Plan for L Foster

GDC 05 Wrap-up & Synopsis

I have been back for a day and a half now from a great GDC. For those of you who didn't know, GDC was held in San Francisco this year, which essentially meant that we got a chance to work off all the calories from the massive amounts of alcohal that was consumed.

The show itself was pretty intersting. I had never been to GDC so I quite honestly never expected how focused the expo was towards professional development and working together to make games better. The expo floor itself was filled with a lot of great vendors who were more than happy to demonstrate their products and talk to you as a developer (versus some kid who snuck into E3).


The Lore pod at the IGF booth... located right in the middle and standing out and looking awesome

Overall I have to say that GDC was a great experiance thanks to the great public reaction to Dark Horizons Lore : Invasion at the IGF pavilion. We made a lot of good business contacts and I felt that we really got a great opportunity to showcase our game to a large crowd who likely never would have seen or heard of it otherwise. We had a lot of people stop by and check out the game and chat with us about its development and make business contacts with some very cool industry guys. Heck we even had the producer of Mechwarrior 2 come by and play for quite some time and he seemed very receptive of the game and what we had accomplished as indies.

The only unfortunate thing was that we did not come back with any awards (everyone was very bitter about this since we had all poured so much into Lore Invasion), but looking back on it now the publicity it got will be reward enough in the long run.


We had a great little table at the IGF/IDGA ceremony that we took over and consumed a lot of beer and little chedder goldfish... thankfully no accidents occured due to this combination ;)

I was fortunate enough to have access to a classic GDC pass which allowed me access to many session that I found highly beneficial thanks to my day job (shameless plug: Enter the OpEngine Indie XTRA contest for a chance to win $10,000).

I felt that a lot of the sessions were really beneficial and opened my eyes to other considerations that I can add to help enhance the game projects that I am working on and make them bigger and better without costing us much in the means of development time or requiring 30 odd people and creating a management nightmare for myself and others. I don't know why but I am a sucker for a lot of the psychology and instructional design that goes into this stuff and am actually contemplating taking some classes in the evening to learn this stuff more.

Unfortunately I haven't put all my notes together yet about my thoughts and feelings that I have taken back from the sessions that I got an opportunity to check out and the information that I have put into written form is unfortunately confidential since its things that will likely be rolled into Lore Invasion and Realm Wars.


The Friday wrap-up at Bucca di Bebbi

Lastly it was great to have an opportunity to meet up with friends both old and new including the entire Max Gaming crew of Adrian, Ed, Anthony and Sebastian; our friends at GarageGames such as Jay, BenB, BenG, Matt Fairfax, Pat Wilson, Tim Aste, Jeff Tunnel; Kevin Grove from Chronic Logic; Tom Spillman; Justin Mette and Kevin Ostrow from 21-6; and industry friends such as Louie, Vince, Jodi and John from Discreet; Paul Neale from Pen Productions, Alan Noon from day1; and Don Moar from Bioware.


Anthony and I enjoy the hospitality from Discreet at their hotel suite: Max 7.5, a great view and an open bar... what a great combination