Saturday, Mar 10, 2007
Well, GDC is now over, and I have one thing to say to anyone reading this- I'm sorry I didn't update this blog as often as I had promised to before I came out to San Francisco, but it was a lot more hectic than I had anticipated and at the end of the day, I was exhasted from being on my feet and doing a ton of stuff(not to mention that I didn't get that many photos)
Well, now that is over, time for my reflections on each day at GDC.
Day one-
WOW! I didn't expect the conference to be this big. The sheer number of people going from one building to another was mind blowing. Not to mention it really hit me that I was at a place where I was surrounded, both at the convention center and outside it, by Video Game Industry people (This feeling really started for me the night before when, at a Thai Restaurant
that had the high-****look, I heard the table next to me talking about a game, and it ended up being Battlefield 2142). The first session I attended was a session about the upcoming standard for C++, held in one of the rooms in the West Hall. I'll save people here the pain of reading what went on, but it was very technical and would be very boring to any non-programmers.
After that, I proceeded to go out to the North Hall and attended the Sony Keynote. While the gamer side of me was impressed with the new features that Sony announced(Home and Little Big Planet), the programmer/developer side of me was less than impressed with the fact that Sony's keynote seemed to be more geared toward the consumer than developers and should have been at either their own event outside of GDC, at E for Al,l or E3 this year. I spoke to a couple of developers afterwards, and it was mostly the same feeling.
After the keynote, I hit the Main Expo and Career Expo floors and went swag hunting at each of the booths. The Expo floor was a great place to check out what each company was offering up in terms of new products and games. Nintendo had Wiis and DSs set up with Super Paper Mario, Big Brain Academy Wii, Pokemon Battle Revolution (with controls featured on the DSs), Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. The graphics companies had all day tutorials running at their booths, and Intel had several PCs set up showing off the latest games that took advantage of the new multi-core CPUs(which included a full version of Supreme Commander and a demo version of Hellgate London, which was very fun to play when I did). The Career Expo was more tuned down in terms of booths accessories, but companies were still giving out swag to entice people to looking into jobs at those companies. The best swag in my opinion at the Career Expo was from Cryptic Studios(from City of Heroes/Villains fame), who gave away free popcorn at their booth. I got a neat little key chain Wiimote(with just a blue LED at the end of it, and the 1 button turning the LED on and off) at the Nintendo Career booth, but it was woefully small compared to any of the other major companies there.
After going around the Expo floors, I got my lunch and then headed into the session "From "Ouendan!" to "HELP!": Inside the Elite Beat Agents" where I saw what went behind the development process for Ouendan and then later EBA and I also saw the first screen shots of the Ouendan sequel. After those sessions, I hit the Expo floors again until they closed down the Conference for the day. After that, I went to the Independent Game Association/Game Developers Choice Awards. I was surprised at a number of awards that were won, especially a couple of Nintendo awards, but Gears winning overall didn't surprise me at all. It was then I got info and an invite to a party that was being held from a friend of mine that was a Conference Associate this year. That turned out to be a bust(it was held in a club where they were carding at the door and I didn't have my wallet. I only found out later that if you went in as a group, only one person had to be 21) so I ended up wandering around the area until Midnight when I went back to my hotel for the night.
Day 2-
After breakfast at the conference, I started off the day with the speaker session- "Controlling an entire Theater of War: The development of Supreme Commander" by Chris Taylor. The session was relatively empty, but that was to be expected when CliffyB also gave his talk about developing Gears of War. I found the talk to be really informative, not only about how Chris came up with the design choices in Supreme Commander, but also how he got into the industry and how he got to where he is today.
After that, I attended Nintendo's Keynote(after braving the gigantic line to get into the entrance, and the non-media line did go all the way around the block once). Shiggy's talk about how he and Nintendo look at developing games had a lot of good information, but, in my opinion, the keynote was drug down by two things. One- the translator didn't put a lot of energy into his translation, which caused me to sort of nod off a couple of times during the talk, and Two- since the keynote started late, and ran late, I noticed a lot of people myself ending up leaving early to get to meetings. I, myself, left early to attempt to catch one of my game professors so that he could introduce me to a couple of guys at GarageGames, but I ended up missing him and the meeting.
After the keynote, I did a lot of crawling through the Career Expo floor, finding out exactly what people were looking for in interns and in new hires. At 4:00 pm, I attended the session- "Designing Games for Everyone: Harmonix Design in Practice". It was here that a director and producer from Harmonix detailed Harmonix's path through development, starting with Amplitude and going all the way up to Guitar Hero. This sessions also suffered the same fault as the Nintendo keynote in my opinion, in that, while the info was very interesting, the speakers didn't have enough energy in their speech. They also relied too much on powerpoint to convey their topic. After that session, I went to the Zelda presentation where I saw how Wind Waker 2 became Twilight Princess for the Western Audience, and how the other Zeldas for the past couple of years came into being. The best part of that speech was where Aonuma spoke about how his wife got into Zelda(when she had been a non-gamer before hand) because she wanted to see his 5 year old son get to the later stages of the game.
This came about when Aonuma brought home their first video game console(Wii) after his son(5 years old) had seen an advertisement on their TV for the Wiimote and had specifically requested that he wanted a Wii remote. When Aonuma brought home the Wii, he, of course, brought along Wii sports and also decided to bring along Zelda. After playing Wii sports for a bit, his son had asked to play Zelda, and after 10 minutes of explaining the controls, his son quickly got into the game. After their son had been playing it a while, Aonuma saw that his wife started to watch their son play Zelda. The next day, Aonuma came home early and found that his wife was playing and enjoying Zelda because his son had finally gotten to some monsters and was too scared to go on.
(Wow, that was a long tangent. Back to my experience with GDC)
After the Zelda presentation, I went to the Programmer's Challenge, which is a light hearted session. Its structured after Jeopardy with 2 teams competing. The categories and the questions were presented in a very funny way, like one of the categories was- "Compensation: Questions about the largeness of things (or lack thereof)", which featured knowing the limits of the memory on consoles. Funny enough, the questions that stumped both teams ended up being math related(and basic add/subtract/multiply/divide math too). After that, I attended an event that is known as "Suite Night", where a couple of the larger developers host parties at a local hotel. I mostly stayed at the Pandemic/Bioware suite, where the alcohol was "on the house" and I didn't have to worry about not having my wallet as no one was carded. I scored two Pandemic/Bioware shot glasses there along with many business cards. It was a great social atmosphere and I ended up meeting a lot of very cool people. Afterwards, while I was walking back to my hotel, I met up with a group on Nvidia guys who were walking to a bar. I managed to get invited along with them and scored a free glass of beer out of it, along with meeting some more cool people.
3rd day-
Well, this was really wind down day. With no keynotes, and no after parties, the day was just really slow. My first session was at 12:00pm and it was about "Tips & Tricks to Making a Lasting Impression", which was just some info on what to do when your out looking to make contacts. After that, I had a session at 12:40pm- "Game Sketching", or how to present game concepts without prototyping the game (anyone wanting clarification on this, just let me know in a comment). After that, I did a bit more booth crawling, and then headed to my last GDC session- "Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games". While this session was done in the 2 previous days, Friday's session was for anyone who had almost no knowledge of AI. It was quite informative(one thing I learned is that the AI of allies is a lot harder to do than the AI of enemies) and I learned a lot. I also made a really good contact there, and learned a little insider info that I will not make public(at least not here
)
Overall, GDC was a great experience for me. I would highly recommend that anyone that has the ability to save up the money for one of the passes and the trip to the city that the conference is in, and they have any interest at all in working in the Game industry, to come. I think that it is here that you will find out what you have in you and if you can make it in the industry. At the very least, you will walk away with a lot more knowledge, and at least a couple of friends who are in the industry.
If you have any questions about anything at the conference, don't hesitate to ask in the comments, I will be checking them over the next few days when I can.
Well, now that is over, time for my reflections on each day at GDC.
Day one-
WOW! I didn't expect the conference to be this big. The sheer number of people going from one building to another was mind blowing. Not to mention it really hit me that I was at a place where I was surrounded, both at the convention center and outside it, by Video Game Industry people (This feeling really started for me the night before when, at a Thai Restaurant
that had the high-****look, I heard the table next to me talking about a game, and it ended up being Battlefield 2142). The first session I attended was a session about the upcoming standard for C++, held in one of the rooms in the West Hall. I'll save people here the pain of reading what went on, but it was very technical and would be very boring to any non-programmers.
After that, I proceeded to go out to the North Hall and attended the Sony Keynote. While the gamer side of me was impressed with the new features that Sony announced(Home and Little Big Planet), the programmer/developer side of me was less than impressed with the fact that Sony's keynote seemed to be more geared toward the consumer than developers and should have been at either their own event outside of GDC, at E for Al,l or E3 this year. I spoke to a couple of developers afterwards, and it was mostly the same feeling.
After the keynote, I hit the Main Expo and Career Expo floors and went swag hunting at each of the booths. The Expo floor was a great place to check out what each company was offering up in terms of new products and games. Nintendo had Wiis and DSs set up with Super Paper Mario, Big Brain Academy Wii, Pokemon Battle Revolution (with controls featured on the DSs), Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, and Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. The graphics companies had all day tutorials running at their booths, and Intel had several PCs set up showing off the latest games that took advantage of the new multi-core CPUs(which included a full version of Supreme Commander and a demo version of Hellgate London, which was very fun to play when I did). The Career Expo was more tuned down in terms of booths accessories, but companies were still giving out swag to entice people to looking into jobs at those companies. The best swag in my opinion at the Career Expo was from Cryptic Studios(from City of Heroes/Villains fame), who gave away free popcorn at their booth. I got a neat little key chain Wiimote(with just a blue LED at the end of it, and the 1 button turning the LED on and off) at the Nintendo Career booth, but it was woefully small compared to any of the other major companies there.
After going around the Expo floors, I got my lunch and then headed into the session "From "Ouendan!" to "HELP!": Inside the Elite Beat Agents" where I saw what went behind the development process for Ouendan and then later EBA and I also saw the first screen shots of the Ouendan sequel. After those sessions, I hit the Expo floors again until they closed down the Conference for the day. After that, I went to the Independent Game Association/Game Developers Choice Awards. I was surprised at a number of awards that were won, especially a couple of Nintendo awards, but Gears winning overall didn't surprise me at all. It was then I got info and an invite to a party that was being held from a friend of mine that was a Conference Associate this year. That turned out to be a bust(it was held in a club where they were carding at the door and I didn't have my wallet. I only found out later that if you went in as a group, only one person had to be 21) so I ended up wandering around the area until Midnight when I went back to my hotel for the night.
Day 2-
After breakfast at the conference, I started off the day with the speaker session- "Controlling an entire Theater of War: The development of Supreme Commander" by Chris Taylor. The session was relatively empty, but that was to be expected when CliffyB also gave his talk about developing Gears of War. I found the talk to be really informative, not only about how Chris came up with the design choices in Supreme Commander, but also how he got into the industry and how he got to where he is today.
After that, I attended Nintendo's Keynote(after braving the gigantic line to get into the entrance, and the non-media line did go all the way around the block once). Shiggy's talk about how he and Nintendo look at developing games had a lot of good information, but, in my opinion, the keynote was drug down by two things. One- the translator didn't put a lot of energy into his translation, which caused me to sort of nod off a couple of times during the talk, and Two- since the keynote started late, and ran late, I noticed a lot of people myself ending up leaving early to get to meetings. I, myself, left early to attempt to catch one of my game professors so that he could introduce me to a couple of guys at GarageGames, but I ended up missing him and the meeting.
After the keynote, I did a lot of crawling through the Career Expo floor, finding out exactly what people were looking for in interns and in new hires. At 4:00 pm, I attended the session- "Designing Games for Everyone: Harmonix Design in Practice". It was here that a director and producer from Harmonix detailed Harmonix's path through development, starting with Amplitude and going all the way up to Guitar Hero. This sessions also suffered the same fault as the Nintendo keynote in my opinion, in that, while the info was very interesting, the speakers didn't have enough energy in their speech. They also relied too much on powerpoint to convey their topic. After that session, I went to the Zelda presentation where I saw how Wind Waker 2 became Twilight Princess for the Western Audience, and how the other Zeldas for the past couple of years came into being. The best part of that speech was where Aonuma spoke about how his wife got into Zelda(when she had been a non-gamer before hand) because she wanted to see his 5 year old son get to the later stages of the game.
This came about when Aonuma brought home their first video game console(Wii) after his son(5 years old) had seen an advertisement on their TV for the Wiimote and had specifically requested that he wanted a Wii remote. When Aonuma brought home the Wii, he, of course, brought along Wii sports and also decided to bring along Zelda. After playing Wii sports for a bit, his son had asked to play Zelda, and after 10 minutes of explaining the controls, his son quickly got into the game. After their son had been playing it a while, Aonuma saw that his wife started to watch their son play Zelda. The next day, Aonuma came home early and found that his wife was playing and enjoying Zelda because his son had finally gotten to some monsters and was too scared to go on.
(Wow, that was a long tangent. Back to my experience with GDC)
After the Zelda presentation, I went to the Programmer's Challenge, which is a light hearted session. Its structured after Jeopardy with 2 teams competing. The categories and the questions were presented in a very funny way, like one of the categories was- "Compensation: Questions about the largeness of things (or lack thereof)", which featured knowing the limits of the memory on consoles. Funny enough, the questions that stumped both teams ended up being math related(and basic add/subtract/multiply/divide math too). After that, I attended an event that is known as "Suite Night", where a couple of the larger developers host parties at a local hotel. I mostly stayed at the Pandemic/Bioware suite, where the alcohol was "on the house" and I didn't have to worry about not having my wallet as no one was carded. I scored two Pandemic/Bioware shot glasses there along with many business cards. It was a great social atmosphere and I ended up meeting a lot of very cool people. Afterwards, while I was walking back to my hotel, I met up with a group on Nvidia guys who were walking to a bar. I managed to get invited along with them and scored a free glass of beer out of it, along with meeting some more cool people.
3rd day-
Well, this was really wind down day. With no keynotes, and no after parties, the day was just really slow. My first session was at 12:00pm and it was about "Tips & Tricks to Making a Lasting Impression", which was just some info on what to do when your out looking to make contacts. After that, I had a session at 12:40pm- "Game Sketching", or how to present game concepts without prototyping the game (anyone wanting clarification on this, just let me know in a comment). After that, I did a bit more booth crawling, and then headed to my last GDC session- "Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games". While this session was done in the 2 previous days, Friday's session was for anyone who had almost no knowledge of AI. It was quite informative(one thing I learned is that the AI of allies is a lot harder to do than the AI of enemies) and I learned a lot. I also made a really good contact there, and learned a little insider info that I will not make public(at least not here
)Overall, GDC was a great experience for me. I would highly recommend that anyone that has the ability to save up the money for one of the passes and the trip to the city that the conference is in, and they have any interest at all in working in the Game industry, to come. I think that it is here that you will find out what you have in you and if you can make it in the industry. At the very least, you will walk away with a lot more knowledge, and at least a couple of friends who are in the industry.
If you have any questions about anything at the conference, don't hesitate to ask in the comments, I will be checking them over the next few days when I can.
Tuesday, Mar 6, 2007
Well, the day of my flight out to San Francisco has come. After some late night shopping and packing, and some early morning business card cutting, I'm ready to take off. Now if only my flight was at 12:00pm or 1:00pm, instead of 2:10pm. It is currently 11:38am as I type this, so I have a while before my flight takes off. I have to say, I enjoy the architecture of Phoenix's Sky Harbor a lot. The geometric shapes and earth tone colors really give a sense of being in the desert without the wind and the heat(although it is quite comfortable in the winter).
I couldn't find my PC-digital camera cable, so all pictures from GDC will have to wait for Saturday night when I get back and can borrow one of my friend's cables.
I will update tomorrow with impressions from the show floor.
I couldn't find my PC-digital camera cable, so all pictures from GDC will have to wait for Saturday night when I get back and can borrow one of my friend's cables.
I will update tomorrow with impressions from the show floor.
Friday, Feb 23, 2007
Well, I just finalized all of my plans and paid for my pass to GDC this year. This is what I am planning on going to besides the various parties outside the main conference, the Expo Floor, the Game Career Seminar, and Breakfast and lunch for Wed. through Friday-
Wednesday-
Thursday-
Friday-
If I can find some internet during the conference, I'll upload impressions of everything that I see there(I'll also get pics if I can get my camera to work).
If anyone wants to know anything about these sessions, let me know in the comments. This post was going to be longer, but GS loves to screw with HTML so much, that I gave up on the detailed post.
Wednesday-
- TR1: C++ on the Move
- Keynote: Game 3.0: Developing and Creating for the 3rd Age of Video Games - Phil Harrison (Sony)
- Xbox LIVE Arcade Game Development: How to Develop and Pitch a Successful Xbox LIVE Arcade Game Submission (Sponsored by Microsoft)
- Designing Revolutionary Controls(Wii controls related)
Thursday-
- Keynote: A Creative Vision - Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo)
- Who Is the Real Bully?: Rights and Responsibilities in the Anti-Game Debate (Thu)
- Easy Multi-language Development and Cheat Detection With Google Web Toolkit
- Reflections of Zelda
- The Programmers Challenge (a comedy session)
Friday-
- Dealing with Destruction: AI From the Trenches of Company of Heroes
- Game Sketching
- Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games (Fri)
If I can find some internet during the conference, I'll upload impressions of everything that I see there(I'll also get pics if I can get my camera to work).
If anyone wants to know anything about these sessions, let me know in the comments. This post was going to be longer, but GS loves to screw with HTML so much, that I gave up on the detailed post.
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