Developing video games has been a passion of mine since I was a child. It’s actually what got me into programming. Making video games with my childhood best friend. Programming became my hobby, my degree and my career. Despite my focus now being on blockchain development, video game development still holds a close place to my heart. For instance, I’m developing a game on the side with a few colleagues, Pyramid Panic, so despite it not being my focus, I find ways to shove it into my life. Game Development is also the minor of my computer science degree, and my Seed blockchain research project is about using blockchain technology to power video game servers (among other applications as well). Despite my love for it, I have never pursued anything video game related outside of the comfort of my home, school or friends groups. That is, until last week.
For the first time of my life, I had the pleasure of visiting a wonderful video game developers conference, accurately named Game Developers Conference (GDC). For those of you who are not aware, GDC is a huge annual event where everyone from industry leaders to indie studios come together for a very large conference. Over 750 lectures, 550 companies present and a record breaking turnout of 28,000 industry professionals, describing it as “large” would be an understatement. Outside of the event, there were countless other events going on simultaneously. It’s impossible to see it all, which is both a blessing and a curse.
Today, I’m going to go over my journey and talk about the cool side adventures I got to take during this week, and just my overall experiences.
As I’m located in Vancouver Canada, I had a ways to travel to GDC, which was held in the heart of San Francisco. Overall, I stayed for eight full days, and explored Seattle on my way there and back. Truthfully, I’ve only ever been to the United States to visit my family in Seattle when I was a kid. I probably haven’t been back in the city since I was, at most, twelve years old. This was a really exciting trip for me, and only the second time I had left Canada on my own.
On my first day in San Francisco, I went to a Cryptocurrecny Game Developers meetup. It was a really fun time, as I got to meet a lot of really interesting people. I met Unity video game developers who were incorporating their own ERC20 tokens as rewards for their video game, met a BCash Twitch employee who had a lot of interesting insights, and some amazing people creating an exciting new product called NTitle.
The highlight of my night was honestly meeting the NTitle team. They were hosting a discussion panel at GDC, inviting Cryptokitties and a couple other projects to speak with them about cryptocurrencies as a monetization model in games. It was a fascinating time all around, and I got some really good feedback on my PixelProperty DApp, as well as on our research project overall.
One really awesome take away from this was getting to speak to other crypto developer folks offline. Truth be told, I’ve never met someone in day-to-day life who is a developer in this space, only people I’ve met online. Getting to interact with people and get live feedback on my research was amazing. I felt like I had a bit of imposters syndrome before the trip, feeling like a fraud, however after speaking to other professionals and being treated like an equal, I became a lot more confident in my shoes.
The most amazing time I had at GDC was going to Github's office party. Never in my dreams would I speak to so many amazing people, so easily, while still being completely in my element.
The venue was beautiful. The GitHub office is the nicest office I have ever seen, with amazing lighting, a large built-in bar, and just a very well designed layout. Games hand picked by Global Game Jam (GGJ) officials were set up around the room for anyone to play, with one other game being streamed across the office for folks to watch the friends battle it out.
I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the GGJ officials who was based in London. As a fan of GGJ and someone who has participated twice so far, it was a really fascinating experience hearing her speak about it. GGJ is a global event, with locations set up by volunteers all over the world. This is a colossal effort to organize, and I give her and the rest of the GGJ team a lot of respect after learning about the scale of the matter.
On the stage, I had the opportunity to play this amazing game that is not for sale or distribution. The game is none other than Multibowl, a two player battle across three hundred emulated historic games. I got to play twice, with an even record of 1-1. Thrilling experience nonetheless!
After learning of and acquiring some Amazon Alexa Buttons, a relatively new gadget for the Amazon Alexa, myself and my colleague spontaneously decided to create a game for these buttons. At first, we honestly thought it was a hilarious constraint, simply ridiculous that a single LED button could be used as a game controller for video games. However, after bouncing ideas back and forth, we came up with an interesting Dungeon Explorer game where Alexa is the Dungeon Master. At this point, ButtonQuest was born.
It was intended to be a single day Game Jam, since the games seemed very easy to make. There are no visuals, no physics, no movement, no collisions, just a single input per user and Amazon Alexa as narrator. However, we learned the hard way that developing for a new technology was more work than we expected.
Sadly, the game is still not complete. We had to be added as Beta Testers to Amazon's internal systems, which was an interesting task. Amazon has been very supportive, giving us swag, more buttons, and an Alexa device to build on. Hopefully we will be releasing the game in the short future!
I could probably write ten pages about my adventures, however the above are some key highlights of my trip. Outside those adventures, I saw many amazing tutorials, met tons of fantastic connections, and feel my passion for development rejuvenated.
I’ve already found myself booking hotel reservations for next time, so I suppose I’ve already convinced myself I’m going next year! I would love to from everyone else about their experience at GDC, as I know I missed a lot of what there is to offer, and simply scratched the surface of GDC's potential.
