GDC 2011 Diary: Day 3

Today was the first day that the Expo Floor opened up at GDC. It was way more crowded than it had been on Monday or Tuesday. But when I finally stepped through the doors and into the light, I saw why.

I went to a couple of talks before heading inside, but I didn't get too deep into them. Suffice it to say that I wasn't the target audience for the lectures that I saw today. But that was fine, and it gave me some interesting insight into some corners of the development process that I knew nothing about.

I walked around the show floor a little bit and got to see a lot of neat things at the different booths. 3D sure is the hot new thing right now and I got to try and see a lot of it. In the end though, the glasses keep ruining the experience by washing out all the color and just generally being a hassle, especially since I wear a pair of glasses to begin with. Enter Nintendo's 3DS.

The 3DS is the next handheld coming out of Nintendo. Like its wildly successful predecessor, the 3DS has two screens. Now though, the top screen can display in eye popping 3D. WITHOUT GLASSES.

I got to demo many games on the device today, and the most shocking thing about it all is that it works as advertised. Granted it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and not fight the dual images they are receiving, and you also have to hold the system in a somewhat fixed viewing angle for the effect to work, but once you take a brief moment to get acclimated, the effect is remarkable.

So while I have nothing but great things to say about the hardware itself, the software is pretty much all middling at best. The best game for the thing right now is a remake of Ocarina of Time. Not exactly the stellar launch one would hope the system to have. I have faith that the software will really start to get amazing later in the year, but for now, there's not really a good reason to buy the system. Which is a real shame because I REALLY WANT TO.

Apart from that, I just walked around and took some pictures. Nothing super notable happened today, so I'll just dump all the images I have and write a little note about them. Expect more of the same tomorrow because I don't have any talks scheduled until Friday.

Nintendo's 3DS. Smaller than I thought it would be, but it felt sturdy.

A talk I attended on some 3D modeling software that I'll never be smart enough to use. I think I learned that I never want to be a 3D artist.

Sony's next portable cleverly named the Next Generation Portable was not playable, but slowly rotating in a glass bubble.

Unlike the 3DS, Sony seems to be pushing their device as something that can offer portable versions of experiences you'd expect to find on home consoles. I think it's an unwise strategy personally, but it remains to be seen what exactly this device is going to be, so we'll have to see.

SpeedTree is a hilarious bit of middleware that I first heard about on GiantBomb.com in their coverage of GDC 2010. It's capable of randomly generating trees for your game based on criteria you feed it. I was tickled that I found this booth.

Some dudes from a press site doing an interview with a developer. I thought it was neat to see something like this happening.

Tomorrow I plan to go back to the Expo Floor and play the rest of the 3DS games I didn't get to today, and maybe I'll write impressions of each one on here. But again, they're not very good, so we'll see.

'Till then!