Game Development Giant

There were no surprises in the evening's awards ceremony.

Planetscape: Requiem lived up to expectations and won the best game of the year, and Dr. Willie Higginbotham, who invented Two Players Tennis, also won the first GDC Lifetime Achievement Award.

In fact, the original prediction was between him and Bushnell. Because so far, these two people have played an irreplaceable role in the early development of video games. After all, without Dr. Willie Higginbotham, there would be no video games, and without Dr. Willie Higginbotham, there would be no video games. There will be no commercial games in Bushnell.

If there is no way to commercialize it, then video games can only be something for the self-entertainment of some technical men in the laboratory, just like when Bushnell created Space War in the MIT laboratory. The situation remains the same, and it will never become a huge and scary industry with hundreds of millions of audiences around the world and an annual turnover approaching tens of billions of dollars.

You know, even in Atari's era, Atari's annual turnover exceeded the ticket revenue of the three major ballparks in the United States for an entire year, and exceeded the box office of Hollywood in the United States for an entire year.

Let alone now.

The entire GDC meeting was held calmly. After the awards show in the evening and the subsequent dinner, the next few days were some forum-type discussion meetings organized by major game companies themselves. These game companies also know that many Game producers came here looking for an opportunity with their ideas, and they also wanted to find out if it was really the gold hidden in the gravel.

Of course, the Egg Incubator Project was also launched at the same time. On the afternoon of the day Jester's speech ended, the newly formed review team received more than 70 game development plans. In fact, this number. Compared with the total number of people participating in GDC, it is still very small, and there is a reason for this. Although the incubator plan and the crowdfunding plan were made public, everyone, whether they were independent game studios or not, were very excited about it. .

And, full of longing for the future of this plan.

However, there is also a very embarrassing problem here. Moreover, when Jester explained this problem in his speech, he did not clearly propose a solution.

That is, every game plan is a burst of inspiration from the producer. If it can complete the crowdfunding or be selected by the egg incubator plan, that is not bad, at least you can have money to complete your own game. If these are not completed, and what I have been thinking about is completely disclosed, then this is not equivalent to. Your own thoughts are worthless.

What if someone else completes the game based on their own ideas in the future and sells it well? And, who knows. These large companies that organize incubator programs will not copy their ideas and invest more in them. What about more people making games that are much better than them?

Therefore, many people are still worried.

Even if these game companies disdain to do this, will those who participated in the review reference or learn from it?

This is something that no one can guarantee. It is impossible for Jester to use words that humans can understand to make everyone understand an issue that many game designers will understand in the future - the relationship between the quality of a game and its creativity. It's actually not very big.

Of course, there is no need for Jester to remind them. This is something that these designers will always understand as time goes on. A super-class producer like Jester will always receive a lot of discussion meetings. Although Jester didn't really want to participate, as the organizer of GDC, it was obviously inappropriate not to participate in any of them.

Therefore, Jester randomly chose one, which was a discussion about the performance of game graphics.

Basically, it is an exchange meeting between artists and artists from some of the world's top game companies. For example, Mars Entertainment's Sons of Mars team had seven or eight people participating in this discussion with a total number of less than fifty people.

Small seminars have the advantages of small seminars, and large seminars also have the advantages of large seminars. Of course, Jester prefers small seminars, because this way everyone can speak and express themselves. From my perspective, this is much better than hundreds of people sitting together and only a few people talking in the end. Moreover, art is still very talented.

The theme of this discussion meeting has been around 3D modeling, mainly the establishment of 3D human models and the simulation of 3D scenes.

This is considered the most cutting-edge topic in the entire gaming industry.

Because now the only credentials that can carry real 3D graphics are arcade machines and high-priced PCs designed at high prices. The price of the graphics card specially announced by AMD just for simulating 3D scenes is as high as several hundred dollars.

Despite this, everyone knows that 3D scenes are truly the future of gaming.

The Sons of Mars team of Mars Entertainment is currently one of the few teams that can conduct a large amount of 3D modeling in the game. Especially those who participated in Carmack's development team have accumulated a lot of 3D modeling experience. The 3D effect of Quake 2 really shocked everyone and almost bit off their tongues. Before Quake 2, no one could have imagined that the graphics of the game could actually evolve to This level.

Therefore, in this discussion, the people from the Children of Mars stole the show. The top artists from other game companies were as serious and studious as primary school students when they spoke, and many of them even knew how to do it. I took out my notebook and took notes carefully.

And Jester also listened with great interest.

Although he could not understand much, after all, 3D modeling had never been his strong point.

In fact, in terms of the expressiveness of the picture, or to put it another way, the exquisiteness of the picture, the 3D scenes that are still in the early stage and are modeled with rough polygons are far from the exquisiteness. Compared with 2D scenes, 3D scenes have an advantage that 2D scenes can never catch up with, even the still extremely rough 3D scenes and the already extremely exquisite 2D scenes.

That is the sense of immersion that a 3D scene gives players, even if it is a picture full of jagged edges and polygons, this is something Jester admits.

Because in his memory, in the original 32-bit computer era, the final victory of PS perfectly proved this point. Of course, although the 3D expressiveness of n64 is also very outstanding, the n64 The problem lies in the cassettes used for storage. Compared with CDs, the development of cassettes is too difficult, and there is no way to make up for this advantage in reading.

From the n64, every game in the Ren series is better than the last, and third parties can't even develop smooth games, so we can draw a conclusion.

The real battlefield takes place between the Sega Saturn and Sony's PS.

The Sega Saturn can be called the most powerful 2D game console in history. Its 2D screen processing and performance capabilities are the best on the platform. However, compared to the PS that focuses on 3D performance, in the middle and late stages of the console battle, Sega The weakness of the console is obvious.

At the beginning, when the development of 3D games was not very familiar to third-party game developers, the Sega Saturn relied on its excellent 2D performance to temporarily top the sales volume of its generation. This was not the case for Sega. In the history of consoles, they are unique, but with the popularity of 3D games, players have accepted them in large numbers, and game companies have increased their experience in developing 3D games.

Therefore, the PS console made great efforts in the later stage and finally won this console war.

In the later PS2 era, Sony's technical strength exploded perfectly, completely surpassing DC's 3D graphics processing capabilities in an era, and Sega tried its best to fail to turn the tide.

We would like to ask Mr. Jester Li to say something for everyone. Just when Jester was pondering about the choice of era between 2D and 3D, this sentence suddenly came into his ears, and Jester At the same time, he came back to his senses. He looked around and saw everyone looking at him, so he also smiled and said: Actually, I am not a professional artist, so let me talk about technology. I’m definitely not as good as you at what you do.”

However, it is obvious that what Jester wants to talk about is not a technical issue.

So, let me talk about the performance of the picture from the perspective of a designer. This range is very large, not limited to 2D or 3D. This is my feeling.

Although Jester said this, it is obvious that many people do not take what Jester has to say very seriously. After all, although Jester is the best game producer in the world, in their expertise In the field, they still don't need an amateur non-artistic producer to teach them. The reason why Jester was asked to say something before was just out of courtesy.

No matter what Jester said, he would applaud and agree with it.

But what will actually happen depends on the individual.

In fact, art is the department that Jester has the least contact with, because Jester himself knows that in terms of professionalism, he has no way to teach artists.

Actually, as a game designer, the picture I most hope is like this. It can be summarized simply in a few words. (To be continued...)