GDC: The First Night

Hey,

I haven't written in a while but I'm at GDC and feel like what I'm learning/doing should be recorded somewhere. In the past I've kept my posts mainly to what I've read but I'm going to do several entries about each of my days at GDC. At first they will be in outline form as notes for myself. Once I get back to school I will go back and add more detail, descriptions, etc.

Once I got to San Francisco I dropped my stuff off and went a casual games party hosted by Zynga. My friend who I was staying with was at another party so I had to go alone which was pretty intimidating. I did finally start talking to people and received some interesting insights. The first person I talked to was a designer at a start up who I asked what advice he could give an aspiring producer. He told me that being able to talk to each part of development (art, programmers, design, etc) and then translate to other departments is one of the most important skills for a producer. He introduced me to a senior level employee at Microsoft who repeated much of the same thing to me.

I started wandering again at this point and met an artist at EA. He told me about how when he applied to EA he didn't have a college education and his portfolio was nowhere near today's standards. The times have clearly changed a lot and breaking into the industry is much more competitive. He also talked about the structure of the production department at EA. The production department is split between project managers and producers. The producers work with the development team and help with game play etc. The project managers work on the schedules and budgets for the games. He said that because of the split it creates a lot of "discussion" between each side but in the end having the powers seperated is beneficial. I can see how it can work effectively but I think that in certain situations it can cause large rifts between each of the sides. My friend finally arrived and i followed him around the room as he said Hi to everyone that he knew. I met a few flash developers bujt didn't get a chance to have a full conversation with them.

At the end of the event I was satisfied even though I didn't meet as many people as I would have liked. It is really hard going to an event like that without knowing anyone and in the future I'm going to try to always have someone there I know.


Cyaz