Just got out of bed from a nap after my red-eye back from San Francisco and thought I'd fire up my first few thoughts about GDC this year. I'll probably do a few posts about GDC in the coming days, as well as find a chance to put up the slides for my talk, though I won't get to that today (Eric-Jon Waugh covers it on Gamasutra here if you want a summary that includes some spoilers).
Overall, this was the best GDC for me in 2-3 years (though I always love it). That's especially impressive when I consider the problems that needed to be overcome. For one, I prefer having the conference in San Jose. Not because I have some love for the city or anything, but really, since I spend the entire time at the conference, the city that it's in is irrelevant to me. It could be on the moon for all I care. So while I hear a lot people say 'San Fran is so much nicer' - well, that's totally true... but how much of San Fran did those people see? I didn't see any of it.
It's better in San Jose because people scatter less, and it's easier to find or run into people who you want to talk to. My impression of San Fran is that most people disappear at 5:00 back to their rooms to freshen up, get changed and hook up with their co-workers, but because they are so much more scattered, and because there is no central 'hub' (like the Fairmont) then they end up hanging out with their coworkers and networking less. I certainly found I had to go out of my way to track down certain people in particular to find them this year, and I came back with about 20 business cards, instead of the ususal 100. So I definitely meet fewer people.
The second thing it had working against it was the simple fact that I had a crappy hotel room way down on Fisherman's Wharf, so instead of havign a 10 minute walk each day to the Moscone Center, I had a 15 minute, $10 cab ride. Suck suck suck. Oh well.
The third thing it had working against it was the fact that I am now ten days from a major milestone, and my entire team was back here crunching on my - still unnannounced - game. More than anything I would rather have been in the office nailing down the last dozen things that need to be fixed before we hit the deadline, but such is the difficulty of getting your work schedule in sync with GDC.
The good news is - as I said - even with these things working against it, it was the best GDC I'd been to in a few years, and the reason for that simply was the quality of the sessions. Except for one or two things, the sessions I saw this year were uniformly top-notch, and I learned a lot of stuff. For me, the best part about a good session is not (usually) that it opens my eyes to something that I never thought of - but rather that it fills in a lot of blanks about stuff that I had thought of, but had not had a chance to think of in any detail. In a twenty minute talk, a guy like Randy Smith can kind of upload two months of research and thought on save-load system design into my brain and effectively save me two months of work. Now I have a working understanding of a complex problem that I always wanted to tackle but never had the time to, and because it comes from a highly trusted source, I don't need to question the quality of the thinking that generated the conclusions I can start from. In fact, I'll likely question those conclusions less than I would if I was the one making them (how's that for pressure Randy?)
Anyway, more details about specific sessions - as well as my slides and presentation materials - to come soon.
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