Finally!

I know, I know. You were like, “Did they even really GO to GDC? All we know is that they were pretty inactive for a week.” But here it is. Undeniable proof that we were, in fact, there.

And it was awesome…We were supposed to bring with us two other USC students, for a total of 8, so we were going to get two rental cars. But they bailed on us, so instead Nick, Jenova and I decided it would be a lot more fun to rent this beast:

Jeep Durango, TGC wheels '07

When we got to San Fran, we stayed in a totally ghetto Travelodge. Wednesday night, Nick's duffel bag and John's laptop got stolen. Nick went to tell the night watchmen, who shrugged his shoulders and said “Yeah, it happens.”

John working at the hotel, not knowing three days from now he would need a new laptop:

TGC Travel Rule #1: The Cheap Motel is Never Worth It.

So, that part wasn't so awesome. But the rest of the week was totally awesome. We saw a bunch of you guys, hung out with Phil Harrison from Sony AND Reggie Fils-Aime from Nintendo (Reggie convinced Phil to try out the Wii), met Cliffy B:

And I geeked out and made Austin take a picture of me with Alexy Pajitnov, the FREAKING CREATOR OF TETRIS:

Oh yeah, and there were our talks, too.
First of all, the Independent Games Summit was fantastic. It occurred, along with a few other special-interest summits, on the Monday and Tuesday preceding the GDC. These summits I think really helped to maintain that community vibe of the GDC, and some of the more engaging talks happened on these two days.

To kick the week off, on Monday Jenova participated in a panel discussion on Innovation in Indie Games. It was a thrilling debate that asked “what is innovation” and “should we care about innovation, anyways?” It felt like by the end of the two days, the word “innovation” had become SO pase, and instead “emotion” and “player experience” had taken its place. Jonathan Mak pointed out that if you are making games that you think will be popular based on what's already out there, you are letting the current market dictate your design choices. Similarly, if you intentionally make games that are “innovative” or different than anything else out there, you are STILL allowing the current market to dictate your design choices.

From left to right: Jonathan Blow, Kyle Gabler, Johnathan Mak, and Jenova Chen. If you don't know who these people are, look them up. Now.

Tuesday, Jenova and I presented on our process in making Cloud, and how to develop experimental student projects. Our focus was clear creative direction, keeping a small scope, and leveraging your resources as a student (i.e. the internet and school resources).

Friday at noon we had our final talk, “Classroom to the Console: The Autobiography of flOw”, and what a finale! If you haven't seen it already, IGN did a pretty good summary of the talk:

The IGN article (Thanks, Dreamer!)

GDC will eventually post video of it, and at that time we'll see if it makes sense to make our slides available. Although, if you've seen us present before, you know that our slides aren't really typical bullet point-style, so I don't know how useful they are out of context.

By the way, Austin was king of the audio ball. He went to a bunch of the audio talks, and many of them referenced flOw! It was so cool, even Video Games Live founder Tommy Talarico gave him props on flOw.

Etc, etc:
My GDC flickr set
Jenova's GDC flickr set
Tracy Fullerton's (IMD Faculty) set

I'm going to let everyone chime in on the next few blog posts to talk about more specific people and talks, because this post has just gotten crazy.

I (almost) have recovered, and am already beginning to look forward to next February!