I really should have been taking care of some assignments for school this evening, but instead, I decided to draw a character that is probably going to be used in a future game of mine. I’m thinking I’ll stick with the same art style I used in When We Were Kids.

More newsworthily (is that a word?), I have just landed a summer programming job at Backbone Entertainment. Though it ain’t quite Telltale, I’m quite excited about it nevertheless. Particularly considering that I’ll get to work on console games, which is the one thing I still haven’t done yet. Woo.

So, GDC was essentially everything I expected it to be. A lot less noisy and more developer-centred than E3, and therefore better. In my extremely subjective view, anyway.

I went to the awards show, and saw Tim Schafer make a lot of obviously rehearsed jokes on stage while attempting to MC, as well as a bunch of indie games (some even made by students) that put my present work to shame. I saw Shigeru Miyamoto’s keynote speech, in which he spent most of his time talking about his wife. I went to a bunch of lectures, most of which discussed stuff I essentially already knew through reading about it over the internet, but were interesting to watch regardless. Ernest Adams’s lecture on interactive storytelling was my personal favourite, particularly since he talked a lot about games without challenges, an area I seem to have been exploring as of late. Another favourite of mine was a panel summarizing ten academic papers written about games, which gave me a sudden urge to start considering graduate school (albeit definitely not in the immediate future).

And of course, I reunited with many of my buddies from Telltale, and got to meet Marek Bronstring and Dave Gilbert in person, the latter of whom I ended up talking to for quite a long time and finding a lot of common ground with. (Now all I need to do is, uh, actually play his games.) It was definitely fun times. Don’t you just wish you were there?

Well, kids, tomorrow, I’m off to my first-ever GDC. I’m quite excited, and will be sure to let all you wonderful readers know how it went.

In the meantime, I’ve posted a new poem for the first time in, well, ages. It would be the one called “Romeo and Juliet”.