Today I went down to the Eurogamer Expo at Earl's Court, a convention host to some of the up and coming games.
Me with some funky looking NVIDIA glasses for a live 3D presentation.
There were plenty of games on the show floor to play but the real highlight of the day was attending some of the developer sessions, which are presentations led by the developers giving an insight into their game and some of creative and technical decisions therein. Some of the presentations I was able to attend were Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Polish developers CD Projekt and The Witcher 2, Sega's Shogun 2: Total War and finally iD Software/Bethesda's new first person shooter RAGE.
Ninja Theory presented some great concept art for their game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, which was intriguingly inspired by Monkey King - a character from the Chinese epic novel Journey to the West that has seen many televised and film adaptations, something of which I was quite enthused about in my childhood. The game itself is basically a Western adaptation of the character, only with a completely different setting from the old Chinese fantasy tales. As such, it was originally titled Monkey: Journey to the West, although this had to change due to copyright restrictions. They also explored some of the creative and technical processes they do from sound capture to character animation block tests - a sort of previs if you will focusing on capturing the movement and animation of a character.
Character concepts
Motion-capture was used for in-game cutscenes and dialogue to give further personality to the characters.
Environment concepts
From the other developer sessions, it was great to see some gameplay with the added bonus of developers giving live commentary on the game itself with the design choices they made. They were all equally brilliant; although the developer session of RAGE felt particularly special seeing as not much of the game has been showed to the public, so it felt great to catch a first look on the game. Unfortunately, this meant that no photography or video recording was allowed.
Its also interesting to note that there is a career corner at the convention, where you can present your portfolio to some game developer companies for a chance at recognition.
Overall, I had a fun day out and will most certainly be considering going again next year.
Links:
Eurogamer.net
Eurogamer Expo 2010
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