San Francisco, CA - Game Developer Conference

Dear Friends:

Recently, I spent the week in San Francisco.  The reason for the visit, was to attend the 2017 Game Developer Conference (GDC).  This is the biggest gathering of folks connected to the actual development of games.

The conference itself is only three days long, and attracts around 30,000 people.  However, several events are held in connection to the conference - because everyone in the industry is there.

The weather in San Francisco that week was amazing.  Just prior to that, it was raining quite heavily - so I guess one could say that I brought a little Texas sunshine with me??

At the very beginning of the week, my team at work held a little "offsite" meeting.  We are located across the globe, so GDC is a great opportunity to bring us together.  We spent a full day in a conference room, discussing strategies for each of the major territories around the globe.  I delivered the presentation on North and South America - and things went quite well.

During the lunch break, I grabbed some chocolate from Ghiradelli, to help keep everyone awake for the afternoon presentations.  I also wanted to show the folks from Europe that not all chocolate in the U.S. is horrible ; )

Throughout the week, I attended several business dinners.  This is one of the benefits of traveling to San Francisco - there's an endless supply of great restaurants to chose from.

Seafood sampler from Scoma's on Fisherman's Wharf

The next day was an important one for me.  Here's the background - in the game industry, lots of developers us a "game engine".  This is technology that provides almost all of the base functionality of a game, allowing developers to concentrate on the more "creative" aspects of development.  The game engine business is actually quite big.  The market leader is called "Unity" and it owns over half of the engine market.  This means that if you can optimize the performance of the Unity engine on your hardware, that makes games perform better.  I've been working with Unity for the last year to introduce a new feature that would help speed-up the performance of games...and help save the battery life of smartphones and tablets.  The joint initiative was introduced publicly at a press conference held by Unity at GDC.

This is a big deal for my team, as we were features front-and-center during the press conference, using material that I had helped develop.

The event went really well, and it was a huge relief when it was over.  The culmination of a year-long project was really fun to finally see available for game developers.

The next day, the actual conference began.  While hundreds of presentations are being given at the conference, there is an "expo" floor with hundreds of thousands of square feet of trade show exhibit space.  The booths at the expo were impressive, especially the larger companies in our industry

One of the booths that I had meetings in, was actually two stories.  The conference rooms were on the upper floor.  I decided to take a picture from up above, to show how big the Oculus booth (VR) actually was:

My company had its own booth - a little smaller by comparison ; )  GDC was my project this year, so I worked hard to make sure everything looked great.

Because the video game business is so large, several countries actually had exhibit space at the expo, and allowed smaller game developers from their respective countries, show off their products.  These countries want to attract more developers to help build high-tech economies.  Here are just a couple of the country pavilions:

As I said, everyone in the industry was there.  I ran into a ton of friends while walking around.  This is a group from AMD, and it was great to catch-up with them for a few minutes:

As is the case with many conferences, there are several parties each night.  This year, I only visited a few of them ; )  One of the nicer events was held by Google (no surprise) at the old San Francisco Mint.  They had several taco bars to supply dinner - and they were actually good.

As you can see from the image below, there were a LOT of people there.  Just a little crazy...

Back at the conference, there were some exhibits that caught my eye.  This one was a tiny little display from Champlain College.  Their graduate students created something called Spacebox.  This was a fun game that had you flying through space.  The difference was that you sat inside a cardboard box and your movements in the box caused changes in the game.  Talk about living out a childhood dream - this was really imaginative:

I had a nice surprise during the conference.  My oldest daughter actually works in SF now, so she stopped by to see me.  It was a real treat, in the middle of all the conference craziness ; )

Virtual reality was a very popular topic at the conference.  Many companies were showing both hardware and software solutions for developers.

The new LG Vive VR headset

This was a virtual dog experience.  With controllers in your hand, you could interact with the virtual dog.  Don't ask me why...just marvel at the way the dog interprets gestures.  You can also try to pick the dog up ; )

Here's a good old fashioned, bow-and-arrow VR experience inside of a traditional fantasy game....

And just when you think you've seen everything...a game comes along called "Eggggg" - it's a game where the main character actually vomits his way through an obstacle course.  Yep...you read that right.  The company was handing out creative "sick bags"

The night before the closing of the show, I took the opportunity to visit with my daughter and grandson.  I rode the train down from San Francisco, and little J absolutely loves trains.  He was in awe of the commuter train as it arrived.  We had an absolute blast playing together that evening:

Grandpa even had fun helping out with J's bath.  He's such a delightful kid...and he loves to laugh.  That totally works for me!

Overall, it was a very successful week, at a conference that I've been attending for many, many years.  I came away feeling that I had accomplished all the goals I had set.  I returned to Austin very content!