Mayank's GDC Experience 2017

Post date: Mar 08, 2017 9:50:27 PM

Day 1 Wednesday, March 1st : The Arrival

This year was my very first GDC experience and I have to say it was amazing. I arrived at San Fransisco at 11 45 am on Wednesday, March 1st 2017 and by 12 30 pm I made it to Moscone center, where GDC was taking place. The very action I had to take was to check in and obtain my badge and ID, which was located on the main floor of the building. After doing so, I proceeded towards the basement level of the building where the event was taking place. As I walked down the stairs, to the basement level, I realized how busy and packed it was. It was a remarkable site to see.  There were  people standing in line to get there free waffles, a lot of them were walking around and looking for their friends  or just running off to a talk.

It took me few seconds to take it all in and decided that I would hit the ground running. I had planned to meet up with few friends from Ringling, however, since they were still on their way, I decided to  go and explore  conference on my own. With the help of GDC app and the pamphlet provided, it took me less than a minute to figure out that there were two zones North Hall and South Hall and What events were taking place and where. The first zone i visited was the North Hall, where there were quite a few number of indie game developers were showing of their game. During my exploration, I met up with Matthew Krumlauf, one of the developers of a game called Threshold. Threshold is a 3rd person, RPG, game where you have to fight monsters and escape from the dungeon.  It was an interesting concept and we ended up talking about, how the textures  effect game play and frame rate. We spent a good amount of time, discussing what were the issues i faced and how the game could be made better with constructive feed back. We exchanged our business cards and i proceeded towards exploring the conference.

As I moved around, I came across a Nintendo booth, It was quite small (not what I was expecting) and decided to investigate whet they had to offer. It turned out that they were only there to promote their gaming station the switch. Upon further conversations with them, the representatives had informed me that Nintendo America does not help develop any games but is rather more business oriented, where as most game development takes place in Japan. The handed me a card that provided me a url for careers to their site.

Only couple of booths away, I stumbled upon WBGames, Where i met Christeen Pucci, she's a recruiter at WBGames and Monolith. I made a new connection with her and expressed how thrilled i was to meet her and asked her to look at my portfolio. She was kind enough to give me few constructive feedback and urged me to apply for WBGames internship online. During our conversation she mentioned that she was really interested in my art and would like me to send her constant updates on my projects so that she can provide me critiques. Before parting ways,we exchanged business cards and provided my resume as requested by her.

I continued to explore the conference grounds and came across quite a few number of independent game developers who had created wide variety of games ranging from First person RPG to Final Fantasy Style turn based game to a dog fight style top down games. I had also come across a section of the conference that hired from different countries. There were independent games countries, from Canada, Sweden, Italy, South Korea, China and many more. It was definitely a sight to behold.

As the time passed, I met up with friends and we explored the south hall. The south hall had a completely different vibe to it. It felt more official. As we explored the area, we came across many other booths, some of which were, Unreal Engine, PlayStation, Substance, Ringling and many more. Looking around in north hall, was brilliant, because  it made me realize how big VR is becoming. The entire convention was 85% VR based  which was amazing. We explored a power rangers booth, where one could get into Power ranger Mecha and simulate as tho they are controlling it. We also  visited Kongregate  booth, which was interesting as they expressed  that they were trying to get ore into Mobile game industry. I visited Unreal Engines seminar where, they discussed about the improvements on the new update on sequencer. Where, we as devlopers don't have to add new camera's every time but rather change the track and move the same camera in separate position. In my own view it seemed very similar to primer pro, there fore the user interface would be  easier to explore. I had also visited  Adia Entertainment Ltd booth, a company based in china, that specialize in game art, commercials, CGI fx  and trailers. During my interaction with them, they informed me that they were only looking for seniors but will keep me in their file for future references.  During my visit to PlayStation booth, they gave out play station shoelaces but however, the recruiter, who I was hoping to show my portfolio to was about to leave, so i was unable to have a proper conversation with her at the time.

After exploring around for a while, I met up with my friends again and decided to sit down in one of the round tables. As we were talking about our portfolio pieces, we were approached by couple of Digipen students who were amazed by our art work and had commented that they need to inform their school  to hire art teachers like Ringling. After they left, we were approached by material artist from Naughty Dog who had worked on Last of Us2 and had collected our business cards and briefly previewed our portfolio's.

At the end of GDC day 1, I attended Ringling Alumina Mixer, which was great as I got to see few similar faces and made new friends. I had also made a new connection with Jeremy Griffith, who had attended the course when it started for the very first time. hes currently a freelance FX artist. in the past he had worked on Call of Duty Modern Warfare3 and Bioshock infinite. I would say it was an end to a successful Day 1. 

Day 2 Thursday, March 2nd: The Following

Day 2 was the continuation of Day 1, where, I had continued to explore the expo grounds and  attended a lecture on how to work better with materials in unreal engine. I had decided to revisit the PlayStation booth and met with two recruiters,one of them known as Katherine LaRue, who reviewed my portfolio and asked me what internship I was interested in. She provided me with good critique as well as asked for my resume. She invited me to connect with her on LinkedIn and keep her updated with my portfolio. She wrote down the jobs internships i was interested and the city where that internship would take place.

After which I explored more and revisited Substance booths, Facebook booths,  and few VR companies booths. During my visit to the north hall, i was amazed by the technology that was coming out. Tahoe and I discovered a scanner that can scan textures from real life and can digitally enhance them without any manual labor, the software they used to show of their machine was substance painter and unreal engine. It was quite remarkable the level of detailing that was obtained was simply mind blowing. We also visited Insomniac booth, where I met up with Trey McNair, who also game me some insightful tips on making my portfolio better. I had also visited Hradsuit Labs, that helped creating quite a few number of games such as titan fall and others. They too were looking for seniors or recent graduates to join their company. As I met up with others during the day, i was informed there was a Zynga party that would take place later on that evening. After being invited to it, during the day, I was intrigued by Facebook's presence and decided to step into the booth, they had asked me to play a game to score more than a 100 points on their new mobile game testing and if i did, i would get an exclusive invitation to their private party. Needless to say, I had received their invitation for Friday night.

In the evening, I attended Zynga mixer with Tahoe, Jared Hunter and Zach Monteforte and we had a good time making connections. Day 2 ended with a great success.

Day 3 Friday, March 3rd: The Finale

Day 3 was more of a relaxing day. I visited South Hall for one last time to  relive the pat two amazing days. the atmosphere, was more relaxed and quite a few number of independent game developers were ready to  close of their booths. As i revisited some of my favorite booths, I came across a section of an expo, that had completely skipped my mind. Its was one of the sections of game developers where, the games were interactive in real world. It was quite a sight and kinda interesting to see how the games worked.

The game shown below work with steam kettle  showing where the lasers are and  you have to interact with the lasers to  make the music. something like guitar hero  but with lasers in real life. Great out of the box thinking.

The following picture is of game that is more arcade style where you wear the cat ear hat and you  score by punching the right controls. the indication of the controls are the different color lights and where they lead to. Higher the score = Higher the difficulty by increasing speed of the lights

In conclusion: Great First GDC and it has inspired me to do better and i learned alot from this experience. I cant wait for next year's GDC its gonna be great.