Hi everyone. I'm down here in San Fransisco for GDC 09.

The conference is fantastic. I've been bouncing between the AI summit and the Indy Game Developers summit. Game AI people are just starting to discover machine learning techniques from years ago. Indy game developers have discovered (and made a lot of money from) iPhone development.

My talk with Jeremy Gibson went really well. We changed things up a little bit for average conference attendees.. instead of talking about making games, we made the audience MAKE GAMES! Real video games, not just design docs or a paper prototype.

We used the Blender Game Engine and a cooking show approach. "Heres how you rig a 3d model; go rig your own; if you had any troubles, turn the page and use our pre-rigged model." We made the pre-rigged stuff really simple and easy to understand.

After the workshop, a lot of people came up and talked to us about making games, about rapid prototyping and about teaching game-development. There was a lot of interest in Blender from the academic community. "It's free, it does everything well, and you can go under the hood and modify it? It lets you make a game in under two hours? Sign me up!" 

I've also been attending the networking events and spreading the word about Big Hadron Games. There's lots of interesting people to meet.

On the indy game dev, iPhone side: the secret to success seems to be: Make a game you can explain in just 5 seconds. Anything more complicated than that won't get downloaded from the app store. Forget about your epic RTS with intelligent AI and unconventional resource management. Go make an iPhone mood ring.

On the AI side, people were talking about making evolvable AI with sliders to set personality preferences. They called it "the photoshop of AI" and "seperating code from style". Hey, that sounds a lot like our Genetic Programming experiment: Turtle Evolution! It might not be a fun game, but it seems to point us in the right direction toward letting game designers create their own AI through use of a wizzy interface.

In fact, it's reasonable to speculate that, sometime in the distant future, the entire pipeline will be procedurally generated.We're already seeing that with textures and animation (Spore); eventually, AI will also be generated procedurally, and not hard coded for each new game. Designers will just select personality preferences and describe motivation for the agents (kind of like directing film actors now).