Mary Cassin: Technical Artist's POV of GDC 2016

Post date: Mar 22, 2016 7:12:0 AM

My top five insights from GDC were:

1.) VR is the hot new fad of the Year but it needs a lot more development

    VR was definitely the hot topic this year at GDC. I was lucky enough to be able to attend some of the VR summit talks on Monday. I sat in on the VR UI talk given by Riho Kroll and it brought up alot of very interesting things about having to deal with a UI space and how that really changes in the VR environment. The solution that Riho had for the menus in the games he was working on was treating them as a total environment. A really interesting thing he talked about was that all menus needed a floor plane and objects in the distance. If the floor plane was not there, the player would have a sensation that they were falling. Riho's talk was very good but I feel like the other talks I attended were more fluff than substance when it came to VR dev. I found it was better to go onto the expo floor and pick the brains of dev's presenting at the booths. 

2.) Physical Technical Art is a thing, and it's super cool.

    A talk I went to on Tuesday at the Tech-Art boot camp was Robert Butterworth's about physical technical art. What I gleamed from the talk was the physical technical art was making things in the physical world that allowed for more efficient workflow of an artist or the whole studio. One really cool example he had was he was making a broken build alert system. At his desk he has alittle tiki statue that has eyes that glow different colors, green is good, yellow is there's warnings in the build, and red is when the build is broken. When the build is broken it also yells and breaths some smoke to really get everyone's attention. This as has been a quick way for rob to know when builds have broken, rather than waiting from an email notification that might get buried. 

3.) The Career Floor is not for Technical Artists

    I learned pretty quickly walking around the career floor that there was maybe two or three people at booths who could actually sit down with me and crit my portfolio or even understand what it was and what type of technical artist I am. Instead of getting "wow you're a tech artist, that's great, apply through our website" I found going to talks and meeting up with fellow technical artists was a much more efficient way of finding out what companies needed technical artists and who would be willing to give me a real crit while we were out to lunch. Also this way i didn't have to stand in line for 30min+ just to get a blank stare and then "wow, this is awesome."

4.) Talks can be hit or miss no matter who's giving them

     One thing that surprised me was that one of the talks i had hyped to myself that I wanted to go to was the Firewatch talk. This game is one of my favorites and I just wanted to get more insight on how they made the game and how they created some of their assets. What I didn't expect was a 45 minute talk on level streaming that nearly put me to sleep. This taught me the important lesson of if a talk isn't interesting or pertinent to what you want to learn, no one is going to berate you for getting up and leaving. At GDC you need to make the most of your time while you're there, so don't waste an hour in a talk when you could be making meaningful connections somewhere else. 

5.) Networking, Networking, Networking 

    This one seems alittle obvious but always good to reiterate. Networking and making quality connections is key. I found this year instead of meeting as many people as possible I found that trying to make meaningful and quality connections was the better route. So my advice would be ask people out for lunch or a drink! You never know who's going to end up getting you that job because they know that you're a person they'd want to work with. That or you'll just make a great friend who you can bounce ideas off of when you need help solving an error or writing a tool.   

**Also just in general for all technical artists out there tech-artists.org is a great resource to find fellow technical artists in the industry, as well as every tech art boot camp is up on their website and ready for download.