GDC was SO much better this year. The volunteer work was more organized, I talked to more people, I got more free stuff, and I saw more interesting talks. Honestly, the experience was at least twice as good as last year. And that’s WITH the fact that I got a cold-like illness and re-injured both my feet (making walking even short distances very difficult). I told the Conference Assistant director (one of them, Tim) that I would refrain from working GDC again until I was sure my feet had fully recovered.

Anyway, I went to the Nintendo Keynote where they announced The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks and gave away a free copy of Rhythm Heaven. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself when I saw the Zelda trailer. Not because I thought the game was silly. Far from it, I’m looking forward to a futuristic Zelda one of these days. No, I laughed because I just knew how the internet would probably react. The collective groans of hardcore fanboys who don’t like change could almost be felt from where I stood. Anyway, the keynote was mostly about Mr. Miyamoto’s management style. They used some really creepy images of Miyamoto to get their points across…

Notice how his expression and pose doesn’t change. So deliciously creepy!

I also was at the first 3/4ths of the Hideo Kojima keynote about the development of the Metal Gear series. It was very interesting and somewhat familiar to hear that technology LIMITATIONS necessitated what we regard as brilliant game mechanics. I believe this is also why movies with a lower budget end up being better films. The creators are forced to be more creative. I would have liked to stay for the whole thing, but I had another volunteer job scheduled for the last of it. For those of you who don’t know, you CANNOT be late for CA work. They really drill into you the nature of the quality of service we are to provide to conference attendees. It’s almost like boot camp, but toned way down.

I talked with a lot of people, mostly other CAs, but I did exchange quite a bit of contact info. If you’re reading this, other CAs, I’ll be getting into formal contact with you soon.

The sessions I attended were mostly production and graphics oriented. The talk about iPhone development was simple. The Blender game engine talk was eye opening. While they spent the first hour and a half talking just about modeling and animating in Blender (something I’ve already done), the last 30 minutes were incredible. Turns out, Blender has a very simple, but very effective VISUAL game engine. All you have to do is define actions, actuators, and controls, followed by connecting them by dragging and dropping connections between them to result in behaviors. Combined with the basic physics engine and custom scriptability yields a powerful tool for prototyping just about any type of game one can imagine. It’s very fast, and you certainly can’t beat the price (free). I also went to talks by Khronos University, who from what I could see, are a major deciding factor on how OpenGL, OpenCL, and Collada are developed. They discussed plans for OpenGL 3.1, which appears to be a major departure from the past technologies and embraces the latest in graphics techniques. Excellent!

I roomed with Nick this year, and it was good to have company. Many of the other Digipen master students were in the same hotel, so we often ate dinner together and visited. Kelly and crew were nice enough to get me a birthday cake. Thanks guys! I managed to get myself out of bed for the Game Developer Awards show (or the last half of it anyway). It was incredibly funny, as were most of the skits by Mega64. I’m just surprised how many awards LittleBigPlanet won. Sure, it’s a great game, but I can’t think of any single part of it that’s particularly innovative. It’s a really, really well-made platformer, but it’s no Portal.

Sadly, my sickness and feet problems left me unable to visit the Career Pavilion and I was only able to go to the Exbo once (and not even all of it). Maybe 2011 will be my year to totally rock the conference.