gdc2010

Digital City 73: iPad pre-orders; foiling NYC taxi scams, and FFXIII vs. God of War III (podcast)

On this week's show, we find out how many people pre-ordered an Apple iPad (including someone you might not expect), then we check out a huge taxi scam in NYC, undone by the clever application of GPS technology.

Dan just got back from the annual Game Developers Conference, and he recounts his adventures there with indie games, FaceBook fans, and, of course, the PlayStation Move motion controller [see related video here].

Finally, Joey and Scott debate the merits of Final Fantasy XIII, and Dan jumps in to explain why God of War III owes much to Joseph Campbell and … Read more

A 257-degree panorama from the GDC floor

Work hard, play hard at GDC (audio slideshow)

As the video game industry searches for the next big thing in gaming, designers around the world are honing their skills and playing with new ideas and theories in game design. Most of the time, digital artists and designers are locked behind their screens and spread around the world, but the Game Developers Conference provides a forum for the worldwide community to come together and share ideas on the future of gaming.

They come from Europe, China, South America, and across the United States, and GDC gives them an opportunity each year to meet the industry's biggest players face … Read more

GDC 2010: Scaling the summits of gameplay

The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco brings together designers, programmers, publishers, and others for the latest from the world of video play.

Work hard, play hard at GDC audio slideshow Gamers come from Europe, China, South America, and across the United States, and GDC gives them an opportunity each year to meet the industry's biggest players face to face. (Posted in Full Frame by James Martin) March 13, 2010 6:00 AM PST

Sid Meier and his mind games Game developer and guru tells developers that if they want to create the next best seller, they need to … Read more

GDC: Sid Meier and his mind games

SAN FRANCISCO--Legendary game developer Sid Meier took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference with a simple message to those who want to create the next best-selling title. The secret of making a great game, Meier said, is to get inside the player's head.

Psychology was never something Meier studied prior to getting into gaming. But as he explained to a crowd of developers at his keynote speech Friday, such a big part of game design ends up trying to figure out how the player will react to the things developers put in their games. Yet, as Meier … Read more

Scenes from GDC 2010

With the 2010 edition of the Game Developers Conference winding down, we've put together a short photographic tour of our week, from Sony's PlayStation Move launch to the booth-filled expo hall. Though surprises were few and far between, we did pick up on some new lines of perceived wisdom from our fellow attendees in the form of trends and themes to watch out for.

Indie games looking for bigger audiencesOne highlight of the week was the Independent Games Festival Awards, which celebrated small, indie projects. Many of these games are or will be available as iPhone, Xbox Live, or PC downloadable games, and though we thought there were too many side-scrolling platform games, there were also many very creative ideas on display.

The move toward digital distribution is having the same effect on the video game industry as it did on the music industry several years ago. Small, independent developers, with tiny budgets and teams, can bypass publishing middlemen and sell directly to the consumer (or close to directly--the owners of much of this virtual retail shelf space, including Apple and Microsoft, still act as gatekeepers).

If you want to check out a few of these indie games, Monaco, a four-player co-op game, took top honors at the awards show.  We also liked the photographic mystery game Trauma and the atmospheric side-scroller Limbo. (Disclosure: My spouse, AOL Games Editor in Chief Libe Goad, is a member of the IGF judges panel.) … Read more

A peek at Unreal Engine on Palm Web OS

SAN FRANCISCO--While at the Game Developers Conference, we just got a peek at Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 running on a Palm Pre Plus. It's the same technical demo that's been shown off on the iPhone, both at CES back in January and on Wednesday at Epic's talk about changes it had to make in order to get the engine running on Apple's iPhone OS.

According to Epic Games' Vice President Mark Rein, with whom CNET spoke earlier on Thursday, Palm was only given a test version of the Unreal Development Kit two weeks ago and … Read more

InstantAction to offer embeddable console games

SAN FRANCISCO--It seems that the 2010 version of the Game Developers Conference here isn't just about social and iPhone games. It's also about services that can stream console-quality titles directly to gamers.

On Wednesday, OnLive announced its launch date--June 17--and said it would be working with partners like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, THQ, and others to deliver AAA games to anyone anywhere.

Rival InstantAction made a similar announcement on Thursday. InstantAction's catch is that it lets players choose how they consume a game, whether it's to play by the hour or to buy. Publishers set the … Read more

New OpenGL 4.0 aims to match DirectX 11

Aiming to keep pace with Microsoft and advance the computing frontier, the group behind OpenGL has announced a new version of its interface designed to make advanced graphics easier for programmers to handle.

OpenGL 4.0 adds more support for using a graphics processing unit (GPU) for other computing chores and for tesselation, which subdivides a region on a graphics object into many smaller patches for more detailed imagery. The technology got its start as a graphics library at pioneering Silicon Graphics but has grown into a standard that works on many different computer systems and overseen by the Khronos … Read more