Brutal Legend at Game Developers Conference 2009

Anyone who’s followed the annual Game Developers Conference knows that it’s always an extremely interesting event, full of in-depth talks and demonstrations of the most cutting-edge game development techniques.

It was at GDC that Spore had its famous first demonstration, which set the industry alight with excitement. And it’ll be at GDC that more of Brutal Legend is unveiled, setting the industry alight with awesomeness.

Lee Petty, art director of Double Fine, will be holding a one-hour lecture about the art of Brutal Legend, going in detail into the process of how the company takes something from an initial idea to a full-blown piece of work. To quote the official description:

Details on how Double Fine met the challenge of creating a unique, stylized look while also delivering a “AAA looking” game on the current generation of consoles are revealed. Creating the art for Brütal Legend was particularly challenging, as the game features a tightly constructed, story-driven single player campaign, a free-roaming open world environment of epic proportions, and a rich multiplayer game.

A number of sites including the superb Mojo have picked up on the mention of ‘multiplayer’ in this quote, confirming that multiplayer has indeed made the cut after all the publisher problems — although there’re no details concerning how it’ll be implemented. I’m kind of thinking co-op will be a feature, seeing as people seem to love the concept of playing a story-driven game socially nowadays (on consoles, at least).

According to Develop there’ll also be a second Brutal Legend talk hosted by Double Fine’s lead simulation programmer Paul Du Bois, entitled ‘Robotic Testing to the Rescue’. This will be about the “automated testing framework” Double Fine is using for the development of Brutal Legend, and is probably less exciting than the other talk (Sorry Paul!).