GDC 2018 - Hailey Williams

Post date: Apr 05, 2018 9:29:23 PM

This year for GDC I had a Summit Pass and also worked at the Ringling Booth. As a result of working the booth I didn't spend a lot of time on the expo floor beyond my shifts. However, I did get to network with a lot of people just by working at the booth! There was lots of interest seeing a student project developed in UE4, some primary things people seemed to respond to were the midpoly modeling workflow and predominant use of tiling textures, using masks and math to add variation. Another observation from working the booth, leveraging stickers + social media as a self-promotion tool was incredibly effective for me at GDC. Something I observed at GDC last year was how many booths and small indie studios gave away free stickers, and how that later would prompt me to look them up. Also its much easier to offer someone a sticker and then talk about your work than awkwardly asking them if they want a business card. For this GDC I decided to treat "marketing" for thesis in the same way. The response was overwhelming, by posting regular pictures and updates to Twitter with our booth number and game, we had people seeking our project out to come playtest it or just to grab a sticker. Even after, we had other people like the developers of Perception (Bill Gardner) and a Lead Graphics Technical Artist at Bungie (Nate Hawbaker) tweeting about our thesis, encouraging others to check it out. Using social media as a way to promote your work and yourself is HUGE, and starting as soon as you begin thesis production is a great way to create buzz for GDC, it definitely helped me make some great connections and actually led to several interviews after GDC.

Beyond working the booth, I caught a great talk called Shaders 301 by Ben Cloward (Senior Technical Artist at Bioware) which talked about the idea of Procedural Noise (like perlin noise) and how that can be optimized and baked down for real-time computation. This is achieved by converting it to a volume texture. Something I really liked about this talk was Ben Cloward gave piratical examples on how high-level shader concepts can be used and applied in-engine. Also he showed most of his work in UE4, but always included examples of what it would look like if you scripted it yourself and talked about using the tools that will give you the best result.