GDC & San Francisco Part I
Sometime early yesterday (seems like much longer ago now), I was dropped off at the airport to make the 6+ hour flight trek west. I think the last time I was in San Francisco was when Dani and I came out six or seven years ago. So I was pretty excited to get back out here. I'm staying at the Cartwright hotel in Union Square. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice the hotel is. The building is old, but the rooms are nicely updated. They are small, but that works fine for my solo trip this week.
I decided to walk down to Fisherman's Wharf and pier 39. Because of the time difference, I was already super hungry at 3pm, so I battled the crowd for my In-N-Out burger fix. I'm so sad that we don't have that chain on the east coast, but I suppose that's good for my self control. Right after I finished eating, it rained for a short while. I was a little bummed to be caught in it, but seeing this rainbow really made it alright.
Since I'm still on east coast time, I crashed about 8:30 pm - which means I was then up at 4am. Fun!
Monday at GDC
Registration opened at 7:30 am, so I grabbed a coffee and headed over. From what I understand, registration was a bit of a pain in years past. It could not have been more simple this year. I grabbed my badge and "swag bag", then headed over to the west hall. Since panels didn't start until 10am I just hung out at the tables and did a bit of work on my game.
With a couple exceptions, I spent the entirety of my day taking in the panels from this years "Mobile Summit". Since I'm working on my own mobile game, it was super educational. More than anything it gave me a bit more of a peak into the industry that I lack, having never worked for a studio. The other two panels were a "Simple AI Tricks" panel and a postmortem on a really neat Project Tango based augmented reality game called "Woorld".
I was very impressed by how well things ran today. And how diverse and inclusive the entire conference is. There were people from all over the world, men, women, trans peeps. Given how bad the player community can be to people who are cis-white hetero males, It's nice to see that the dev community is so much more inclusive.
Anyways, here's photos I took today.
