Despite a late night after receiving our ten wins at the Interactive Achievement Awards (we’re still beaming, by the way), we managed to get up in the morning and close out the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010. Today’s sessions had Randy Pitchford explaining the history, overall development philosophy and business management of Gearbox Software; John Schappert from EA promising not to tell us how much money he’s made and discussing EA’s publishing philosophy in these more difficult economic times; Mike Yuen from Zeebo talking about how his company is looking for success in under-served markets while fostering low development costs; Joe Madureira and David Adams from Vigil Games taking us through their development process of Darksiders as an independent studio; and, to conclude the day and the summit, Greg Short and Geoffrey Zatkin from EEDAR providing quantitative data and analysis on this console generation by looking at trends and comparisons in a variety Read more...

We’re about halfway through a very long day at the D.I.C.E. Summit 2010 today. Our own Richard Lemarchand kicked off the sessions for the day with his talk, “Uncharted 2 - How to Fly By the Seat of Your Pants Without Crapping Them.” His talk presented an overview of how Naughty Dog operates as a studio and an inside look at what our development process is like. I hope it was interesting to many of the developers and business folk in the audience, because I like to believe we have fairly unique and unorthodox development process, but one that at a glance may freak many people out (especially producers) used to more rigid development processes. Richard can put it far better than I could ever put it, even though I’m seen him speak about our process a handful of times already. In a nutshell, he explained how we value a highly collaborative and iterative process that can seem to outsiders extremely chaotic and on the verge of falling apart. But that Read more...

Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer on UNCHARTED 2, and I just arrived in Las Vegas several hours ago, where both of us will attend our first D.I.C.E. Summit. The easiest way to explain the D.I.C.E. Summit is that it’s kind of like a mini-GDC focusing on the business of making games, but really a bit more on a high level. It’s notable industry figures giving us their perceptions and big picture about making and selling games right now. And there’s no shortage of notables—just in our first session today you could spot key folks from Epic, Portalarium, Valve, Silicon Knights, Insomniac, Ubisoft, EA, Activision, and on and on and on. Not to mention we’re all essentially trapped in the same hotel the conference is at, so it’s a great time to meet new people, see old friends, catch up and share ideas, in a quieter, more subdued environment than other industry events. I really enjoyed one of the opening sessions today, “Hot Read more...

If you’re headed over to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference in a couple of weeks… well, first off, consider yourself lucky as it looks like the entire conference is going to be pretty spectacular this year! On our end, we’re feeling pretty excited about GDC09 as well since three Naughty Dogs will be taking part in three separate sessions during the week. If you happen to be in town early to check out the GDC Summits you can catch, Christian Gyrling, Programmer, speak during a session during the new AI Summit. He’ll be talking about how AI and animation are getting closely integrated during game development as more powerful hardware and ambitious game design are increasing the challenges programmers and animators face. The session is called “(307) Animating in a Complex World: Integrating AI and Animation” and it takes place from 11:15 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. on Monday, March 23, 2009 in room 2018 in the West Hall. Next up, Richard Lemarchand, Read more...

Last week at the Develop Conference and Expo 2008, Richard Lemarchand gave a keynote presentation in the Production track called “Working Hard and Having Fun: How Naughty Dog Made UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune.” I had the pleasure of seeing Richard give this presentation internally just prior to his trip to Brighton for Develop 2008 and it does a stellar job fully describing the unique and successful production environment we enjoy at Naughty Dog. If you want an inside peek at how we develop games at Naughty Dog, you can download Richard’s presentation slides here (PDF, 8.7 MB). Read more...

The Game Developers Conference took over San Francisco again on February 18 – 22, 2008, and a bunch of the Dogs were there to give presentations on the methods and techniques they honed during the creation of Naughty Dog games like UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune. For those of you who couldn’t make the conference, or are just curious about the state of the art in game development, we’ve made the presentation materials from GDC08 available for download below. GDC Session Descriptions (PDF, 20 KB) In depth Descriptions of the presentations delivered at GDC08 by members of team Naughty Dog Adventures in Data Compilation – UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune (PDF, 1.1 MB) Presented by Dan Liebgold Amazing Feats of Daring – A Postmortem for UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune (PDF, 18.3 MB) Presented by Richard Lemarchand Autodesk Mudbox: Integration and Use with Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya (PDF, 4.7 MB) Presented by Rich Diamant Creating a Read more...