Game Developers Conference is almost in full swing (technically the main part of it starts tomorrow) and it's always mind blowing to me how this event seems to draw out every single game developer on the planet. There are a lot of game developer events through out the year now, but for some reason GDC still is the main one for a lot of people.

I almost wasn't going to attend this GDC, but thanks to a lot of good luck and a lot of help from friends of mine I was able to make it happen in the end. I feel like every year I weigh the good and bad sides of attending GDC which is what ultimately drove me to decide to not attend this one. I'm not sure if the bad was necessarily out weighing the good, but I don't think a conference like GDC or a conference in general is always 100% a good idea to attend.

Let's get the worst things out of the way first:

Another Game Developers Conference has come and gone. I guess this was my 9th GDC I've attended, so I guess next year will be kind of a big deal... I should do a quick recap of the week while it's still fresh in my mind. I'll spare you the big details and just try to do a broad sweep over the week, and maybe if there's anything specific I want to unravel I can do that in another blog post.

Also all the pictures in this post are from Matthew Wegner and the GDC Photo Stream!

Things started off a little crappy because of the weather. Saturday and Sunday were pretty rainy and cloudy days respectively. Walking through San Francisco during a giant mess of a St. Patricks day parade while it's raining is not super fun, and it's even worse when you're carrying all your stuff trying to find where you're staying.

The weekend was spent hanging out with all sorts of cool people from around the world. Sunday night we busted out some Magic booster packs and did a quick draft tournament. My Red White Allies deck managed to scrape out two victories in my pod which was pretty neat. We also ate a lot of sushi right off the bat which is one of the main reasons I go to GDC I think.

Just got back from Game Developers Conference last night! I'll be writing up some sort of thoughts and feels post about it soon, but for now enjoy some matches from the TowerFall Invitational put on by Humble Bundle this year!

Greg Lobanov vs Matt Thorson


Me vs Connor Ullmann


Me vs Frederic Tarabout


The tournament was absolutely incredible this year. We had over 70 entrants in the whole thing all playing 1v1 best out of 3 (and the grand finals were best out of 5.) It was hosted at Folsom Street Foundry which was just an amazing venue to say the least. I really hope this continues and becomes a solidified GDC tradition!

Another GDC has come and gone and each year it feels like it's going by faster and faster. I did get to see a lot of awesome people from around the world, but there were still many many more that I unfortunately missed. The indie community is getting so huge that there are hundreds of smaller communities within it, and I feel as if I'm only a small part of one of those fractured off communities.

GDC is a time of pretty intense emotions. The event is built up in my head as some sort of annual check up on how my game development life is doing. A lot of developers use this time as a huge deadline to show off their new work, or discuss how awesome their past work has done. It can get pretty stressful to think about.

Last month with GDC looming on the horizon I started to crunch on my latest game project. I wanted to get something playable and ready to display at GDC, but as the days went by I realized that although I was making pretty decent progress, a fully playable thing was not going to be possible by the time I would be in San Francisco. I decided to instead just take it easy and work at a normal rate, and instead look forward to playing TowerFall all week at GDC instead of stress out about showing a game.

I'm not really sure how that decision has effected me, but it feels like it was the right one... maybe? When I don't have anything super solid to just show people, the question of "So what are you working on these days?" is a little tough to answer, and is kind of scary to hear.

The last year of my game development life has been pretty weird for me. I was working on an extension of a game jam game in Flash at this time last year... but when I went to GDC I didn't really like my project anymore. I didn't like working in Flash anymore. So I scrapped it, and spent months searching for what to work on next.

Eventually I made it to C# with SFML.Net, and Otter was born. Along with that, I started working on a project based on my old game jam game Gaiadi. I feel like this is the right choice... but I'm never totally sure.

I actually started working on this new project in June, but also at that time I started working on Otter, so progress was pretty slow. Then in December after Otter was way better of an engine, I restarted the project, and I'm almost four months into the new version... which is a pretty long time now that I think about it.

So right now it's tough to fully explain what I'm working on. My game hasn't really taken a solid form yet, and I feel like it's going to be awhile before it actually does, and that is terrifying to me. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to answer "what are you working on," but it is tough when the thing I'm working on is still very nebulous, and the fact that I spent half of last year between GDCs just screwing around with different engines, and I don't have a presentable thing to just display to someone, and say "this! this is what I'm working on and it's super cool!"

I feel like I should have more to show for one year since last GDC when I scrapped my old Flash game. When I see the awesome things that everyone else is cooking up I ask myself if I'm just totally lazy compared to all of the other people at the conference. I wonder how it seems like they have so many things figured out and I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing or how to solve a lot of issues. Imposter syndrome becomes very severe this time of year!

Maybe I'm just in another rut of depression, as leaving GDC and all of my friends can be a pretty big bummer... but right now I totally feel like not doing anything. I spent most of today playing games. I've coded a little bit since I got back, but my motivation is near zero. I'm not really sure what the core issue is, but I'm going to try to get out of it as soon as possible.

Phew, this post is kind of a downer so far! GDC wasn't super depressing though. It was actually a lot of fun! But I have all these weird issues in my head popping up that I need to figure out.

It's no secret that TowerFall might be my favorite game made in the past decade. The local TowerFall community in Phoenix is quite strong, and we play almost every night. We've been playing the beta for the recent PC and PS4 release for a few months now, and over that time I've collected a whole lot of replays.

Since the game is finally out I'm going to start sharing all of my awesome replays on The Assassin Prince. I pretty much always play pink, so every replay is going to feature the pink archer somehow.

Also, next week is Game Developers Conference and I'm looking forward to playing so much TowerFall with everyone, YEAH!

Get one of these rare KPULV collectors items at Game Developers Conference! :D