’t complaining – this was another entertaining session. I’m really pleased to see how many comments this story got, too!

GDC: Radical Talks ‘More Is Better’ For Prototype – This session blew me away. It was obviously hotly anticipated (the room was packed in a very not-legal seeming way, and I tripped, oh, 86 people with my laptop cable) but I hadn’t even heard of Prototype before I went (feel free to pillory me for this if you wish.)

Most people obviously came just to see the game in action, and it did look amazing, particularly for the amazing fluidity and freedom of the main character – like a cross between Assassin’s Creed’s Altair and Crackdown’s nameless agent. Wasn’t a fan of the gore, though. There had better be a decent explanation for it – I’m not against violence, but it’s actually one of the few games I’ve seen where I thought “man, this seems gratuitous.”

What actually impressed me most about the session was the speakers’ clear understanding of their game design tenants: that the fun of open world games comes from the variety of systems in the world interacting. A mistake the developers of Assassin’s Creed made was to produce a game full of systems that didn’t interact, and I’ve wanted to write about that concept for a while now.

GDC: The Inter-Species Game Design Challenge – What a great day for sessions! This was really wacky – particularly Alexey Pajitnov’s Dolphin Ride concept, which largely involved electrocuting dolphins (or shooting them with paintballs.) I was very impressed with Brenda Braithwaite’s One Hundred Dogs, though. If I ever signed up for Facebook (and if I ever get a dog) I’d play it for sure. It should have won!

If I thought my problems were over when GDC Mobile ended, well, was I in for a surprise. It managed to get busier and crazier once the main conference began.

GDC 2008: The Crysis Of Audio – Maybe not the most obviously exciting way to kick off one of the main events in the gaming calendar, but considering that both the development of game audio and the game Crysis have barely grazed my consciousness, this was… Sort of interesting?

GDC: Deconstructing The Best Interactive Storytelling – This was a great session. If we’re going to talk “trends” pretty much the major trend of this year’s GDC was storytelling; how to make it good, how to integrate it with gameplay, and so on. This was just a fun panel on games that some famous developers liked, including Loom and Planescape: Torment (which even I have yet to finish.)

I was supposed to write up three sessions on the 20th, but apparently Jesse Alexander (co-executive producer and writer on Heroes) decided to cancel his session weeks previous and somehow no one knew. Thanks for nothing, Jesse.

Still! The IGF Awards that evening were so great it kind of made up for it (even if they made the IGF Mobile Awards look positively tiny by comparison) with some brilliant skits from the Mega 64 crew (and The Behemoth‘s Dan Paladin.) I think Mega 64′s Rocco was kind of pissed that I compared the opening skit to the opening of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie, but considering that’s probably my favourite opening to anything ever, I thought it was a nice thing to say. In retrospect I realize I was dumb.

Later, Jason Rubin mumbled his way through his script at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards with all of the style and panache of a bronzed porcelain bird, but he made up for that by mistakenly calling Crackdown “Cracktime.” We laughed about that for the rest of the week.

“After twenty years in the business, with the decision of Atari to sell Shiny Entertainment in early 2006, founder and Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah and Enter The Matrix co-creator David Perry decided to take a year off.

Gamasutra recently talked to Perry after his session about his ‘holiday’, his many projects, and the concept of free-to-play MMOs.”

Happy New Year!

“Stéphane D’Astous, General Manager of the newly-formed Eidos Montreal, is bullish about his studio’s planned development cycle. ‘Trying to get nine women to give birth to a baby in one month doesn’t work. Everyone has tried that in this industry, but we decided to cut the bullshit,’ D’Astous declared on our in-depth tour of the new facility.”

Some more coverage from my time in Montreal! This time in feature form.

I eagerly await Deus Ex 3, even if, at this point, there’s really not much more than speculation floating about. I adored the original Deus Ex, but the sequel was just horrible. Not for the reason that so many people complain about (that it was “dumbed down”) but because the environments were absolutely nothing in comparison. In the original, areas such as Hong Kong were large and interesting to explore, while in the sequel, entire cities seemed to be about four rooms big. It was a complete disappointment.

“At the Montreal Games Summit, Realtime Worlds producer Phil Wilson gave an in-depth postmortem of Crackdown, discussing obstacles encountered and mistakes made during the development. Wilson noted that while he did a postmortem for Game Developer, he wanted to add some other aspects of the game from a different direction, looking at things from a chronological standpoint.”

A left over bit of coverage from the Montreal International Game Summit appears with some help again from Leigh Alexander.

Crackdown: Made in Scotland. Like me!

“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, Flagship Studios director of technology Tyler Thompson discussed how using data-driven algorithms instead of “hard-coding” can offer developers more flexibility and control, with lessons from his experience with the Diablo games and his studio’s recent Hellgate: London.”

Thompson mentioned, late in the talk, that quality assurance is much harder when using random generation in your games. Which is noteworthy, because from most accounts Hellgate: London was an buggy mess at launch. Clearly it is a heck of a problem.

This was the final session of MIGS but one – straight afterwards there was the Journalists Panel, where the collected game developers that visited MIGS (well, those that hadn’t already headed off to the pub) could grill a panel of journalists on whatever took their fancy. The panel included Game Girl Advance‘s Jane Pinckard, Sun Media’s Steve Tilley and… me! If I find some free time I’m going to write about the panel, as a lot of arguments were started but never exactly resolved. Not that I’ll be able to resolve them exactly, but there are a few things I still want to make my opinion clear on!

“In his keynote lecture at the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, veteran developer David Perry decided to share what he learned in his 12 months “off” — in which he directed six MMOs, consulted, took classes and started an investment company — about the free-to-play business model, lessons from Asia, and useful time investments for game developers.”

I’m not fully convinced by the free-to-play model, but I think that’s more on a personal level, because I hate purchasing in-game items. My experience of purchasing in-game items come from Second Life, of course, and there are still thousands of people who play that and sustain an economy by purchasing items and services with real money in game, so it’s not that I don’t think it can work. I’m just not entirely sure it’s going to be the end of traditional games, exactly.

I’m very intrigued by a Korean MMO FPS which he mentioned very briefly that didn’t make it into this article – Huxley, from Webzen. Doesn’t look like it’s going to be free to play (it’s coming out for Xbox 360 as well as PC, apparently) but is a good example of the kind of craziness the rest of the world is getting up do in games development. And the name is inspired by Aldous Huxley! Excellent.

“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, veteran game writer Susan O’Connor, whose most recent projects include Gears of War, BioShock and Blacksite: Area 51, used comparisons between God of War and the movie Gladiator to illustrate a fascinating lecture on game story.”

I thought this was a good talk on using traditional story writing techniques for video games. For all of the brouhaha that surrounds the new ways that video games could tell stories, O’Connor is astute in pointing out that (for the most part) video game creators need to learn how to write stories in the first place to make them worth telling.

“At the 2007 Montreal Games Summit, Retro Studios president and CEO Michael Kelbaugh discussed the Metroid Prime arc of the classic Nintendo franchise, highlighting challenges faced by the team from the series’ 3D debut to incorporating Wii functionality with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.”

I’m at the Montreal International Game Summit again! This time I decided to take the bus, which was completely unbearable. I have no idea how my better half managed to take a 21 day trip across the states in a Greyhound bus without going completely and utterly insane. I was only on the bus for about six hours, but by hour two (where we’d just about reached the outskirts of Toronto) I was going bananas.

Anyway, I really like MIGS. There are some really great talks, and this was just one of them today.

(As with my coverage of the Future Play conference, this article, and those that are to follow, are constructed from my notes and edited for publication by the staff at Gamasutra.)

“Located in the temperate Niagara region best known internationally for wine production, St. Catharines is also home to game developer Silicon Knights, currently working on Too Human for release on Xbox 360 under the command of founder and president Denis Dyack.

Despite its significance, few even within the city are aware that St. Catharines features Ontario’s largest game developer. After all, the number of staff members of Silicon Knights — 160 — pales in comparison to nearby province Quebec’s largest, Ubisoft, which has over 10 times as many.”

I didn’t realise people made such a big deal about everything Denis Dyack says! What I thought were fairly inoffensive (and frankly, rather logical) comments on the subsidies for game developers in Quebec have been linked on Game|Life, GamesIndustry.biz/Eurogamer, and more.