GDC Europe Sum-up

Me, Marc and Jens got back from GDC Europe yesterday so believed I must write a modest summary of the trip.


Initial of, some thoughts on the lecture:




My speak was scheduled the initial day and was the 1st time I have ever had this type of lecture so I was fairly nervous. This meant I had a bit of trouble relaxing and enjoying the other talks before mine. Also, the evening before I had had the final practice round for the lecture, creating my dreams that evening filled with nothing but fragmented sentences from my script, which of course tainted the next day too. My head contained little but the lecture.

My 1st strategy had been to discover the complete lecture and not use any notes, but in the course of practice I often managed to miss anything and felt having some type of notes was a lot more safe. As the lecture slides was fairly considerably void of text and the actual pictures typically not extremely descriptive to what I stated, I had to preserve every thing in my head. In the finish, I am happy I created the decision of having notes as I did get lost a couple of times, but could rapidly get back by a glance. Hopefully nobody noticed anything.

When it was lastly time for the speak I was truly worried if any of the videos would work, as there had been quite a few problems when testing at residence. Luckily all videos showed perfectly!

All round, I think it all went really properly and the audience seem to get pleasure from it also. There are summaries of the lecture at Gamasutra and Gamespot, and I will see if I can get the script up as well later on.

I was also involved in a panel with some other men and women. My five minute presentation was pretty much an extended version of an old blogpost.


After my lecture was done I could ultimately relax and get pleasure from the a variety of lectures a bit a lot more. As often there is a great mixture in top quality and content. My favorites have been almost certainly a lecture about RPG mechanics, a speak on horror by the developer of the upcoming Silent Hill Downpour (even although I disagreed with plenty) and a talk about overall performance capture (by 1 of the founders of Ninja Theory).



Apart from the GDC stuff, we also attended anything named the NotGames Fest. It was an exhibit that showcased a bunch of games that did not have a huge concentrate on "enjoyable game mechanics", and Amnesia was one of these. It was all significantly a lot more nicely setup than I thought it would be. Visitors had to enter a atmospherically lit, cave-like area constructed up from cardboard. It was very moody and fitted the exhibit completely. I really liked how it contrasted the standard, ear-deafening, sensory overloading exhibits videogames are typically shown in and had a extremely calm and serene really feel to it instead. I hope that there will be more game exhibitions like this!

At the evening the exhibit also had a BBQ featuring hot-dogs in round buns, which was felt a strange (but still tasted good). Jens told me this some German tradition. Anybody know anything more about this strange way of hot-dog consumption?



Also like to note that two guys form the Italian company Santa Ragione gave us a free of charge copy of their horror board game "Escape from the Aliens in outer space". We attempted it even though waiting for our plane to take off and even even though we were probably a bit as well handful of it was truly good. Will definitively play it once again.