After I picked up my badge I started walking around the West Hall to see what I could get my hands on. There were attendees everywhere either chatting or typing away on their computers. Technically the exposition doesn’t start until Wednesday so the first couple of days are mainly for the developers and business people but there were still some stuff I could still check out.
I quickly stepped into one of the AI Summit’s sessions involving AI postmortems from Eric Grundstrom, senior software engineer at EA, Matt Tonks, gameplay programmer for Epic Games, and John Abercrombie, AI programmer at 2k Boston. I learned what was successful and unsuccessful for them in their attempts at programming AI. It was quite interesting actually and I definitely got something out of it.
With this being my first GDC I finally realized how beneficial it really is. It’s wonderful to have people who’ve professionally worked on games come and talk about their experiences to help influence the future developers. It makes me wish I made video games too.
So that’s all I have for now. Come back all week for more GDC posts and news stories. Aaron and I will be at Iwata’s keynote and I’ve got a couple of interviews with developers lined up so you definitely don’t want to miss that. And if you’re at GDC don’t be a stranger! Look for the guy with a blue backpack and say hello.