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Now that the Austin GDC has wrapped up, I have a few impressions that bear reporting.  Overall it was a great experience, informative and entertaining.  It was one of the few trade shows I've attended that I actually enjoyed, maybe due to a genuine interest in the people and companies and what they have to say.

I made the rounds to every booth and cheerfully presented my card, either asking for work (if a game company) or sponsorship (if a portal/publisher).  Long shots all, no doubt.   Most major game companies had a booth and were advertising positions, but relatively few had openings in Austin.  Most of the folks I talked to were from out of town, and the place was packed - many of the sessions in smaller rooms were standing room only.  It was a fairly diverse crowd, a mix of geeks and suits, and lots of folks older than me, which is good (I need the runway).  More females than I expected, but they're still a small minority in the industry, it seems.  

People seemed to belong to 2 distinct camps: those oriented towards big budget console and/or PC games, and...everyone else. It isn't surprising that big companies have fancier booths, and hold "sponsored" sessions to advocate their way of doing things, but the voice of the Rebellion was also loud and clear, and that was exciting.   On the one hand you've got hives of highly specialized workers, building huge, complex, very expensive products, driven by risk management as much as creativity.  On the other, a strange mix of advertisers, academics, makers of serious games and simulations, and most of all casual, web-based game developers, dreaming (like me) of DIY world-building, and creating game experiences that don't necessarily involve killing endless alien hordes or cost umpteen million and years to build.   There's no real antagonism between these groups, and much goodwill and cross-pollination, but their visions of the future can be very different.  

Most of the sessions I attended were worthwhile.  I heard a very useful description of  how to use "smart terrain" to influence NPC behavior, by giving each a dynamic, weighted set of Needs (like patrol, rest, and socialize for a soldier) that correspond to terrain waypoints and animation sequences.   Environments feel much more immersive when NPCs are both unpredictable, and are influenced by the player's actions.  Other general take-aways:  great audio is always worth the cost, proper design documents and preproduction are always worth the cost, building a scalable MMO is both fantastically difficult and not as hard as you think, the big titles are boringly similar and we need to think beyond them to something different while emulating them as closely as possible, community building is everything, making it fun is everything, immersion is everything, finding the right balance of community, fun, and immersion is everything, and most of all, if you want to make games, you should be doing it, using whatever tools and technologies you can get your hands on (as I'm whispering “Blender and Unity!” at the back of the room).

Sulka Haro's keynote about Habbo Hotel was eye-opening.  What they are doing with community building and microtransactions is worth studying.   Did he say the ingame economy is worth 600 million dollars?  80 million registered users?  7.5 million uniques per month?  Staggering numbers.  All this, with Director as a platform, and simple graphics in isomorphic projection.  He's giving the kids what they want, a sense of community and investment in a safe environment. 

Raph Koster speaks like a man with the momentum of the universe behind him; he's on a righteous crusade, and ain't scared to say it.   His riffs on indie empowerment and "the net is the platform" are very appealing;  I loved his snarky enthusiasm, shooting barbs down the table at the Death Star representatives during the final roundtable session of the conference.  He compares them to the old AOL: a beautiful walled garden where users are tightly controlled, and all the content is provided to you by your Betters.  That's fine until other options become available, like Googling or making your own web pages.  To Raph, the console and retail box guys seem as blind to the evolving dynamics of the net as AOL was back then.  In order to maintain subscriptions, ever more elaborate, expensive content must be generated, and it's plain to see the cost curve they're on now is not sustainable.    Meanwhile, on the net you can create gigantic value on a relative shoestring  by building communities, and getting users to work for you.  But to do that, you must empower them, and release control of the experience.  Most user generated content is crap, they say.  True, says Raph, but the small percentage that isn't crap is going to kick your ass.  They may be untrained and unprofessional (not to say unwashed), but there are way more of them, and they're better than you are.   Music to my ears, man.  

It was great to meet Tom Higgins and Sam Kalman from Unity, and get my hands on the soon-to-be-released version 2.0, which will include terrain painting, dynamic shadows, and multiplayer networking, and many other supercool features.  I praised them and Unity effusively, and spread the Unity meme wherever I could throughout the show. I hope to be able to attend the first Unity conference in San Francisco, but budget issues may prevent that. If I have to choose between upgrading to version 2 when it's released or attending the conference, I'm sure they'll understand if I choose the former.

Regarding my other favorite tool Blender, I got some blank stares when I mentioned it, although some others shared my enthusiasm, especially regarding the new FBX export capability, allowing transfer of skeletal animation data.  I did see some Blender demos running in the HP booth on 30” displays they're trying to sell.  None of the schools or training companies had Blender in their curriculum.  I assured them that was a mistake, and they should fix it. :)