Where can you battle a toaster with a waffle iron? Wield a barcode scanner for fun? Navigate a digital character through a real-life paper pop-up book?
The Game Developers Conference Alt.Ctrl showcase, that’s where. It’s my happy place at GDC, and this year I wanted to share some of the zany magic with ya’ll.
Epic reiterated its plans to launch the Epic Games Store on both iOS and Android this year. And as part of that, the company released a concept image that looks a lot like, well, the Epic Games Store. Only mobile.
The keynote is taking place at the 2024 Games Developer Conference, and you can tune in from YouTube, Twitch, or the livestream embedded below.
Epic Games is expected to reveal the latest updates to its Unreal Engine, the 3D game development tool that powers games like Fortnite and Mortal Kombat 1. But if the event is anything like last year’s, Epic might toss in a few surprises, too.
This should give you a way better idea than the partial transcript I originally included in my story!
The delay before each answer is annoying, but InWorld CEO Kylan Gibbs tells me that’s because text-to-speech and other microservices are running in the cloud — future chips with onboard AI coprocessing might run them locally instead.
The Game Developers Conference kicks off next month, and once again Epic will be holding its State of Unreal keynote. Last year the company showed off more of its metahumans, the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and more; afterwards I had a nice, long chat with Tim Sweeney about the metaverse. You’ll be able to watch the keynote on March 20th on both Twitch and YouTube.
In a GDC presentation (one with a line to get in so long, folks had to wait outside on the roof) talking about the unique challenges of making a 3D Kirby game, Shinya Kumazaki — general director of the Kirby series — shared this slide on what it means to be Kirby.
If you’re not in the building at GDC 2023, you can watch Epic’s event streaming right now, as it showcases the toolkit that developers are using to build everything from Fortnite to a heads-up display for your next new car.