My GDC schedule

I’ve got quite a busy speaking schedule at the Game Developers Conference this year! Here’s what’s up.

Monday at 5:30pm: I join a distinguished group of friends to discuss the topic of “AI Wish List: What Do Designers Want out of AI?” The other panelists are Dave Mark, Richard Lemarchand, Laralyn McWilliams,  Noah Falstein, and Robin Hunicke. This should be an interesting conversation!

In 2012 and 2013, long-time game designer Warren Spector called out the discipline of AI in games as being too focused on “combat and pathfinding”, urging designers to expand into non-combat behaviors, social interactivity, and other areas. To this end, this panel brings designers from across the industry together and asks, “what is YOUR wishlist for AI?” Whether it be character AI, procedural content, animation, speech, or “director”-style pacing and content delivery, the panel won’t necessarily focus on the practical of “what can we do” but explore “what COULD we do?” The goal is to give AI programmers ideas for “what SHOULD we do?”

Wednesday at 4pm: Richard Rouse continues his annual series on “Rules of the Game,” where a panel of designers offer up one rule or design approach that has served them well in their design practice. I’ll be sharing mine alongside Erin Hoffman-John, Soren Johnson, Josh Sawyer, and Stone Librande.

How do you make your games work? There’s no sure-fire way to design great games, but over numerous successful projects the best designers develop techniques that help them craft compelling experiences. Returning for GDC 2018, the Rules of the Game session takes five renowned designers and asks them to go into detail about a rule they’ve used in their work. Each speaker has ten minutes to dive into their technique and provide detailed examples about how they have used the rule in past projects, honestly sharing the pluses and minuses including where their rule works well and where it may be less applicable. These are personal rules that you may not always agree with, but they’re guaranteed to provide interesting fodder for your own game design thoughts and help you build your own design rulebook.

Thursday at 1:30pm: I’ll be at the Google booth on the Expo Floor co-presenting with Aaron Cammarata. We (and others!) have been working together on “AR Joysticks and Invisible Mice – Reinventing Game Controls in AR“ at Google for a while. (I can finally say that out loud, because this talk listing is actually public now). Look for Aaron’s other talk during Google’s Developer Day on “Building a better multiplayer” as well.

Historically, game developers have had a library of well-understood controls available for building games: d-pads, steering wheels, mice and keyboards, pedals, shoulder buttons, and of course, analog joysticks. In the emerging world of AR, designing the UX of even basic actions like “select unit” can bring development to a screeching halt. In this talk, we’ll share with you our attempt to create AR versions of the two most common controls: mouse click and analog joystick. Starting with hypotheses, we built prototypes, and tested different options. In this deep dive talk we’ll share our findings, and show you the control schemes in finished game products!

Friday at 10am: Rich Vogel, Starr Long, and the legendary Richard Garriott (plus me, of course) will be offering up a “Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online” to celebrate the game’s 20th anniversary as a live service this past fall.

September 2017 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch on Origin’s ‘Ultima Online’, the pioneering massively multiplayer RPG that changed online gaming forever. Join key members of the team as they talk about the things that went wrong and right: Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the legendary Lord British and producer on the game; Starr Long, the original director; Rich Vogel, the producer; and Raph Koster, the creative lead.

You can always check out the full calendar here on the site for dates and times of upcoming speaking events or whatever; I try to keep it up to date.