Game Developers Conference Day Two - Keynotes and Expo

First up today was the keynote "Heart of a Gamer" by Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo. This keynote was interesting in that he spent a fair amount of time "connecting" with the audience - "on my business card it says president, in my mind I am a developer and in my heart I am a gamer. He talked a lot about his background and then talked about the standard stuff - being innovative and intuitive is key; games are getting bigger and more expensive to make (though he didn't provide any solutions here). Then it was basically a DS demofest with Mario Kart Wireless, Ectoplasm (a music toy sorta thing - pretty cool) and Nintendogs (tamagotchi style simulator with very nice graphics and AI). We also got to see new footage from the upcoming Zelda.
He also announced that Revolution (the next Nintendo console) is on track with chips from ATI and IBM, and that it will be backward compatible with the GameCube. Overall though, a nice keynote.

Apart from another Peter Molyneux session that was part a post-mortem on Fable and part a working with Microsoft talk (I'm a bit of a Molyneux fan in case it's not obvious ;-), I spent most of the rest of the day in the Expo.

The expo felt a little smaller than usual, with all the usual suspects (NVidia, ATI, Dolby, RAD, Alias, Renderware, etc...) and some other unexpected ones (like Sun - pushing server platforms).
Like last year, the mobile focus in the expo has expanded with lots of mobile chips from ATI and NVidia running and looking very impressive.
Lots of game companies where also there on "hiring row" with booths trying to pull in new talent.
In a welcome change from previous years, the booth babe "feature" was pretty much non-existant, the only company with them was, suprisingly, Nintendo. I'm not going to repeat the big slogan above their booth, but it was a tad risque given the aforementioned staff members.

My favourites though are the smaller companies with the little, single desk stands. There's always new and innovative niche stuff going on there. Lots of AI, physics and rendering middleware.
Also, in another first, there were two companies doing UI middleware. One, Anark, had some very impressive 3D UI, all xml based with good looking demos and tools. Another, Sonic Fusion, had a great looking MFC style UI product that is fully skinnable and customizable. Both of these technologies sit ontop of Direct3D, are hosted by your application and have great looking tools. Definitely worth checking out if you're in the "I need new UI" frame of mind.

As far as the conference as a whole is concerned, it seems a bit more crowded than before. And I don't think the new convention center works. There's no focal point outside (like the Westin lobby area in Santa Clara, or the Fairmont in San Jose), and the escalators are a hideous chokepoint. Minor niggles, but they are problems.

Final day tomorrow.