Randy Gerson GDC 2017

Post date: Mar 16, 2017 9:21:9 PM

This was my 3rd ever GDC, but my first ever as a casual attendee, not working as a CA attending the event. The experience was quite different, forcing me to focus on networking event and exploring the expo floor rather than sitting in talks and taking notes in between busy work shifts. I missed the camaraderie of my associate friends, but I wouldn't change my GDC 2017 experience which went as follows:

Tuesday 2/28

The Arrival

The most effective flight we (me and the group of students I’d be flying with and staying with inside of the Marriott Hotel) left at 5:45 am, tuesday morning. This flight would have us arrive in San Francisco around noon, providing us the time to check into our hotels and collect our badges before the expo had even opened up. Saving the gory details of going through TSA and boarding a plane, the flight went smoothly.

I had slept the majority of the flight, but while waiting for our luggage in baggage claim, my GDC sweater from the year prior began my networking experience for me. From across the baggage claim area, I was noticed and approached by a man of similar age. We talked a little bit, and I learned of his background in programming and joked about how little I knew on the subject of his expertise. He joined our party of ringling travelers, since his hotel was near ours, and we all traveled via Bart, into the financial district. Parting ways we exchanged cards and agreed to keep in contact in the future.

The Ringling party and I went to our hotel, dropped off our bags and then went and collected our badges. There was a bit of confusion since some of my companions were “exhibitors” while some of us got the regular expo badge, but it was no problem long term. We all changed our titles from students, and we were ready for the fastly approaching evening.

The Exhibitors had to set up their station while the rest of us had to wait. Us remaining split off, and some went down to the day of the Devs set up, while I went and tried out the Paranormal Activity VR display. While waiting in line, I spoke with an audio engineer who had worked on Abzu. He was semi amazed by my knowledge of shaders, and the issues with transparency sorting, claiming that the environment artist that had been working on the game, didn’t know as much as I did about the technical constraints. This made me feel good.

We had just enough time to eat before the polycount mixer, were networking began in the line outside of the venue. Me and several friends wound up spending much of the wait speaking to a budding character artist, who lived in Florida as well: small world. He had mostly self taught himself, and took only two years of study at Dave’s school in orlando.

It was hard to talk much inside of the Polycount mixer as it was literally filled wall to wall with people. It was nice to see some of the recent alumni from Ringling milling about, but as some had recently landed pretty prestigious jobs (rhymes with lizard) they were overtaken by people itching for party invites.

We left polycount to go to a mysterious GitHub mixer, with rumors of an open bar. It didn’t disappoint, and despite this being more of an technical/ engineer meetup, there was no lack of networking to be done, and friendships to be made. I spoke with a couple of guys creating their own indie company (hot mess games), and learned a bit about how that was going for them. I also had a very informal and friendly conversation with a full stack engineer at Unity, about a joint love of the game “Broforce”, and he gave my card to his friend a Unity recruiter incase anything opened up.

Ran into more alumni, and we all went over to the “coin-op” a local pizzeria and pub, where we all caught up, ate pizza, and got yelled at because one of the party had fallen asleep sitting up, and the store owners weren’t too fond about that. It was a glorious end to an eventual day.

Wednesday 3/01

The big day

Having been a CA in years past, I was horrified at having slept past 8am. My roommates for the trip assured me I wouldn’t be missing anything. We got there at about 10:30, so I was able to walk around the Expo floor very quickly before rushing up to the line for the Crystal Dynamics Junior day. I waited in that line for about 2 hours. I got very used to waiting in lines this week.

I spoke with some of the students around me, but the main highlight was speaking with Matt Bard and Pat Stone, and having them review my portfolio. Matt really wanted to see more focus on the hero props in my environment. His main notes were that my environments seemed to be lacking the nerded out detail that they would have liked to see. He advised that I spent time just focusing on single elements; that focusing on getting the wear on a pool table just right, would be more impactful than having a portfolio of only okay environments.

Pat stone, had similar notes, but he also added that it would be a good idea for me to focus my future hero pro creations more on sci-fi, or even marvel related so it would better suit their project needs. He said that it seemed pretty clear based on my images that I knew how to build worlds, but as a junior I would be more often than not in a role of creating hero props, and it would be more beneficial to show that skill set- the ability to make a really polished hero asset.

From here I explored a bit of the expo hall and career pavilion in the south hall. I was too late to get a portfolio slot assigned with WB, but I was told that if i waited around early the next day There might be time to squeeze me in. my main goal was simply to get a lay of the land and start exploring all that was on show.

That night was the riot mixer, where I felt totally out of my element being neither a VFX artist nor a stylized hand painted artist, and the it was on to the ringling mixer. The ringling mixer is where I spoke to Gail Yui, and she introduced some of my more 2d focused friends to a concept artist friend of hers. She urged us to stay in contact since we told her we might be staying in the area a couple of days past GDC. She also actively promoted the idea of going where the job is, and thinking about the price later. She swore up and down that somehow the life in San Fran, for an artist, made up for the outrageous cost.

From here we went to the famous Epic party, where I danced like no one was watching. Ironically, I knew that people were watching, because there was quite a bit of clapping for me as I did my “thing”. This outgoing, drive to have fun no matter the cost resulted in quite the number of card exchanges, and overall just a memorable and good time.

Thursday 3/02

The hump

I started this day with a focus on getting into WB. Surprisingly I was able to get in and I met with Adam Tolman from Avalanche (SLC). He looked over my work, and seemed fairly impressed. He mentioned that it may benefit me to show off some texture callouts,and some proof I can create solid 2D work as well. He gave me his card and asked that we kept in touch.

I went from there over to hardsuit labs where I met with Luke Doge, the art director there. He was similarly impressed, saying what I was creating looked a lot like their current project. This was great news to me, and he said he’d try to send my work down the pipeline to their environment lead, to possibly get an art test lined up. As I waited in line I spoke with a CA friend of mine currently working at Hardsuit Labs, Adam. Our little family of conference associates missed me this year, and that was great to hear. I missed them too and hope to wear our neon shirts next year.

Hurrying over to the insomniac booth I got a portfolio review with Ryan Benno an environment artist working there. I mentioned Carol Torres, who is now working there and Ryan laughed, mentioning that they were great friends. It’s a surprisingly small world for gamers. Ryan’s main feedback was that I should add some greater light contrast, playing around with complimentary colors. He also mentioned I may want to revisit some of the textures and materials making my scene.

From this point we had pretty much finished our time for the day with GDC, so we went to a local mixer for the night hosted by riot games. This mixer was hosted by riot, and was more about having fun at this point, then maintaining strict professionalism, as it was mostly a lot of gaming and game competitions. It was great seeing that people inside of the games industry would blow off steam playing games and spent time hanging out with one another, proving split screen multiplayer wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon if game devs have anything to say about it.

This venue eventually lost interest, and we tried to get into a microsoft mixer that we heard about. This wound up being a failed attempt since the doors were closed by the time we got there, but we then went to a bar called the view on top of our hotel, making it one of, if not the, highest bar in the city. Here I met a few individuals, such as Anthony Merlino, and we joked on the spot about making a game. After spending a good while at that location we bar hopped to a local dive where I spoke a little with a designer at Tiburon. After all of this, walking a friend back to their hotel, I was able to meet a couple of art directors from NGD studios in south america. Over all a bust night.

Friday 3/03

The Last Day.

As GDC was closing and it was filled with students, there wasn’t too much left to do. We went through the Expo hall and collected anything we could find that was being given out for free, and we said our goodbyes to the amazing experience.

There was one event to attend to, and that was the killer portfolio reviews. The line was long, but in it I was able to speak to a few people in line, and it was fascinating to learn about how they were approaching their own artistic journeys. One person was an animator for contract at harmonix who after working on rockband 4 for a while, had decided to gear themselves more towards positions in tech art, finding that they really liked working with shaders, and dealing with technical challenges.

I had a portfolio review with Greg Foertshch art director at  Firaxis, and overall he liked my work. I asked what i should work on, and he also advised spending some time with hero props, and then I threw him a larger question, without as straightforward an answer. I asked what his opinion on showing verisimilitude was; I asked if he would rather see a portfolio of a focus on one type of environment, or a series of environments, and this idea gave him pause. His response was something along the lines of “do what you want to do. The thing is, if you do something outside of your normal, and your comfort zone, that is going to stick out like a sore thumb. If it looks bad, that is going to hurt you, and if it looks good, that might be all a potential employer sees, possibly forcing you into a work position, doing something you might not be as impassioned about.”   getting his business card with the promise to keep in touch, and the reassurance that my work was good, even if the industry had a tendency to be fickle (he told me about someone he just spoke with who was a phenomenal artist who had been trying to land a job for 5 years), I left basically putting a close to my GDC experience 2017.

Takeaways:

• • Make hero props.

  • Learn basic substance

  • Learn houdini for procedural art.

  • Work on what you want to work on. Spend the time to really noodle out on the details and don’t worry as much on making massive spaces, just make good ones.