Okay, today was the first day of the GDC 2006 in San Jose. I awoke to the sound of the bedside alarm clock at 4:00 AM - the last guest in this room was kind enough to set the alarm for this ungodly hour of the morning. Cheers.

I got up for the second time at 7:30, dressed and went out to the front of the hotel. I’d read that the GDC was laying on buses to the event for people in GDC hotels (the Hyatt is one). This is good because I was worried about having to spend hundreds of dollars in taxi fares. I’d seen from the taxi ride from the CalTrain station to the hotel yesterday the distance is not really walkable. Sure enough there were a couple of buses waiting when I got out there, and I arrived at the GDC at a quarter to 9am. I registered for my pass in just a couple of minutes, got a showbag with the schedule and other goodies and was off and racing to the first lecture. Breakfast and lunch are laid on for free, provided you have a full pass to the show, but I missed breakfast. I won’t make this mistake tomorrow.

The vibe to the show is great. It’s much bigger than anything that would happen in Australia. The only similar event I can personally compare it to is the AEAF that I went to in Sydney last year, which I enjoyed a lot, but it’s not to the same scale as this. I guess this is probably a taster as to what E3 would be like. There’s a show floor with lots of exhibits and companies demonstrating their latest technology, middleware, hardware or games and then all the separate events off in other lecture rooms. I couldn’t find our competition entries displayed on the concourse, so I guess they decided not to display them.

The first presentation I saw was Cinematic Game Design, which talked about using film and cinema techniques in gameplay. The analysis of techniques got me thinking which was good. I then walked over to the Civic Auditorium for the first major keynote. It was a Sony keynote about the Playstation 3 (mainly), showcasing some of technology benefits and possibilities. The line for the event was huge, almost making it all the way around the convention centre. From the keynote I caught the Field Recording For Games lecture, which covered doing field recordings for games (surprised?), as opposed to using sound libraries. I went to this as this as I thought it would be relevant for independant film and general sound recording as well as games.

After this I got a free lunch, which was on American size, so certainly made up for breakfast. A smoked turkey sandwich (we’d call it a roll in a Australia, I don’t think they know what a sandwich is over here), a bag of chips, a pasta salad and chocolate cake, washed down with water or coke. I then caught the Character Rigging Best Practices workshop which covered bipedal character rigging. There was a lot to cover, and I found myself feeling severely sleepy (from lack of sleep, not the presentation) so I lost the plot for a lot of the presentation, but it gave me some good insights into things to consider in the rigging process. When you both rig and animate it’s sometimes easy to say, “I’ll just animate it the hard way” and not bother building the best rig, because as an animator, I hate rigging. I might try and delve into rigging a bit deeper from now on.

I then spent a couple of hours walking around the show-floor and checking out the different booths. I got to have a go of the redesigned Nintendo DS, which is currently only available in Japan, and won’t come out in Australia for a while yet. It’s definitely an improvement, being more comfortable to hold, more attractive, and the LCDs are much brighter. There was free food and beer at the booth crawl also, so again no need to go hunt for food.

At 6:30 the Game Developer’s Choice Awards started with first the Independant Game Awards, then our competition entries were shown to the audience, and then the Choice Awards proper. The whole thing was pretty cool, and although they only showed a single compiled clip of our entries, it was good to see it up there on the screen in front of hundreds of people. The real award ceremony for the competition is tomorrow night, in what I hope is a more subdued and low-key affair

Anyhow, I grabbed the bus back to the hotel a bit before the end of the awards to beat the rush. Will try and get an earlier night tonight to try and catch up some sleep and get up early for breakfast tomorrow. Tomorrow morning is probably the biggest of the week, with three of my hero’s giving their presentations (Richard Garriot, Satoru Iwata and Will Wright). It’s probably going to be tough to see all of them so I’m hoping for a bit of luck.

No pictures today - there’s no point taking a camera to GDC because most presentations don’t allow them in. I doubt I’ll get to see any of San Jose before going back to SF on Friday night, but without a car I think getting around would be tough anyhow.