GDC 08: Day 3 : Become a "spornstar"

"A future Wide Open: Unleashing the creative community" by John Schappert from Microsoft (see picture above). The new features of the Unreal engine looked cool. They announced games for the Zune (Zune what ?). An important message was that they will democratize game development with the Xbox Live Arcade. They even talked about a Belgian game : “Little Gamers.” This is a 2-D high definition action side-scroller based on the famous Web comic “Little Gamers” created by Loïc Dansart, a 24-year-old software developer from Belgium.


"Procedural Music in SPORE", Aaron McLeran and Kent Jolly (in the picture above). This talk actually blow my head. They used open software, called Pd (developed at UC San Diego), to generate music. So instead of listening to a track, in Spore, you're listening to a program. The program reacts, and hence the music, on events in the game. Very cool.

"Pollinating the universe: user-generated Content in SPORE", Caryl Shaw from Maxis.

It looks like Spore is the internet made easy. Basically they took over known internet community facilities to stimulate communities around Spore. The trick to hide the procedural stuff as payload in a PNG file is very clever. I remarked that one of the contributor to the sporepedia had as nickname "spornstar". Hence a new name for somebody who want to know everything about the Spore game and the title of the blogpost. Spore will be released on 5 September 2008 in Europe and a few day later in the States. The reason for that is that the market for PC games is bigger in Europe then in the States.

"How heroes are Made: A collaborative Approach to Serialized Content in a Transmedia World" by Jesse Alexander. This talk was cancelled. So I went to:
"Wii Fit : Creating a brand new interface for the home console", Takao Sawano from Nintendo.

My first experience with the Wii Fit was not instant fun. So my initial enthousiasm about this tempered. Bye, bye, Narnia.