Game Developers Conference

I had the pleasure of attending the Game Developer’s Conference this year, going to the last three days, all day. The overall experience was very positive as I was able to attend a number of very interesting and useful sessions, in addition to the booth crawling in the expo halls. The networking possibilities alone is usually enough to make the experience worth while, and I was able to meet a whole slew of new professionals, but it was also great to be able to get back in touch with a lot of friends I hadn’t seen in awhile.

On my way to the Portal Post-Mortem session, I was riding the escalator up and looking back down on the floor. I saw a friend from school so I waved, that caught the attention of the man directly behind me I mean (who I didn’t notice since I was looking past him), this man turned out to be Noah Falstein. Noah contracted Totally Games (to hear Noah say it) to work on something, so I’ve been working with Noah for a few months now, but it’s still easy to geek out on someone at a big gaming convention

Once we got to the top of the escalator, we were greeted by a line so long that you would have thought it led to Space Mountain. We cruised around the line for a bit trying to find someone up front that we knew and could use to chat our way to the front (totally Noah’s idea, I swear!) That idea didn’t pan out though so we ended up going to the end of the line. My friend that I waved to earlier was back there as well, so I got to chat with and introduce him to Noah, turns out he rightfully had heard of Noah, unlike me. My friend was amazed that I got to work with industry legends the likes of Larry Holland and Noah Falstein and wondered how I did it, I told him that the secret must be to have never heard of the person before meeting them.

I got lucky by landing a job at Totally Games, and though I had heard of the X-Wing series of games, I had no idea who Larry Holland was. Larry and Noah have known each other since before I was even born, Noah was responsible for giving Larry his first job in this industry even, so one day at work, Larry stopped by my desk and said that a Mr. Noah Falstein was going to stop by tomorrow to chat with us about a project. I said “cool” and proceeded to that very Wikipedia page I linked with Noah’s name earlier, since I had never heard the name before, I was duly impressed with his pedigree of course.

So there’s my secret, if you want to meet someone particular in this industry, the trick is to have never heard of them before… I’m not sure how well that will work with someone that you want to meet.

Other notable moments; it was cool to be able to check out and play a bunch of the indie games on display that don’t have demos available yet, like Crayon Physics Deluxe (winner of the IGF grand prize) and Fret Nice (which now has a demo available). I gave the ‘game’ Guitar Rising a shot too since I’ve about mastered the plastic guitar, I figured it may be good to try and learn the real thing. The presentation is pretty non-existent, but the core experience seems solid, and that’s all that really matters right? I’ve never picked up a real guitar before, but the game was setup in such a way that it was really easy to learn. It only took me about two seconds to learn how to read the tabs that scroll by, so it seems very promising that this game will be a good way to learn guitar.

Well, I’m closing in on 700 words, which means that this post is getting too long for most people to want to read, so I’ll go ahead and end it at this.