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Firaxis was well-represented in presenters and panelists at this year’s GDC. We’ve asked our esteemed colleagues to summarize their talks below:
Seth Spaulding, Art Director: “Art Director/Lead Artist Roundtable”
We had over 100 attendees over the three sessions of the roundtable this year. Directors, leads, managers, artists, as well as a few producers, designers (and even a studio director) took part in discussions surrounding the use of pre-production resources, scheduling, and real situations of schedule slips, marketing requests, tools, art reviews, production pipelines, training time, lead attributes, career development, production hurdles, and a wide range of personnel issues.
I hope the participants came away with an understanding of the issues that face the industry as a whole, whether they’re part of a large publisher or a small, one-team studio. But, the most important part was the opportunity for a room full of industry professionals to bring their collective wisdom to the challenges facing each of their companies.
Seth’s favorite part of GDC was Keith Self-Ballard’s roundtable on building an art culture.
Greg Foertsch, Lead Artist:
My panel was part of the IGDA Education Summit, titled “Industry and Academia: In Search of the Love.” It was a discussion about successful partnerships between the game industry and academic programs, breaking down barriers between the two and finding creative ways that industry and academics can work together. The panel of academics all had a wide range of approaches to partnerships, from collaborations to programs targeted to entry-level employees.
I was the sole industry representative, and I spoke about how our partnerships with academia evolved, our reasons for partnering with academia, and how this relationship benefits both parties in the end. I talked about some of our programs: internships, teaching, and partnering with faculty on sabbatical. I came away inspired by the professors on the panel and amazed by the programs they’ve created. I’m convinced there’s more that industry and academia can do for each other!
Greg’s favorite parts of GDC are the “secret parties.” When pressed for details, he refused to elaborate because “they’re secret!”
Photo by Douglas Keachie
Dan Baker, Graphics Lead, Civilization V
At GDC, I presented at Intel’s tech session on scalable game performance. I showed how we’ve used threading in Civilization V’s new engine to take advantage of the capabilities of multi-core processors, and how the focus of the graphics engine was on performance and throughput. The crowd was over 150 people (and sadly many had to be turned away because of the room size), and only two people hadn’t played Civ before!
Dan’s favorite part of GDC was catching up with the other industry professionals, especially graphic programmers, to exchange war stories and show off scars.
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