megawertz::blog
Google Code Blog: Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One →
- July 22 -
And yes, it’s commented.
Social Security Numbers Can Be Extrapolated From Public Data →
- July 7 -
For years, government officials have urged consumers to protect their social security numbers by giving out the 9-digit codes only when absolutely
Giz Explains: How to Choose the Right Graphics Card →
- July 2 -
There are plenty of great graphics cards out there, no matter what you’re looking for. Thing is, the odds are seemingly stacked against you ever finding the right one. It doesn’t have to be that…
Raising a healthy gamer: seven tips for parents →
- July 1 -
Parenting is always a tough job, and video games are a tricky subject in today’s families. Don’t worry, we have you covered. Ars offers a no-BS guide to dealing with gaming and your children, and our…
Light touch: a design firm grapples with Microsoft Surface →
- June 29 -
Ditching the mouse and keyboard means a whole lot more than just doing without two common peripherals. As those who’ve worked with Microsoft Surface have found out, you have to jettison decades of…
Academic source code dust-up symptom of CS education ills →
- June 12 -
A college student who published the source code of his completed school assignments recently found himself in a troubling confrontation with a professor. The conflict illustrates some of the…
End the University as We Know It →
- April 28 -
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.
Day 3 Recap
- March 26 -
This was the first full day of the conference. There were a lot of great sessions to choose from and even more friends to catch-up with. I started the day by watching Clint Hocking discuss his approach to game design in FarCry 2. It was a great look into his thoughts on design and how he is working to define the process he uses to make games. After Clint’s session I went to a panel that was supposed to reveal some insight on the development and publishing process for XBLA, PSN, and Wii Ware. It was a bit unstructured and Johnathan Blow really ran away with the session.
Lunch was relaxed and afterwards I attended the Game Developers Challenge. This is a yearly tradition at GDC and this year promised to be a good one as three designers were pitted against each other to build an autobiographical game based on their “first time.” It was a bit disappointing to find out that Valve would not let Kim Swift participate due to the topic and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Valve is a company that builds very violent games. Keeping an employee from simply discussing an idea about a game that will never be made that may be loosely based on the topic of sex is a bit disappointing. Everybody is an adult at the conference. I find the acceptance of violence and the denial of sexuality in the industry to be a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Games are art and art should express the full experience of being human.
I ended the day on the expo floor. The booth crawl started at 4:30 and it involved a large number of game companies serving drinks and building an informal environment for socializing and professional networking. This was a great opportunity for making new friends and for talking to a lot of passionate and dynamic game developers.
At night I met up with about 12 game developers, artists, writers, and designers from the Philadelphia chapter of the IGDA. We had dinner at Tres Agaves and talked about growing the Philadelphia game scene. It was cool to have the guys from Cipher Prime stop by and spend time with us. If you haven’t played their game you should. You should also buy their game to help support game development in the Philadelphia area and to help feed the young developers who made the game.
