GDC — as you (should) know — is the premiere conference for game developers in the world. That said, the conference is not without flaws. In fact, you can criticize GDC for a lot of things, but one thing they’ve been reasonably good at is posting slides from the talks (as long as the speakers have bothered to submit them, that is). You can find the GDC proceedings archives here.
Another interesting games conference, is CEDEC, the Japanese equivalent to GDC. In years past, companies like Capcom have held really interesting presentations at CEDEC, and I and others have blogged about what little was released about the presentations (see links below). I say “little”, because CEDEC was never very good at posting slides. But this appears to have changed! I recently noticed that almost all of the CEDEC 2008 presentations are available for download here:
I found several presentations I thought were interesting. For example, Steve Theodore’s Building Halo: A case study in the role of technical art was definitely worth a read.
Of course, you pretty much need to speak Japanese to get much from the presentations (except from Steve’s, which had every other slide in English), but there’s always the google translator which does a good enough job that you can usually figure out what’s described.
CEDEC 2009 is imminent, and there is already a link to the 2009 archives, but nothing is yet posted there. Here’s to hoping that CEDEC will post all presentations for 2009 as well!
As a final note, some interesting CEDEC presentations from earlier years can be found on Pyramid’s technical reports page. Well worth a look.