Quick GDC Report
Yes I’m alive and back home from the Game Developers Conference. I’m still suffering from a horrible jet-lag (I woke up today at 05:00 AM), and my computer broke down on me (I feel like I’ve lost a family member) and the credit card bill just landed in the mailbox. On top of that I’ve been really busy trying to catch up on all the things I had to postpone because of GDC. So this week’s been really sucky. I think it’s a karma thing, I had too much fun in San Francisco and now karma is punishing me for it. If the conference would have been any more fun, I would have probably died this week.
My presentation at the Experimental Gameplay Session went well in the sense that the audience enjoyed it. I noticed that people tend to share the presentation slides on their blog. So here’s mine: egs_slides.ppt. There isn’t all that much useful information in the slides. I basically put them together to let the people know that the games I presented, could be download from this site. And since your reading this, you probably now that already.
I was going to write about the other people’s games presented at Experimental Gameplay Session, but people with faster blogging skills did that already. I really suck at this rapid blogging of events happening right now. I mean the session happened over a week ago. I blame the jet-lag. Anyway Gamasutra has a brilliant coverage of the event, but unfortunately they missed some games. You can read about them from joystiq and from And Maw! This. And also check out these videos recorded during the session (thanks Louis).
As for the conference, it was great. It was my first GDC, and I really enjoyed it. I got to attend some really great lectures, like Chaim Gingold’s Spore’s Magic Crayons and Raph Koster’s Where Game Meets Web, but my favorite was easily the Nuances of Design session by Jonathan Blow. At the Nuances of Design session we had our own laptops there and we played the games as the designers talked about them. I really hope there will be a Nuances of Design session at GDC 2008.
Other thing I really enjoyed about GDC, was the fact that I got meet all these like minded people, creators of my favorite games and people I look up to as great game developers. Everybody seemed very down to earth, passionate and willing share their ideas. Luckily for my safety I didn’t bump into any grumpy old game developers, who would have no doubt strangled me for my enthusiasm. One of my personal highlights was the fact that I got meet and hang out with Kyle Gray and Kyle Gabler of ExperimentalGameplay.com. They are two of the four guys who inspired me to start creating experimental games in the first place. They’re like my idols, so meeting them was really great.
GDC was such a fun event that I promised already to everybody that I’d be there next year also. I really have to start saving up already, since I might not be as lucky as I was this time 🙂