Assassin’s Creed, Killer7 and FF XII devs set for GDC

Ubisoft Montreal’s Jade Raymond (pictured) and colleague Matt Mazerolle are set to present ‘Chaos vs Control: Creating Gameplay From Crowd Behavior in Assassin’s Creed’, which promises to examine how the team used the chaos of emergent crowd behaviour to inform possibilities for gameplay strategy.

Grasshopper Manufacture’s Goichi Suda is also in attendance for his session, ‘Punk’s Not Dead’, in which the Killer7 designer will discuss the company’s production style which he says "is rooted in appreciation of our native Japanese culture and aesthetic. Grasshopper is not a big company, and each member of our staff has something important to contribute to the games we make. Just like in a band, if the one of the members leaves, the product and the team is forever changed."

Elsewhere, Taku Murata general manager of the technical research division at Square Enix will offer a post-mortem of Final Fantasy XII, an ambitious title that, despite some behind-the-scenes changes, has impressed critics the world over.

Another Japanese team also steps up, with Keiichi Yano from Japanese studio Inis exploring how the team’s DS game Ouendan!, popular amongst hardcore gamers, morphed into the Western-audience-friendly Elite Beat Agents.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a GDC without Peter Molyneux – and he’s promising to reveal brand new design details in his session, ‘Innovations in Fable 2’ which he says will "reveal a totally unexpected feature" in the sequel to Lionhead’s chart-topping Fable.

Other Brits at the event include Relentless’ David Amor, discussing making games for the mass-market, Frontier’s David Braben, who looks at how the interactive entertainment industry, and Introversion’s Tom Arundel, whose sessions charts the indie team’s progress since it’s win at the Independent Games Festival during last year’s GDC.

Also representing the UK at GDC is Rare, with the studio’s Michael Boulton taking attendees behind the scenes of Viva Piñata’s graphics engine.

And these sessions are just bread and butter events taking place during the main part of the Game Developer Conference, which runs from March 7th to 9th at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Keynote announcements, which in the past few years have included key announcements and appearances by top brass from format holders, are expected in the next few weeks.

More information on GDC can be found at the official site.