Gabriel Socrates Gomez (GDC 2016)

Post date: Mar 25, 2016 11:1:28 PM

Gabriel Gomez      

DAY 1

I went to go pick up my badge on Tuesday and noticed that there are a few talks open for people with expo passes. Amazon had talk about making mobile games more social by using Dynamo DB and AWS Lamda. From what I understood about Dynamo DB it is like a database or cloud for mobile games. AWS Lamda is a way to run codes without managing severs or databases. Its more streamline it seems like, but amazon gave examples of what they meant with mock games that they showed through the presentation. They also talked about making players feel more important with push notifications. It seems like that it was a whole presentation on making money off of people’s emotion. Make them feel important and they’ll come back and spend more money.

            There was a second presentation with twitch. This one was a bit shorter than the last one, but it was about people starting out in twitch and how to get into it without having too much trouble. Believe it or not this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything involving twitch, so it was interesting to listen to the presentation. I’ve heard of twitch only through the grapevine and I stayed to see what all the fuss was about.

            Day 2

          Wednesday was a lot more energetic in the sense that people with the expo pass were able to go to the expo floor and the career floor. On my first day on the career floor I experienced a lot. I talked to many different companies especially the indie companies. We traded cards and I might have some people to contract me in the near future. I also had some portfolio reviews and the main consensus was that I needed more variety in my portfolio. I had good stuff, but it was all space scifi, so they wanted to see more art based in reality. Ozwe, a Swiss company had a space vr mobile game, which was amazing. They were using the oculus gear which uses your phone as a vr set. The controls of the game were amazing. It was the first Vr game that really didn’t suck to me. It makes me wish that I didn’t give up my flagship phone because I the phone I have right now doesn’t work with oculus gear.

Day 3

Thursday was the day that I made most of. I visited the igloo which was a pretty cool experience. It was sort of a holodeck clone of startrek. It’s a dome that uses 360 projections. It supposed to revolutionize the way we view things. The example that they used was a shooter that had zombie stuffed animals as the enemy. You had a 360 view of the environment and used 3d glasses. It was a really awesome experience.

The next awesome demo was of the Dolby atmos. It’s a speaker set up that was purely amazing. It was pretty on par with the sound system of an IMAX theater. They were showing the star wars battlefront as a demo when I was there. It gave me chills because I felt like I was on the battlefield with those soldiers. They showed the Overwatch one too, but I missed it.

I went to a substance demo on several different occasions because they had just released a new version of the substance suite at the beginning of GDC. It was simply amazing. One demo was that of a brick texture and the guy who was demonstration went back and forth between painter and designer seamlessly. The layouts are pretty much the same, but it’s more streamlined. On the second demo there was a different man using painter and designer. He did it of a pistol. It wasn’t as interesting as the brick one, but there was still a lot of useful info.

Day 4

Friday was much like that of Thursday, so there isn’t much to say on it.