Bungie is once again presenting at this year’s GDC (Game Developers Conference). While this is not the venue for massive Destiny details to be revealed, there will still be tid bits of new info. Check out Bungie’s event details below, or visit the GDC site.
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Bungie at GDC
Passes for the Game Developers Conference 2014 are going fast, and today we’re announcing even more sessions for the Main Conference that you’ll want to check out.
Today’s highlights include a talk on Destiny‘s character customization system from an artist’s perspective, a rundown of what designers and AI programmers can learn from the enemy AI systems in Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and a pretty intriguing look back at what went right — and wrong — in the process of transforming the subscription-based Rift into a free-to-play MMORPG.
Now in its 28th year, GDC is the world’s largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event, and will once again take place at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California during March 17-21, 2014.
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Event 1: Building Customizable Characters
With the increasing complexity and fidelity of character content, player customization is an ever-present challenge facing many game developers. Destiny’s player customization system is highly ambitious and unlike anything seen in a first-person shooter thus far. This talk focuses on the tools and process Bungie built to create a large variety of high-quality character content, with a system that makes the most out of the art created, allows for continued growth and expandability over the lifetime of the franchise, and gives artists the ability to make strong visual impacts quickly and easily.
Takeaway
After this talk, you will have a better understanding of the challenges a highly customizable player system presents, and a clear example of how Bungie chose to face these problems, including where we succeeded and where we failed.
Intended Audience
This talk is for technical artists, art directors, character leads, tools developers or investment designers whose projects call for a highly customizable player character, a world filled with unique NPCs, or to simply build large amounts of character content in an efficient way.
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Designing Bungie’s Animation Workflow
n this animation presentation, we’ll be discussing the scope of our latest game Destiny, the challenges our team faced, and the solutions we discovered.We’ll break down what it means to animate an immersive character performance, with a focus on efficiency, and Bungie’s high quality bar. We’ll describe how we rig, create, and solve animation playback in Maya, and in our game engine. We’ll demonstrate our process and our findings by giving you a behind the scenes look at our secret Bungie sauce. You will get to see footage in raw form before it becomes the shiny, polished game released into the wild.
Takeaway
The viewer will have the opportunity to learn from our experiences creating animation for Destiny. They should expect to walk away from this talk with some new workflow tricks and a better understanding of Bungie’s approach to animation.
Intended Audience
Animators of any skill level will be able to leave this talk with some valuable information. Engineers and producers may also appreciate the perspectives presented here.