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GDC 2011 – Postmortem from a Game Design student’s POV.

Preface: I'm an undergraduate at University of California, Santa Cruz studying Game Design. I went to the Friday-only student career day last year. These were the only two game conferences I've been to.
For those that don't know what GDC is, it's the Game Developers Conference, the biggest annual gathering of video game developers. It is a place for innovative, new technologies in both software and hardware design, awards ceremonies (such as the Independent Game Festival), and countless parties and gatherings for networking and relaxing after a stressful week of planning talks and presentations. This year, I went for the 3-day Expo Pass. It was fantastic, and I strongly suggest anyone who's on the fence to save up for at least an Expo Pass. If you buy it early (January) it's only $195 USD, and worth every penny.

(LTR) Random dude, Tobias, Markus, Aron (currently working on an iPhone/Android port) and me

A few weeks before the conference, I had read a blog post over at Mojang's blog (Minecraft) about how to get a Steve's Head. So the first thing I did when I arrived was head over to the IGF booth at the Expo floor. Among the dozens of fellow Minecrafters in the audience, there stood some members of the brilliant Mojang team! Carl Manneh, Daniel Frisk, Tobias Mollstam, and of course, Markus Persson (Notch). I talked with them for a little bit, discussing things they probably would hear for the next 72 hours. I also spoke with Jens Nilsson in the next booth over, the sound designer for Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I asked him all the questions I could think of on the spot, and several that were more like nervous utterances of a schoolboy talking to his childhood hero (I don't know how interviewers do it, probably practice questions for hours at a time).

Jens Nilsson, sound designer for Amnesia: The Dark Descent

These encounters by themselves were pretty great. I got to hold conversations with real life (as opposed to virtual) Indie developers who made it big by having innovative ideas AAA developers wouldn't touch and a die hard passion for games. While I talked to them, I never picked up a sense of them being irritated at talking to fans, or that they thought I was wasting their time. They're either really good actors, or are truly good-hearted people, merrily sharing their limited time here in the United States addressing the praises and queries of countless throngs of nerd followers. While wandering around the IGF booth, I mingled with a few other developers, but shockingly not too many others were out there. It was still a great experience having one-on-one time with developers, and that alone was worth the ticket.

The IGF Awards were packed, with people (including myself) lining the walls

That night, I attended several parties under the guidance of a friend and networked a bit, tossed some business cards around and shook some hands. I left some of those parties early to attend the IGF Awards, to watch Minecraft and Amnesia sweep through the ceremony acquiring lots of applause (and cash). That's not to say others didn't fare well, Nidhogg always had a line of people trying to play at the IGF booth, and took the Nuovo award which had a hefty cash bonus, as did a few other games (you can check out all the awards here) .

All in all, day one wrapped up with me going to sleep exhausted but excited about how much I had seen in the last fourteen hours. It also left me thinking about the games that I have made or worked on, and how I could make them better.

Day two started out in probably the coolest way possible. I was still semi star-struck after meeing Markus, Jens, and the rest of the indie devs the previous day. Imet up with my friend and followed her to her Conference Associate (volunteer) position. Lo and behold, in walks in the man, the legend: Chris Crawford.

Chris Crawford, father of GDC, Dragon tamer.

One of the lead CAs caught him before and started in with the usual "I love you're work, etc etc!" and he posed for the photo op, but he had to run. After the CA left, I managed to catch Chris's attention with a project I have been working on for a few graduate students here at UC: Santa Cruz. I gave him an Empire State Building Elevator pitch for Prom Week, which turned into a 30 minute discussion about copious amounts of topics, such as implementations of knowledge base representation, inference engines, and human social models. Several other attendees joined in on the conversation, and eventually the conversation's focus moved back to "OMG You're the best," so I said goodbye and meandered off. As with the indie devs at the IGF booth, Chris was very approachable, and more than willing to participate in a conversation. He didn't have any sort of celebrity "I'm better than you" aura about him, either. I thought my day had peaked in awesomeness, and it was only 9:45am.

Great loot

I was mistaken, however, as my day continued to increase in awesomeness. I roamed for a bit, continually hovering around the IGF booth and perusing some of the bigger companys' booths, inquiring about internships and the such. I had signed up for an Intel AppUp developer's talk, where it was rumored we would get some sweet swag. I convinced the guys I was hanging out with to sign up for the talk as well, so we all left the center and headed for the conference center a block away. We went down three flights of stairs and upon signing in, we realized the rumors were true. In our packet of papers we found a "hardware lease agreement." At the end of the talk, after some (what I found to be an excessive amount of) very technical slides, including some compiler command line arguments and such, we picked up our ExoPC tablets. These things are brilliant little tablets, and I'm swapping it with my netbook. Accompanying our already fantastic swag was a developer's account on the Intel  AppUp store (eventually will cost $99/yr). Come the end of next quarter, I'll have at least one app on the Intel AppUp store. Oh, did I mention my code will work on both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, MeeGo, etc) AND uses C++? Pretty excellent. I finished the day eating dinner with a group of the Conference Attendees and heading back into GDC after hours to chill, relax, and play some Ninja!

Day three was just like last year's student day. Most of the talks and parties had ended, all the remaining swag had to be dispersed, and resumes had to be spammed across all channels. I picked up some Blackberry swag, and some more pins and such, and finished the day with my sister and her boyfriend at a nice restaurant downtown somewhere.  I came back exhausted, and with a heck of a lot still on my todo list, but it was completely worth it. Next year, I'm remembering to apply to a CA position early (before the deadline passes), so I can hang out with even more cool people and help run such an extravagant event.