Luckily after my adventures last night I had plenty of time to rest and recover before the sessions kicked off at 11am this morning. It's another beautiful day here in Vancouver with partly-cloudy skies and a high of 60F, which is actually perfect even though you are right next to the water - the sun warms you when the chilly wind blows and I'm walking around all day with just a fleece sweater or open dress shirt over my t-shirt.

Today was the Game Career Seminar track of sessions I decided to sit in on. The first was a talk from Obsidian Entertainment's hiring manager Jim Rivers about how to present yourself to a company for a job. It was mainly the same stuff he covered back at the 09 Austin GDC GCS, which I live-tweeted here. Some of the hilarious examples he gave this time around for bad resume submittals were: 1) some guy's voicemail on his phone was "drop it at the tone, bitches" and 2) someone said he'd take out his trash or clean his office every night for a chance to work at the company. Creepy. Then after lunch there was an interview with Tommy Tallarico done by Victor Lucas from Electric Playground (they used to co-host the show) - however again this was ground I had already covered. Then there was a panel of HR people from local companies answering audience questions and 1) a lot of the questions were nothing spectacular and 2) the GCS was held in the largest room of the conference and I couldn't hear many people asking questions and they never repeated them on the mics.

So the GCS for me was a bit of a wash-out this time around, but certainly anyone in attendance who hasn't been around to talks like these time and time again would have certainly gotten a lot of valuable information from them! And I'll update the Jim Rivers talk tweet stream with a bit more info from this one in my full write-up. What Tommy Said back in '07 is still applicable today with no edits.

The last session of the GCS was yet another repeat for me, it was the Scrap Metal guys talking about their development methodologies with their team of two people - this was given at the Indie Games Summit back at the main GDC conference this year. You can find the slides for their talk in the free section of the GDC Vault. So I was free to check out a regular conference session and chose yet another iPhone lecture that looked good only to find out that they had a print error in the program placing the iPhone session an hour later than it actually was, so I actually ended up missing it. There was a Bungie session worth checking out, but by the time I realized the error with the iPhone session, the Bungie room (which was very small for some reason) was already packed to standing room only. I love you guys, but I wasn't going to suffocate in a poorly-ventilated room. Sorry.

So that's it for GDC Canada! I think this is a great location to hold a conference that's on the opposite side of the calendar from the Montreal International Games Summit as well as on the opposite side of the country. Vancouver is a great city with a great development community and with plenty to do right in the immediate area of the conference, and the average weather at this time of year is the beautiful temperatures I'm experiencing right now. The convention center as well is very nice, you can see another view down the lobby that offers a look out to the mountains in the image at the top. If you're a Canadian that can't afford travel to some of the bigger US conferences, definitely either make it out to this or MIGS.

So tonight I'm going to attend a Women In Games Vancouver party that's apparently happening later tonight, and turns out it's the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival this week and so I'll prob catch a show over at the Rickshaw Theater later on tonight as well. Then I have the day to myself tomorrow and will be starting the morning off with a free swordplay lesson (the Mastery session) then biking through Stanely Park in the afternoon and hitting up Granville Is in the evening. I'll talk about tomorrow (and the trip in general) more over on my personal blog.

Sunday I catch a train bright and early to head down to Seattle for LOGIN, so I'll be back here writing up more conference impressions soon! Ciao for now.