GDC Trip Day 5: Wednesday March 7th

Wednesday was the first day of the Main Conference so I attended a presentation by the infamous Sid Meier.


Sid Meier's talk covered how to make decisions in games interesting & player archetypes. Overall it was a great way to kickoff the main conference.



fedoras lots of fedoras.




Then I attended a fireside chat featuring Notch (Minecraft) and Chris Heck (Spy Party). Basically they discussed the development of Minecraft and Notch's role change from programmer to PR/Image of the company.


After that I walked around the IGF Pavilion and talked to some independent developers. I ran into Andy Schatz (Creator of Monaco/ IGF award host) and had a brief chat with him. I also talked to the programmer of FEZ and got to play a little demo. I really enjoyed hanging around the Indie Developers all of them are super nice and friendly.



At the end of the day I attended a postmortem talk about Portal 2 by the writers of the game (Eric Wolpaw - right) (Chet Faliszek - left). They discussed the development of Portal 2 which included - cutting Portals/Glad0s/Chell - creating different personality cubes - writing a good ending. It was a little odd to see professionals from a huge company run into major problems like not knowing how to end their game a couple months before its release. But it just showed that you shouldn't just assume things about your game and that different solutions and fit different problems.