Double Buffered

This week is GDC week, and I’m looking forward to it. I’m heading up Wednesday and Thursday and have a conference pass (Friday’s sessions looked a bit light, and there’s a lot to do at work), so I’ll be packing in as many sessions as possible. I’m going to skip the keynotes, because there normally isn’t anything you’ll get out of those that won’t be on kotaku later. Okay, Nintendo does like to give out free games at keynotes, so you might get something cool at Iwata’s. Here’s my preliminary schedule:

Wednesday

• 10:30AM: Advanced Data Mining and Intelligence from Large-Scale Game Data: This is a talk by the psychology researchers who who’ve been analyzing a massive dump of EQ2 server logs. Being both an MMO developer and amateur psychologist, there’s no way I could skip this one. (I posted my notes)
  
• 12:00PM: ‘Winging It’ – Ups, Downs, Mistakes, Successes in the Making of LITTLEBIGPLANET: Postmortem on LittleBigPlanet. I’m especially interested in any of the challenges they ran into with the community and editing tools. (posted my notes)
• 2:30PM: Multiverse for the Next Generation of MMOs: Always good to check up on the competition. It’s good to know how other people approach the same technical problems you have to deal with (notes not worth posting. As a summary, Multiverse is NOT for you or me. The graphics are from 1997 and the max concurrency is 2000 per shard. Looks decent for serious games use)
  
• 4:00PM: Meaning, Aesthetics, and User-Generated Content: Chris Hecker talking about the meaning behind User-Generated-Content. This one is a bit hit or miss, but could turn out really interesting. (posted my notes)
  

Thursday

• 9:00AM: Valve’s Approach to Playtesting: the Application of Empiricism: Valve’s game development process always intrigues me, but to be honest the odds of me ACTUALLY making it up to SF by 9am are pretty low. (no notes, because like I expected I didn’t actually make it up in time. I’m sure it was excellent!)
  
• 1:30PM: From COUNTER-STRIKE to LEFT 4 DEAD: Creating Replayable Cooperative Experiences: The Left 4 Dead director AI is one of the most exciting tech developments of the last year. Again, I love Valve (posted my notes)
  
• 3:00PM: The Cruise Director of AZEROTH: Directed Gameplay within WORLD OF WARCRAFT: WoW has the best MMO content in the business, so of course I’m curious about their techniques for developing it. (posted my notes)
  
• 4:30PM: Post Mortem: Mission Architect for City of Heroes: Definitely curious how an exciting feature that builds on stuff I personally worked on turned out. (posted my notes)
  

My plan is to blog my notes from the sessions I end up going to go, so look for that next week. Oh, and if anyone knows where all the cool parties are this year, drop me a note.

UPDATE:

I posted links to my notes from the talks I attended up above. Hope they’re helpful