Oh yes, it's that time of year again. I'm actually getting to this within a month of GDC - nay, within a week!! (well, almost) There may be hope for me yet.

The Good

Laptop FTW

I so love my new Sony Vaio X. Not only is it sleek and sexy, but light and long-lasting. It wasn't until I picked up my old laptop to pack it for the trip as a back-up booth computer and nearly broke my wrist that I realized how much my interpretation of "light" had shifted. I used to think of that laptop as being light, but now it's like a walrus compared to the X. So carrying it around in my messenger bag I hardly even knew it was there.

The double-capacity battery (rated at 14 hours) is also amazing on this thing. I never had to carry around my power adaptor because there was no need for it. Even with it constantly on during the first day of the Indie Games Summit I ended the day with about 3 hours remaining, and I even carried around my second spare battery (another ~3 hours) just in case. I now laugh at people who complain about their laptop batteries *cough*Trent*cough**cough*Lissa*cough*

I even used it to charge my iPhone while I was walking around to various parties at night, which is why I was tweeting up a storm the whole conference.

GDNet shot glasses

These were a huge hit, both at the show and back home. They were practically gone by the end of the second day of the Expo, and I was left with about a dozen to hand out to select friends of GDNet that hadn't had time to stop by to pick one up. I dunno why it took us so long to think of something like this. Props to Lissa!

Right now we have no plans to produce more, but we did notice the reaction and see the demand out there. Perhaps in the near future we'll look into better logo etching options and put some up for sale.

The booth

Last year I was reminded why it's so awesome having a booth, and this year was no different. I found myself wanting to spend as much time as possible there, interacting with all the people who came by and showing off the new site version we had displayed on the monitor.

A lot of people were coming by just to get drink tickets for the party we were sponsoring with IGDA and GameSpy, but every now and then you got the genuine GDnet community member. One person waited behind several drink ticket people for a few minutes just to come up and say "thank you, your site has saved me so many times from programming problems." I gave him a high five. It's just awesome to meet people like that, and he wasn't the only one by far!

If you're reading this and you stopped by the booth at GDC - thank you!!! We love you all and are so happy to hear from you how we're helping you in your game dev ambitions.

Team dinner

This year we gathered 20 staff/mods/close friends of GDNet at Buca di Beppo for a feast of Italian food. So good!! It's the largest gathering we've had at GDC and we're definitely doing it again next year, as we have every year. Perhaps back at Buca, perhaps someplace else.

Student scholar

I was given the pleasure of mentoring my third IGDA student scholar this year, Andrew Brockert. Like all I've mentored, he's smart as a whip and well on his way to getting involved in the industry. He was pretty overwhelmed by his first GDC as I took him around and introduced him to Warren Spector, John Romero, Brenda Brathwaite, Will Wright, etc, etc. He was also very independent like my previous scholars and it's not like I had to spend serious time babysitting him around and such. He even managed to make it to some parties I wasn't able to get to in time :) As is my recent tradition, I also introduced him to my scholar from last year.

Wifi coverage

Wow, wifi during the conference was actually usable! They blanketed the entire convention center (north and south) with wifi this year and from my experience it handled the load extremely well when the conference kicked into full swing on Thursday. Last year I bitched endlessly about slow and inaccessible wifi, and this year they delivered. Most excellent.

Note: I didn't attend very many conference sessions, so there could have been areas where it was spotty and horrible. I didn't encounter any.

Moscone North/South

So happy to not have to deal with Moscone West this year, you have no idea. Not only was it a pain to walk across the street and around the corner, the press lounge was always on the top floor in the back corner as far away from everything as possible. This year, South and North comprised the extent of the conference, and they are linked by an underground thoroughfare. Furthermore, the press lounge was in a pretty centralized location between the sessions/Expo of North and South.

Awards show

Another great show this year, read my full review for more details and pictures.

The Bad

IGDA Party

There was a bit of mix-up concerning the mixer that was held on Friday night, which was originally billed as a GDNet event. Well, a couple of weeks before the show we decided to not do any bag inserts this year and put the money towards a small party we could host as our own. So we started looking at venues and such, and I heard from Lissa that the IGDA and GameSpy were interested in helping us out. So I naturally thought of them as sponsors, as I still thought this was our party.

Turns out that the IGDA actually had a vastly bigger stake in the party financing than I had been led to believe and that they had canceled their members-only party on Wednesday and moved it to Friday night at the time I was billing as the GDNet party. I probably would have realized this sooner being that I was RSVP'd to the original IGDA party date but never got a notice of it being changed.

So there were a lot of crossed wires, but in the end everything ended up turning out okay, and people had a great time at the event. Still, we'd like to do more of our own thing next year if we can.

Coverage Page

We were unfortunately not in a position to use the V5 platform for our conference coverage like we had hoped, so we were forced to throw up the old coverage portal on short notice. This led to a bit of delay in getting it up, posted properly, people being able to add articles, etc. Basically I did not prep at all in regards to this. Then of course we also decided to use flickr instead of our normal gallery page and couldn't really get that integrated well (for the record, using flickr was way better in terms of uploading mega batches of photos - although some people did get a little carried away with that :P)

In short, a bit of a clusterfuck like last year.

No News

I was so busy I didn't post up any news or anything much during the week. Last year Emmanuel Deloget popped up out of nowhere and handled a bunch of news articles (which was awesome), but no such luck this year. However now that Tiffany Smith is back to doing news (as of last week), hopefully next year we'll have a small team under her to manage this better, as obviously GDC is a big week for news.

Offset Dates

I can't tell you how much having GDC start on a Tuesday was screwing with my head. I kept thinking the Expo opened on Wednesday, that the conference ended on Friday... all that crap. So yea, that was pretty damn annoying. Thankfully next year we're back to the old Mon-Fri sched. It should be noted of course that conference newbies like Trent and Tim and those guys had no trouble dealing with it of course, just like me back in 2002 (which was also a Tues-Sat conference)

The Ugly

IGDA Streaming Fail

So ok, I came up with this great idea to live stream the IGDA annual meeting over our uStream channel, because it's a great chance for members around the world to listen in and give feedback to the IGDA Board of Directors, who are there in person. I made sure everything was working prior to leaving for California, but on the day of the event of course nothing worked.

But here's the strange thing - uStream's broadcasting page refused to detect any of my attached A/V gear, despite the fact that Flash was reading it fine. I made sure Flash was allowed acces, and it could even pick up gain from my external USB mic and attached PS3Eye camera. However the actual uStream broadcaster couldn't see any of that - even my built-in camera and microphone. I thought maybe it was FireFox being stupid, but when I tried loading it in IE8 it just came up as a blank page.

Even worse is that I never thought to instead use the uStream app I have on my iPhone.

Epic. Fail.

No Camera

The Canon Digital Rebel XT I use on behalf of GDNet failed to turn on shortly before I came out to the conference, and I never got around to getting it checked out. When Lissa shipped me that camera like 4 years ago she bought a new one, so I expected her to bring that. Rather I assumed she would bring that. Well, we all know how well assumptions usually turn out. I probably should have at least packed my mom or sister's point and shoot just in case, but I was already traveling tight since I was only doing carry on this year (and that's a whole other story!)

Luckily I was at least able to borrow Kevin's DSLR for my usual shots of the awards show. But other than that I only have a few crummy iPhone camera shots from GDC this year. Pretty lame.

What I Did Right

Got an iPhone

So having an iPhone for GDC this year (as opposed to just an iTouch the last two years) was a pretty awesome thing. It really kept me in touch with people via twitter and let me meet up with a lot of my friends over the course of the week. When the battery would threaten to run out I would just plug it into my laptop, which as I mentioned earlier has plenty of juice to spare.

Party/network/meetings

Again with the crazy partying! I didn't top my record of 6 parties in one night from last year, but it wasn't for lack of trying. As always, I make and solidify a lot of connections at these things - you definitely get to see a different side to people, and they in turn recognize that you're willing to kick it loose and drop the geek style for a bit of fun and debauchery. As much as you may think people attend these things for the free drinks (big bonus) the core factor remains networking. It's all about the networking. Which, ironically, is made challenging by the thumping music that drowns out just about anything you try to say.

Flair

This year I extended the flair on my conference badge to the shoulder strap of my messenger bag. A lot of people were taking photos, and at parties I would simply walk around until I noticed someone staring (or gaping) at my flair and that would be my cue to stop and chat. I probably met about 1/4 of the people I met this year through this method alone.

Of course, the only environment I fear this will have no effect at all is PAX East this weekend :P

Staying Atop my Schedule

I remembered to check my schedule at the start of every day so I didn't miss any meetings, and was able to keep it up to date with changing event/meeting times so as not to miss out on any of that either. I was also better synced with my Outlook calendar through iTunes and my iPhone than I had been last year with just the iTouch.

What I Did Wrong

Didn't Review 2009 Postmortem

There was a lot of stuff in my '09 postmortem that I never even considered this year because I completely neglected to read the past year's pm like I normally do for my GDC prep

Too Much

I think I tried doing too many things at the conference this year - so much so that some stuff kinda just fell flat. I think next year my main focus should be on the writing staff in attendance, making sure they have what they need to cover sessions and handling any problems they have doing so. I was able to do this a lot, but I feel a lot of the newcomers on the team to the whole GDC experience were left adrift a little bit. Focus focus focus!

What I Want To Do Next Year

Pretty much what I said in 09

Not only will we have the awesome new V5 tools next time around, I hope to discover what the best way to cover the conference really is for us. I do not want our staff taking too much time to write coverage when they could be enjoying the conference, and I don't want to be writing up sessions like all the other websites out there. Still looking for a cool way to present this coverage to everyone, and will be seeking feedback on that (starting now, in the comments, if you like)

4th Student Scholar

I'm really enjoying mentoring student scholars. They've all been great kids (actually one was almost 10 years older than me!) and I really feel like I've made their GDC a whole other experience thanks to being able to show them around and introducing them to people. Actually I know this to be the case: they've all told me as much :)

Being Big w/ v5

Not only will our name be even more of a common industry term, but we'll have a powerful new web platform to build off of moving forward, which means by next year's GDC we'll have some really cool stuff to show to people on the show floor and will actually be able to directly pitch services to developers and publishers and business peoples alike. As always, I'm super excited at the direction things are going.

Renting a Sports Car

I had an adventure renting a car to visit family (I'm usually driven around by them instead) and look to rent again next year - this time a Lotus Elise or Porsche Boxster - to really tackle the amazing roads you can find just outside of the city.