Six attend Game Developers Conference in San Francisco
Six Media School students experienced the world of professional game development at the Game Developers Conference March 14-18 in San Francisco.
Nathan Abbott, Max Lancaster, Angela Lograsso, Jake Jeffers, Jordan Coffman and Raymond Stump joined game design faculty at the conference, which featured 400 presentations and hands-on workshops. It attracts more than 26,000 attendees, including programmers, artists, producers, game designers, audio professionals and others involved in the development of interactive games.
Some of the group took the Train Jam from Chicago to San Francisco, networking with one another before the conference. Others flew directly to California.
Senior Nathan Abbott reported on the trip:
Day 1: We started at 10 a.m. at the Moscone Center. There was only one game design workshop that day, and it was eight-hours long and one of the best experiences of my life. I sat down with one of my friends and next thing we knew, three other students from Europe sat across from us. We exchanged pleasantries and business cards, and talked about games.
After about 10 minutes, the workshop began, and our main speaker started talking to us about systems within games and making paper prototypes. This talk was similar to one of professor of practice Mike Seller’s talks at IU. Robin, the main speaker, had us split into groups and create a paper prototype for a video game that we knew.
That task turned out to be a lot harder than most people anticipated. Creating a physical version of a system from a video game is hard to do because you don’t have any of the visuals or music/SFx to help give life to your game.
After this, we broke off into electives of our choice. I went to a Design Jam, where we created a concept of a game in an hour. Our restrictions were that we had to create a game about being a sports coach that was designed for 40+ year-old men who like gadgets. It also had to be made for a Web browser, and we had five years, $100 million and 200 experienced workers on our team.
I will be honest and say it was one of the weirdest game design experiences I have ever had. Nothing at school ever prepared me for the ridiculousness of what I did during that one hour of design. Our speakers role-played during this event and came over to our table as a creative director, producer or marketer to give us more “guidance” about our project.
Even though the Design Jam was really intense, it was an amazing experience being put into a design environment that was outside my comfort zone. My team was a lot of fun, and it was nice working with industry professionals for this event.
Day 2 was much different from Day 1. I decided to go to talks and lectures instead of doing the second day of the Design Workshop. And man, was it worth it! I met so many cool people in the game industry and listened to so many interesting and amazing lectures about level design.
My favorite talk was by Jolie Menzel about puzzle design within levels. It really gave me some great ideas on how to implement puzzles into my own games. At one point, I was so overwhelmed with all the information that I went outside to the nice park next door to relax. I ended up relaxing for only a minute because I started talking to the guy next to me. He also happened to be a Blizzard employee, which is coincidentally the place that I’ve always dreamed of working. He gave me some major tips on getting into the industry and Blizzard. He even invited me to a student mixer the next day.
After that I went to a mixer hosted by the people who gave the level design talks. I talked with the speakers and got their opinions on certain styles of game design.
***
Days three through five included workshops, a career center, town hall meetings for members of professional organizations and exhibits of new products, virtual reality and board games.
More: