GDC and PAX Awesomeness

Hiya! As you might know, we recently came back from both GDC and PAX. GDC (Game Developer's Conference) is a week-long event that takes place in San Francisco, and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a massive consumer-facing weekend event that takes place in Boston. This year, the two were about a week apart, and we're rested up and back to our routine... if you can call it a routine. 

GDC is a great opportunity to learn, get inspired, do business, and meet other great devs. The conference involves going to lectures, meeting cool people, going to eat, meeting more cool people, going to parties, and meeting even more cool people. We were also nominated for an Indie Game Festival award for design, which was a great honour, and we got to go to the award show which was a ton of fun.

The award ceremony was hosted by the lovely Nina Freedman, and then the Game Developer Choice awards were hosted by Tim Schafer, who was funny as ever. We got to feel fancy and have little (kinda big actually) meatball hors d'oeuvres and wine and stuff. That was just one of the many, many, many parties where we met a ton of great people.

We went to some great talks as well, and we were able to share the knowledge within the team at dinner one night as well as in a meeting that took place here at our office. The most interesting thing about the talks is not only that they teach great things, but also that they inspire you to think of things beyond what was covered in the talk, and talk about those ideas at parties (which further accelerates the creativity).

The next step was PAX East, which is a game expo which sees over 150,000 people over three days (my source on this isn't reliable, but I think it's close to that). As you can imagine, the show was pretty crazy. 

It was really great to hear people come up to us and tell us how much they loved the game, as well as introduce it to new people who hadn't seen the game yet. We also had some press interviews and had some streamers pop by to play the game. 

It was a great two weeks full of team bonding, lots of beer, knowledge gathering, and gaming (though we didn't actually get to play much...) and we're looking forward to the next event.

:)