Stephen Chi : GDC 2019

Post date: Mar 25, 2019 4:21:32 PM

So I'm going to talk about the overall experience in San Francisco and GDC in several different aspects:

Money, Living, GDC

Money:

Going GDC can be really expensive. The overall cost is around 1800 dollars. The most I spent is 850 dollars on the Summit pass, and 460 dollars for the airplane from Tampa to San Francisco. Since I don’t have a car, I spent additionally 150$ on Uber. I lived in a 1 star hostel 4 man dorm room; it only cost 160 for 3 nights including breakfast. The money that I spent on food isn’t that much since I bought subway sandwiches for lunch, but it still costs 20$ or more for a regular meal. In conclusion, group up with people will be better. You can minimize the costs by going with your friends to share the uber fee or someone can drive. The food can be pretty expensive if you want to have a good one; it really depends on the budget. Make sure you decide to go or not as early as possible, the earlier you book everything, the cheaper it is.

Living:

I lived in Orange Village Hostel, it’s a 1 star hostel and the room I lived is a 4 man dorm room. Overall experience is kind of sucks but it still gives you all you really need, such as Wifi, hot bath, breakfast (really simple one), and it’s 10 minutes away from the Moscone Center(GDC). They have a locker for you to put your valuable things inside of it, but you have to prepare your own lock and it’s pretty small that you can’t put a small luggage into it. Funny stuff: there’s one night I went back my room pretty late (around 12, btw don’t walk alone on the street during that time, weird people and homeless everywhere, super dangerous); the room is so dark and I found that someone was sleeping on my bad; I turn on my flashlight and saw his GDC badge is on the bed that he supposed to sleep and it shows that he’s a speaker in GDC! I think it’s not a good idea to wake him up and argue with him while everyone is sleeping so I took his bed that night. In conclusion, if you want to save money on this, book the hostel or hotel with your friends instead of living in a dorm room like me, it’s still not really safe to sleep with strangers.

GDC:

I think the overall experience is really helpful to have more understanding of the game industry. This is my first time attend GDC and there’s a lot of confusion for me, which makes me made two huge mistakes. I want to talk about the mistakes I made in this trip: wrong schedule, wrong pass.

Wrong schedule

This first mistake that I made is I messed up my schedule. I didn’t know that the official portfolio review is only happen on Friday and it called “Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer”. I came back to school earlier on Thursday, which means that I missed the portfolio review session, and this can be critical if I am a senior (glad that I’m junior).

Wrong pass

The second mistake that I made is that I didn’t make up my schedule first then decide which pass to buy. In my first two days, I attend 14 presentations including vfx bootcamp, technical artist bootcamp, tool artist tutorial, advanced graphics techniques, material tutorial. I bought the Summit pass, however, most presentation that’s related to material and environment only need an Expo Plus pass. Even though I heard all the vfx presentation on Monday, which is only for Summit pass, I still feel that I somehow wasted my Summit pass.

All the presentation are helpful in terms of knowing the workflow, pipeline, tips, and problem-solving except for the one that is talking about the tips of using substance painter; that one is extremely bad. The difference between the tutorial session and other general session, such as “Texturing the world of ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’”, is that “tutorial session” gives more detail on how they make certain things work, such as a technical artist bootcamp provides more detail on the tricks of Distance Fields and Shader Simulation. Wednesday is the exact time that the Expo hall opened. I basically walked around the hall and looked around what new thing game industry have; luckily, even though I didn’t get a chance to attend official portfolio review, I still found a senior environment artist from Insomniac doing portfolio review for me; he gave me a lot of important feedback in terms of lighting, color, and surface differentiation, and we exchange the business card. In conclusion, the overall GDC experience is really fresh for me, and I do make several mistake but still have a really good time and informed many new stuff by those presentation.