Last week at the Moscone center in San Francisco was the 2016 Game Developers Conference, and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend…  for part of a day at least.  Usually around GDC time you can see some coverage from news sites about particular talks, a few keynote speeches, and some demonstrations, but is that all there is?  Not really, there’s a few things that I haven’t seen mentioned, and I’m here to fill you in on as much as I can.

What is GDC?

It would be easy to compare GDC to E3, because they’re both significant events in the games industry, but that really does GDC a disservice.  E3 is a commercial expo, meaning it is entirely intended to face the customers.  GDC is an industry trade show, meaning the intended audience are other people in the industry.  Sure, there can be some new announcements or demos of new products, but most of it is much more geared to people in the industry selling their services to other people in the industry.

The Expo Floor

What does that mean?  Let’s take those logos you see during the boot up sequence.  Stuff like CriWare, or Unity, or Crytek, or Unreal.  Each of these is likely to have a booth to demonstrate their tech and talk about it to game devs who may be interested in using it.  There’s a lot more to that, though, too.  Networking software, analytics, advertising, audio, even things like haptic feedback (AKA Rumble, i.e. vibration in response to things happening in game) are there to sell themselves to developers.

Over the past few years, VR has taken a big portion of the showroom, and 2016 was no exception.  Even though there were more small demonstrations, PlayStation and Oculus each still had huge lines.

There’s a lot more out of frame, even.

Not as big as Oculus, but still a long line.

This wasn’t the limit of VR on display, though.  There was the usual display of live CG Mocap animation, but this time with the added twist of rendering to a VR headset.  So, you could put on the headset and instead of the mo-cap actor in front of you, you’d see a real time 3D generated image that the actor is animating.

The goggles view is on the left monitor, the master shot of the live rendered animation is on the right.

There was also a big display that included treadmill like things.  This has been there in the past, but then the players would only walk around a shooting gallery.  Now they had actual death matches against each other, with an announcer.  This wasn’t an open demo.  The people playing were at it the whole time and a part of the display, really.

It seems they want to turn this into a sport? I really don’t know where this is going.

And finally on the VR front, why put the screen on your head when you could get Cooler company Igloo to make this thing:

A tent?

What is that you ask?  Well, inside there were 5 3d projectors projecting a panoramic 3d image on the walls of this structure, and 5 cameras tracking the position of the player, or rather their gun controller.

This was an interesting experience.  It’s strange when so conditioned to use a controller to turn, it’s hard to realize that instead you need to turn your body to look somewhere else.

The booths got pretty swank, too.  Really, some of them are practically houses, though they only contain professional, and practical design elements…  </sarcasm>

And in case you didn’t think this was high end, here’s a McLaren car…

…that was in the Unreal booth for some reason.

Then there was the completely ridiculous Clash of Kings booth/display/stage/monstrosity.  This was the most ridiculous display there, and apparently it got even more elaborate after I saw it, with a throne and people in costume.  The screen there was constantly playing ads, and I didn’t see it loop after 10 minutes.  How many did they produce?  A bunch were in Korean, but some were in English, and seemed to be inspired by raps from The Lonely Island.

I don’t know how you can justify this one, no matter how much you’re making. This is a trade show, not a consumer show… Your audience doesn’t care.

More interesting to me, though, was the Ctrl-Alt-GDC displays.  These were experimental games with alternate control schemes, like a tank combat game where you control your tank with 2 huge wood cranks:

Seen here while being repaired.

A TV with knobs that showed another TV playing Pong, controlled by the knobs on the first TV.

Extra points if they used an old monitor like a CRT in this.

A sewing machine…  something

I did not get to see how this worked

TWO telephone switchboards

It’s like Guitar Hero for the telephone. If you can play this, you’re qualified to be a telephone operator in the 60’s

There was another switchboard like control on this, just not as big as the other one so it hid behind the player there.

A high tech Teddy Ruxbin type thing, powered by a tablet.  This is actually an awesome idea that I’m surprised no one has done yet…

Simultaneously cute, clever, and puzzling that it hadn’t happened yet.

Though my overall favorite single display was a surprise to me.  Fantastic Contraption VR.  I didn’t realize this continued after the first game, which I played years ago.  Putting this into a VR world, seeing the player interacting with objects, it was all a very clever use of the medium.  They even had little details like using fake grass to let the player know exactly where the play area was located.

This thing had scheduled demos, and was booked SOLID

This wasn’t everything, though…

Pages: 1 2