GDC 2007 Wrap-up Part One

This year's GDC was all that was hoped for. The Big Huge art contingent returned with notebooks chock full of valuable tips in art, marketing, management and recruiting. Part one of my wrap-up deals with the first talk attended, Merging Art and Marketing: A Look Inside the Gears of War Marketing Effort.

A few key takeaways...

• Exercise extreme quality control with the early visual material you release on the web. Less is always more (marketing will always be asking for more) and images live forever on the net.
• Drill down on marketing material due dates with the publisher in order to minimize last minute requests.
• The art team must be committed from the start of the project for a great deal of marketing work in order to deliver a successful campaign. For example Marcus, along with the other main GoW players, had considerably larger textures than the rest of the game characters. This allowed him to hold up when rendered out for print.
• Programmers should also support the marketing effort. Epic implemented a tiled billboard renderer. My notes say 90,000 x 75,000 pixels were rendered for one particular in-game shot. I may have added an extra zero, though I *think* that's what was said :-)
• The goal of the Mad World trailer was to expand audience interest beyond the traditional action trailer. I think they nailed it with an outstanding use of non-traditional scoring. IMO, best game advert ever...

Stay tuned for part two...