For those who do not know, the Game Developers Conference (known here on out as GDC), is the largest game developer conference on the planet. While E3 and China Joy are larger… that is more about the showing of games, not that much about the development side. It is always great come to come to an Fran every year and talk about the actual development of games. While it is great to talk games (I know I am saying games a lot but I haven’t had any caffeine yet) with my friends… even friends who are in the marketing area of games, conversations with them are like the following:

ME: “This game is really interesting and fun.”

FRIEND, ENEMY OR SOME RANDOM HOBO ON THE STREET: “Yeah. But why didn’t they add this feature or that level. The game would have been so much better with this feature, its like the developers didn’t care!”

ME: “…:”

Now let’s look at the SAME conversation when at GDC:

ME: “This game is really interesting and fun.”

PERSON AT GDC: “Agreed, but I heard they had problems with some of the code not working, and the at the last minute they had to pull some features due to some marketing issues.”

ME: “That is too bad, but that is the way it goes sometimes.”

PERSON AT GDC: “Yep. That is the world of game developme… Why is that RANDOM HOBO ON THE STREET holding a sign that says,  Will play Mario Cart for food?”

ME: “…:”

THE END

As you can see, while I really value my friends opinions (because I am pillar of compassion Mad Overlord), it is still nice to be able to talk to folks who understand that game development is tough! There is a reason games take a sizable chunk of money and lots and lots of manhours (or womanhours), to create.

That said, I met lots, and lots of people. And for a socially awkward person like myself (I know I hide it well, just look at what a cool and well adjusted human being I am on this blog and then multiply that by your shoe size) it was difficult at times. But I came away with a stack of business cards that could choke a chain smoking walrus so I consider it a very successful endeavor.

I consider myself lucky to have met so many truly wonderful people at GDC. 99.9999% of them were really great. There was one guy who would not stop talking about how wonderful he was and how much stuff he knew but I just smiled and nodded a lot and just daydreamed about Fallout 4.

Last thing! While most people who know me (those poor souls), know my programming skills are scratchy at best. But I joined the Google Cloud program-a-thon to learn more about it. The POOR, POOR, guy who ran it had to deal with a zillion questions from me. He really earned his money that day let me tell you. Anyway, I won a Raspberry Pi 3 which is totally awesome. But I am going to give it to Matthew  Ciarlante, the gent who I am working on the Black Earth game with.  He (and his fiancee) let me crash at their place when we do our 48 hour game jams, not to mention he is the also the gent who answers my endless bombardment of Unity scripting questions.

So there you go Matt, free Raspberry Pi 3 coming your way. Thanks for everything buddy.

The real last thing is…. the pictures! Not many actual pictures of GDC since I was too busy meeting people and learning things (learning >> pictures). But here are the few I have. Mostly of the Unity booth (The new version of Unity is going to have some GREAT features). There was a booth whose slogan was ‘Better Coding through Mad Science” So of course I had to give them one of my little Mad Overlords!

https://madoverlordstudios.com/2017/02/13/a-mad-overlord-studios-mad-overlord/

They really liked it and they were fun to talk to. Also viewed in the new Amazon game engine, Lumberyard (which looks really powerful) and of course, the Raspberry Pi.

That is most of the GDC pictures. I still have a lot of pictures left though. Muir woods.Frank Lloyd Wright stuff… etc.

Anyway, back to following up to all those business cards. It was fun to meet everyone, (yeah, even the guy who talked endlessly about himself, I still learned a lot from him).

Remember. Every day is an adventure. Hug your loved ones and sing as loud as you want in your car. But if you sing as loud as you want in the check out line at the supermarket, I am not going to be held responsible.

Till next time!