Tejas Shirodkar

The last 3 days at GDC Europe came to a really good end with me getting some inside info on the demo scene by Dierk ‘kaos’ Ohlerich himself!!! Apparently there is a demo scene party in 2 weeks in Cologne as well, would be interesting if am able to come back here again at the weekend for it!!!

Now am not really going to go into the details about the lectures or talks as the contents can be found quite easily on the web and am far from a journalist, but there were several interesting things to take away from this GDC.

I mostly attended technical sessions with some business/management along with design related sessions, it seems like a healthy mix. As for the interesting ones I missed, GDC Vault will be there for the rescue in about a week!!!

After some technical talks it seemed like sometimes it’s better to just go through the slides or the research papers and I could walk out with more information but I guess that was due to the communication and presentation skills of the speakers. I agree that most people giving these sessions are not always very gifted in the department of presentation but if you are starting to go to such conferences then am sure honing these skills would help the speakers and their audience a lot as well. In contrast most of the Intel sessions and the last one by Dierk got the point across quite well and 2 talks focused around task stealing although at different ends helped a lot as well!!!

There were several good things to take-away from the sessions sometimes in the contents, sometimes while interacting with the speakers and sometimes by the thoughts or the questions that the speakers evoked in the mind.

It was my first time at the GDC and gatherings such as these some times make you feel quite small in the face of the enormous progress you see showcased by people in different areas but of course you can not stand toe to toe with everyone in every area so it does make sense to find your own niche and what you do well and build on it. Apart from that the gatherings also infuse new enthusiasm and increase the drive to go even further and achieve more!

Lastly the aspect of networking is a really good thing, it kind of reminded me of all the inter city/ state tournaments I used to go to as a kid. As mentioned earlier you get to meet some really interesting people and sharing insights and views can be a very healthy process.

Will stop here for now, very tired, need sleep, although the GDC is over Gamescom is still on! I couldn’t really do much today with a lot of things happening at the same time and some really interesting encounters but more on all that later. I will try to go around tomorrow and cover more of whats left of Gamescom although with all visitors being allowed it seems like that’s going to be really hard.