So, GCAP 2009 is now officially over. Overall, it’s been an excellent conference.

Highlights for me:

• Tony Albrecht gave an excellent presentation on day one called “The Pitfalls of Object Orientated Design”. He raised the point that whilst CPU speeds have increased 1000x fold over the last 20 years, memory speed has increased 10x. Object-orientated techniques can cause performance issues by accessing memory a lot, whilst doing relatively few calculations. Tony recommended “Data Orientated Design“, which optimises memory layout of data in a way that makes it more cache friendly, and in turn makes the game run faster
• A video link with David Jaffe. “Aim to make hits”. Very sound advice.
• Justin Halliday from recently closed studio Transmission Games gave a very frank postmortem of Heroes of Europe, which was released by Ubisoft in September 2009. Justin stated that HoE was responsible for the closure of the studio due to delays and budget blowouts. To me, the talk reinforced two points : project management is vital (and totally underrated), and buying technology where possible is better than building your own.
• Meeting people. As with any conference, it’s always great to meet new people. Props to Alander from Prickly Pixel for being awesome. And meeting Farbs was cool too.

Lowlights for me :

• My presentation. I gave a talk titled “Managed Code in Game Development”. It’s something I’m interested in and believe in. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what “managed code” is, I won’t go into detail). I don’t really feel like I delivered the material very well at all. I think I need public speaking lessons.
• Insufficient coffee. Several rooms full of game developers. One coffee provided for 20 minutes during the afternoon tea break. Wtf?

Overall : Highly recommended.