Now I’ve never been to GDC, but let me tell you I will be going to any of them that I can go to in the future.  If you’re not familiar with GDC, its short for “Game Developer Conference”.  Its a place where industry professionals and students can go to expand their horizons and network with each other. There are talks about various game related subjects, round tables, and presentations.  There is also an E3ish expo floor with booth babes and the like.  I’m not a creative writer so I’m just going to break this down logically by day.

Monday/Tuesday (During Conference)

Merit Entertainment was kind enough to get me the “full pass” so I was able to check out the first two days of tutorials.  I went to “Advanced Direct 3d” and “Khronos Tutorial”.  One went over how to use the new Direct 3d 10.1 and 11 and other went over the new opengl 3.1, opencl(threading api), and opensl(new sound api to replace openal).  They also touched on some other things, but thats the gist of it.  Now these tutorials were basically like an all day class, strictly learning.  The Direct X session was pretty funny due to ATI and AMD folks fighting over who has the best extentions all day.  As far as opengl goes, the biggest thing announced was that opengl for the first time actually removed things from the deprication list in 3.1.

Monday (After Hours)

My buddies were telling me that I needed to go to sweet after parties while I was there.  I also knew that these parties were not googlable (at least the good ones).  So this night I basically gave up and went to Chevys next door and ate some excellent Mexican. Sorry, if that doesn’t seem so exciting.

Tuesday (After Hours)

So by this day I was sick of not finding parties.  Heard rumors about an Harmonix party so with some help from a few buddies I was there.  Open bar. Thank you, Harmonix, for the open bar.  Anyways, so I get in there and its a standard bar which Harmonix had taken control of the entire second story.  Instead of a live band they have a projector and rock band set up on the stage.  Geeky, but awesome none the less.  The people that were playing were generally on expert and playing the hard songs, so it was impressive.

Wednesday

Went to some cool talks by an ex-Bungie employee and the expo crawl was pretty sweet.  Coolest thing I would say was the Technical Director Roundtable.  There is nothing like hearing a bunch of the industries finest going at it.  They had one each day Wed-Fri and I would have to say I learned the most from them.  Randomly bar hopped and met up with some Full Sail faculty.

Thursday

Hideo Kojima keynote was out of control.  It looked like the guy spent a good 10k on his powerpoint alone.  I don’t know if you can see it online, but if you can check it out.  Random conference shit, all pretty high quality.  Hung around the W (my hotel) saw a few notable faces (God of War guy).  I think I went to an IGDA party today, but I forget (I’m writing this based of tweets).  If I did it was alright, had a few drink tickets then left.  Almost got into some Little Big Planet party but it was high security, ended up going to some guy’s hotel and checking out an indie game they’ve been developing.  Went back to my hotel (W) and finished up my tab (80 dollor tab, which was my highest for the week).

Friday

Basically a wrap up of the week.  Could barely function with hardly any sleep the whole week.  Went to some cool tech talks. Hung out at the W, ate a 30 dollor cheese burger and drank.  Right before I took the shuttle to fly home I met Cliffy B. and shook his hand.  Nice close to the surreal week.

In summary, I will be at every GDC I can go to for the rest of my days.

Awesome,

Aaron