Three Things that Caught My Attention at GDC 2018
游戏开发者不可错过的三大技术。ゲーム開発者が理解する必要の3つの技術。
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) was held in San Francisco this year. It’s a global gathering of the game industry and what I love about an event like this is meeting people from all over the world. It’s an awesome five-day marathon: running around attending tech talks, visiting booths at the Expo area, and chatting with developers about their game development experience. It’s all about sharing knowledge and learning from one another.
Here are my top 3 takeaways from GDC 2018:
1. Create more realistic game worlds using real-time ray tracing
Ray tracing renders light and shadows in a scene in a more lifelike way. DirectX Raytracing (DXR)is a new feature in DirectX 12 and it enables real-time ray tracing. It is especially useful for complex game scenes where there are glossy objects that require reflections and many moving light sources. DXR is a compute-like workload so it can run on existing DirectX 12 graphics and compute engines.
Seeing is believing, and real-time ray tracing makes scenes look more natural.
Real-time rendering of light, lighting effects, shadows, reflections, inter-reflections can help you create a more immersive world for your audience. Seeing is believing, and real-time ray tracing does make scenes look more natural, so let’s take a look at some videos:
For more videos, see the SEED demo created by EA, this segment of the Unreal presentation at GDC, and the RTX demo by NVIDIA and GameWorks.
2. Implement LiveOps for growth and expansion
When looking to grow your game base, one way is to have an effective LiveOps strategy — games receive continuous updates after launch to promote and increase retention, engagement, and monetization. LiveOps is the term used to describe the post-launch operation phase of such live games.
There are a range of tools and services that can help you execute an effective LiveOps strategy. This can include player authentication, player data management in the cloud, game commerce management, A/B testing, business intelligence, and KPI-report generation. You may also be thinking about leaderboards, multiplayer, and guilds to help build a community. Or maybe you want to remind gamers about a special in-game event and send them event notifications. You want to be able to get feedback quickly so that you can respond and incorporate that into your next content release.
It’s never too early to plan for your game’s success.
Fluffy Fairy shared their success story at GDC this year. This indie studio achieved more than 40 million installs and $100K of revenue a day after implementing a LiveOps strategy using Playfab. It’s never too early to plan for your game’s success.
If you want to focus on game development, choose a LiveOps solution that can help you scale and expand. Playfab, which recently joined Microsoft, is a complete backend solution that provides full-stack LiveOps. It works across all popular platforms and game engines like iOS, Android, Steam, Windows, Unreal, Unity, and more. It is also free to use for up to 1,000 MAU (BTW, there is a promo for a free year of the PlayFab Indie Studio package right now). If you want to build your own LiveOps solution, check out features provided by major tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
3. Explore the power of AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and solutions can help you design and create systems that demonstrate intelligence that’s capable of learning, reasoning, problem solving, and more.
Neural Network and Machine Learning can be applied into a variety of areas like analytics, computer vision, character control, and animation. At GDC, Microsoft also shared what Windows Machine Learning (WinML) means for game developers. If you missed this presentation, read more about it here.
Tech companies are working together with support from key hardware players such as AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA to create and support Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), an open source format for AI models. This gives you the flexibility to decide which tool (or combination of tools), you want to use to develop your AI model.
Although there are many possibilities, you need to be able to define good use cases in order to harness the power of AI.
Are you ready for AI and how will you use it?
Will you be adding AI to tools and processes that improve how games are developed and managed? Or are you applying AI to improve gaming experience and engagement? Are you ready for AI and how will you use it?
If you are interested in learning more about AI, the Microsoft Professional Program offers a new AI online course. You can either pay for the course and receive credit (to get a certificate) or simply sign up and audit the course for free.
I had great difficulty narrowing down all that I saw and learned at GDC to just three thoughts. What excited you this year?
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