GDC 2015 from our point of view
This year we were at GDC 2015! If you don’t know it yet — it’s the biggest conference for game developers, taking place every year at San Francisco. Long story short — it’s like porn for game developers.
But how did I get to GDC? Everything started when we was at CEGC (our report here) and I met Mariebeth Aquino (she is organizing the CEGC) there. We talked a lot and before GDC I was totally lucky because one of scholars just canceled his GDC attendance under Games Austria scholars program. So she offered me to go instead of him — there was nothing to think about — I said YES!
So thank you Marie and thank you Games Austria for this unique opportunity!
The hardest part of GDC was definitely flight from Prague to San Francisco — nearly 20 hours in a plane, totally exhausting.
But lets focus on GDC itself — first day I felt like “Alice in wonderland”, everything was new to me and everything was totally awesome. GDC took place at Moscone Center, which consists of 3 buildings and each had around 3 floors. Yes, It was huge, really!
Also I met there a group of people who were Games Austria scholars as well — amazing people!
I’d have to describe GDC in three statements, it will be — great talks, amazing parties, cool people!
The first really impressive thing at GDC was the fact, that Epic released their Unreal Engine 4 for free to everyone! And as they said: “If you love something, set it free”. This is a great opportunity for everyone to achieve their dreams and create something memorable.
To schedule talks I used the official GDC iOS application but looking at it, I got a feeling that I must split up myself, because every talk sounded like a “must-go”. Decisions, decisions…
So I decided to go to Microsoft’s line up of talks about DirectX 12, which was really interesting and now I’m looking forward even more to DirectX 12. They talked about how programmers can increase CPU performance, how DirectX 12 will be more friendly with multi-threaded games or better resource control for developers. Also there was a talk by Alistair Brown about how they using DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 effects in Star Citizen in damage model of space ships.
At the end of day I went to Austrian Networking Event where there were a lot of interesting people — we talked nearly the whole night.
TIP: Buy power bank and print many business cards, it’s really necessary for GDC.
On Tuesday I went to the talks line up by Imagination called IDC15 when they talked about their upcoming hardware - PowerVR Rogue - and they also showed new tools for graphics debugging and profiling. It was good because I didn’t know these tools even exists —and they are really useful if you are developing graphics intense games and application.
I definitely can recommend to everyone to give it a try, it’s worth your time. You can download them on http://www.imgtec.com/tools/powervr-tools/
At lunch I went to Yerba Buena Gardens which was a great place to talk with people and enjoy the sunny weather in San Francisco. After lunch there was a great talk by Dennis Gustafsson, who spoke about destructions in Smash Hit — mobile game with really impressive destruction model. It was really inspiring to listen to Dennis because he hit many dead-ends when he was implementing destructions.
After that I went to talk by Sergiy Migdalskiy from Valve which was supposed to be about physics optimizations, but Sergiy mainly spoke about micro optimizations in CPU code, like chained pointers, memory reading, CPU waiting and more. I enjoyed every minute of it.
I have many notes from his presentation and I’d like to try to implement them in our project.
At the end of day there was another interesting talk from team behind game Republique and they talked about organization, team efficiency and also how they went through upgrade from Unity 4 to 5.
In the past they promised to create desktop version of Republique to their backers in Kickstarter campaign with new features. This was the reason why they upgraded to Unity 5, beacuse now they can deliver stunning visual style for desktop, that will be called Republique Remastered.
There were many good points and tips how to manage big game and don’t lost in its content and still maintain the efficiency of team and whole development process.
And as usually I went to some parties at night to meet some new people and also show them our game RENOIR. And I was totally surprised because many people already knew about RENOIR — it was unbelievable when guy from Ubisoft said: “Oh yeah, I already know RENOIR and I really like it!”.
Wednesday was totally special day for many reasons. First we went to Conference Associates (guys in yellow shirts) morning pitch and also the Expo part of GDC was opened. The CA pitch was incredible and also really inspiring — they have so much energy and passion for what they are doing.
The expo was enormously large — I spent nearly half of day walking around every booth from Microsoft through Sony to NVIDIA. NVIDIA also had there space for their new Android TV gaming console NVIDIA SHIELD which was announced right at GDC.
But many smaller studios were there too to showcase their new projects. Many of them were really good and I’m totally excited about some games that I’ve seen there.
I also went to Unity party which was full of cool people — for example I’ve met many people from the University of Utah and they showed me some of their games with clever mechanics. And you know — this was the Unity party, right? So I’ve met CEO of Unity David Helgason and took a selfie with him!
Thursday was a big day for every OpenGL developer, because there was planned a session called “glNext: The Future of High Performance Graphics” where Valve talked about new graphic API — Vulkan.
And after that I was at AMD talk about DirectX 12 which was about efficiency and performance on AMD platforms.
I spent nearly whole day meeting new people going around the Expo.
But at night I went to invite-only Ubisoft party (thanks to Ubisoft Blue Byte Studio Head Benedikt Grindel) which was great - I met there many people from Respawn, Ubisoft (obviously), EA and many others.
End of GDC was coming and on Friday I spent most of my time meeting people — like Petr Poláček and Martin Bach from game server Games.cz, which is maybe biggest online games magazine in Czech Republic, and they did small interview about my GDC experience with me.
You watch it here (in Czech): http://games.tiscali.cz/video/ozveny-ze-san-francisca-den-paty-248581
Also I went to some talks like “Better Power, Better Performance: Your game on DirectX 12 by Microsoft” or talks about Far Cry 4 and technology behind rendering and textures.
And that’s it, that was (in short) my GDC 2015 experience. As you can see — article is full of words like “awesome”, “great” and similar and it’s not because I like these words but because Game Developers Conference is really top-notch event filled with cool people and energy!
Next year — I will be there!
Martin Pernica
CEO & programmer
