I’m home from the 3 day tour of GDC, and it was very worthwhile. A non-stop maelstrom of recruitment, attending talks and catching up with old friends and colleagues.
Talks I attended:
- Video Games Turn 25: A Historical Perspective and Vision for the Future by Satoru Iwata (Nintendo Co., Ltd.)
- Fighting Real Time by Jacky Mallett (CCP)
- Forensic Debugging: How to Autopsy, Repair, and Reanimate a Release-built Game by Elan Ruskin (Valve Corporation)
- Classic Game Postmortem – ELITE by David Braben (Frontier Developments)
- Classic Game Postmortem – OUT OF THIS WORLD/ANOTHER WORLD by Eric Chahi (Ubisoft)
- 1000s of Zombies, 1000s of Problems: The DEAD RISING 2 Multiplayer Experience by Dee Jay Randall (Capcom Game Studio Vancouver)
- Classic Game Postmortem – POPULOUS by Peter Molyneux (Lionhead Studios)
- The Game Design of STARCRAFT II: Designing an E-Sport by Dustin Browder (Blizzard Entertainment)
- HTML5: The New UI Library for Games by Chad Austin (IMVU)
The standouts were the classic game postmortems, which were excellent.
I also met up with folks from my former lives, including Doox, Dimitar, Ben B, Will L, Simon C, Peter M, Demis, Cathy C, Ofer, Zak, Mike B, Mike C, Neil M, Thor, Michael S, and many besides that I said hi to.
I have to go check the GDC vault to see the talks that I missed which are recommended to catch up on. In closing, San Francisco is a nice town, but has far too many sushi restaurants.