Emily Cano - GDC 2017

Post date: Mar 17, 2017 7:47:20 PM

This year was my first at GDC so everything I expected came from my roommates descriptions of last year. They were pretty much accurate so they gave me a pretty good sense of things going in. I didn’t go to any talks, because I had the expo pass. I spent most of the time at mixers, but had plenty of time to wander the expo floor.

On the Tuesday I flew in I went to the WIGI mixer while my roommates went to a VFX mixer. While waiting in line to get into the at-capacity party I met a few local game designers and a software engineer who gave me some great advice about getting out of school, finding a place to be comfortable, and some tips about the impending job hunt. Overall it was great to meet a bunch of women in the industry.

Wednesday was incredibly busy. My favorite mixer of the entire conference was the 'LGBTQ In Gaming' mixer. I met so many fantastic people in my community, and it was fantastic to see so many other folks who wanted to making gaming less hostile and get more queer folks into the games industry. It was wonderful. There was talk of negative stories about interactions at the conference and industry because of identity, but the mood was overall very positive. Everyone there was motivated and determined to make games more welcoming despite some of the hate they often received. It was an inspiring mixer, and made me really excited and proud of my community.

Later that day I met a man in line for a mixer who was there as press, he worked in broadcasting and started telling me and Lauren about virtual sets for news shows, and sport commentating. It was something that I honestly had no idea about. He explained that the positions of the cameras and the dimensions of the studio would be given, then it would be up to the artist to create these sets. Packages of them went for a great deal of money, and there was a huge demand for artist to make custom spaces for big name shows.

In the next two days I spent more time on the expo floor. I had several really good interaction with game devs and got my portfolio reviewed a few times. I ended up waiting in line for the ‘Killer Portfolio, Portfolio Killer’ review afterwards. I got a ton of really good advice and now have some very specific things to do to make my portfolio better.