GDC 2010 Review Part 1

So I went to GDC this past week and had an...okay time. I think I left for GDC with high expectations. I was taking part in so many new things -- my first flights longer than an hour, the first time renting a hotel room with someone who isn't a relative, my first time several thousand miles west of my residence, my first convention of any kind really. I had hopes that I would be learning so much about my industry and come back feeling invigorated to start anew and fresh. Now, I feel some of that, which in turn made the entire trip somewhat valuable. I have a new desire to participate more in the Indie Games communities as well as redo and revamp my website and some great material for my lightning talk coming up near the end of March.

Anyway, here is what happened and how I felt about each talk of my first day. I was going to do one long post, but felt that splitting it into three would be better.

GDC Day 1

1st talk: Don't Dread Threads
This first talk consisted of two Intel programmers explaining the importance of threading for game development. It was more for game engine development though, and since I am more of a gameplay programmer, I found it a bit over my head as well as advertisement like for various Intel tools and services. Nevertheless, after this first talk, I was rather pleased and excited for future talks to come. Unfortunately this excitement wouldn't last long.

2nd Talk: From Metroid to Tomodachi Collection to WarioWare ~Different Approaches for Different Audiences~
This was Nintendo's Keynote by Yoshio Sakamoto, the producer and designer for the Metroid series. This talk should have been renamed, "Nintendo Producer Plugs His New Metroid Game." First of all, it had to be translated, which wasn't too bad but something I felt like mentioning. It was mostly his biography and then maybe fifteen minutes of his design approach, which was very individualized and in retrospect maybe that is design approach from person to person is inherently different. What annoyed me the most was just talking about Metroid: Other M and how they worked with Team Ninja and blah, blah, blah. Ironically, when he showed the first gameplay clips I thought, "This looks a little like one of the newer Ninja Gaiden." Anyway, I did not enjoy this talk very much.

3rd Talk: Broadening a Genre While Retaining Its Soul
This was the talk after I had lunch and it should have also had a different name like "League of Legends Post Mortem" Like the previous talk, it made a few interesting points about how to make a game within a niche genre more accessible to casual players, but the rest of it was mostly going through League of Legends and what they did, what they fixed, etc. I just felt, by the title, giving more example of when this is done in other genres would have been more useful. He did mention some other titles, all of which I agree took similar approaches to LoL (which always seemed humorous to me in his slides). I did, however, like it more than the Nintendo talk, so props to Tom Cadwell for that.

4th Talk: From Fantasy to Franchise ~How To Build a Universe Worthy of Devotion~
This talk was funny because I did not know the speaker -- R.A. Salvatore -- or of his work. I guess he wrote a bunch of D&D, fantasy-based stuff. The talk was pretty interesting. Like the prior two it gave a few tips about the title but was then mostly just silly stories of his early MMO experiences. I liked the talk though, but it was probably one of the least memorable at the same time.

Overall: One other thing that happened is around 3:30 I tried to meet some other XNA developers. On the forums, we were going to meet around the Microsoft booth. They didn't really have booth this year though. On the Expo Floor they just had a 360 Booth. By 4:00 though, I discovered a lobby bar which is probably where everyone met. Because of that, and my lackluster talks that day, I was regretting all the money I was putting into GDC. I was tired, had explored the entire Expo Floor, and wanted to go home. One of my co-workers explained that picking good sessions, which I had failed to do, was like black magic and no one ever was 100%. Another said that maybe my expectations were just a little too high. She was right in the end, and Day 2, which I will write about next was a vast improvement.