Day three at AGDC started with the keynote speakers, who presented on the Blizzard work flow. The session focused on the team breakdown for the WOW franchise. They broke down how each departments are broken down into different teams. Teams have a narrow focus and typically consist of 5-8 people.
After lunch, we attended a talk presented by Autodesk. This talked covered Morion Builder, Mudbox and the new Max feature, CAT. I hadn’t heard much on CAT before this talk, so it was pretty interesting. CAT stands for Character Animation Toolset, which quickly allows for creating a rig to a character model.
The final session of the day was presented by Free Realms. They talked about branding and how to keep the overall style consistent from inside the game to marketing ads and so forth. They talked about how they had to communicate the game style to the marketing team. The marketing team then hired outside designers to create the marketing campaign. This whole talk seemed silly, why would a company outsource a graphic design team to develop a marketing materials when the original game designers are right there. Because of such an issue, the flying squirrel mascot for the game isn’t even in the game.
We’ll that’s all for now.
