GDC Adds Assassin's Creed, Viva Pinata, Elite Beat Agents Lectures

Author: by Staff

The organizers of Game Developers Conference 2007 have announced further key lectures for this March's conference, including Ubisoft producer Jade Raymond on Assassin's Creed, Rare discussing Viva Pinata's unique graphics shaders, and Elite Beat Agents' Keiichi Yano on making the cult DS title. Though major announcements, including the main GDC keynotes are yet to be revealed, the conference (which also recently added lectures by Killer 7's Goichi 'Suda51' Suda, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, and a rare postmortem of Square Enix's Final Fantasy XII) has been announcing other major new sessions via its GDC News blog. One newly added session for the conference (which is run by the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra) is 'Chaos vs Control: Creating Gameplay From Crowd Behavior in Assassin's Creed', from Jade Raymond and Matt Mazerolle of Ubisoft Montreal, which "... will walk you through how we harnessed the chaos of emergent crowd behavior to create recognizable rules that the player can use to develop their own strategies and play style" for the much-awaited next-gen title. Another notable new lecture is 'The Look of Viva Pinata: A Detailed Tour Of The Graphics Engine' by Rare's Michael Boulton, for which it's explained: "This talk will provide a thorough overview of all aspects of the graphics engine exclusively designed for Viva Pinata on the Xbox 360. Topics include how the shaders were designed to achieve the look of the game, the lighting and shadowing system, and how advanced features such as edge-based tessellation were used to achieve high framerates." Finally, also just added to GDC 2007 is Inis' Keiichi Yano on 'From "Ouendan" to "HELP!": Inside the Elite Beat Agents', which offers: "A behind the scenes look at how the game that spawned the Elite Beat Agents, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, was born and how the transition from male cheerleaders to secret agents [for Western game Elite Beat Agents] was made. In depth analysis of the game design process will be presented as well as design documents." Further major announcements on the Game Developers Conference 2007 line-up are expected over the next few days.