Ubisoft has recently opened the doors to its technology blog Engine Room and one of the first posts focuses on the data-driven systems developed for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood that afford animators more freedom in giving personality to the crowdlife. A summary of their GDC 2011 talk, my extremely talented team-mates Aleissia Laidacker and Nic Barbeau take us [...]

A week on Wednesday two of Edmonton’s finest, Dusty and Corey, will be flying into town to give an updated version of their GDC talk on our production process, part of which uses one of the cutscenes we did here in Montreal last year to help illustrate the various stages of iteration in our levels’ [...]

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters. Square Enix: The Technology of [...]

Right from the off, this GDC ’08 talk was notable for the novel, (to the West anyway), approach to staffing up for this sequel. Charting the production of SSBB, the incredibly young-looking director Masahiro Sakurai began with his own hiring onto the project on March 9th, 2005 – placing the entire development time around the [...]

Next up, in the first of three animation-related GDC ’08 presentations giving us an insight into modern-day Japanese game development, here are my notes from the Postmortem of Feelplus’s Lost Odyssey, one of two Japanese RPGs created exclusively for the XBOX360 under the watchful eye of Microsoft Game Studios and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi. [...]

It’s certainly some time after the event, (it’s slow going when you’re in the middle of a full production), but I’ve finally collated my remaining notes from this year’s Game Developers’ Conference that relate to animation and characters in games. So to start off, we have the head of R&D on last year’s landmark film [...]

At two months after the conference I’m a little late in posting my notes from the various lectures due to work commitments and the recent site overhaul, but now they’ll be forthcoming. As an extra little teaser, there will soon be something new coming to Game Anim of interest to videogame animators everywhere over the [...]