Our Experiences at GDC 2013

There are a lot of things to do at GDC:

• A selection of hundreds of game development lectures given by a variety of speakers.
• The "show floor", which is where technology/tools vendors demonstrate their products and games companies try to hire new blood.
• Journalists: Most of the big sites have representatives at GDC, so it's a good opportunity to update them on how progress is going with the game.
• Business meetings. Studios require relationships with dozens of external entities such as publishers, advertising partners, tools vendors and outsourcing companies. GDC is a great opportunity to meet face-to-face and work out new business deals.
• Parties! Every evening has a variety of events sponsored by different companies. They are a great opportunity to meet developers from other studios and to trade stories about the industry.

"Sleep" is not on the above list, unfortunately :P

This was the first time we have attended GDC, so everything was very new to us. Due to the recent success of Path of Exile's open beta (and the fact that we're cloistered away in New Zealand, away from most of the industry), we were also new to many of the other developers who had a lot of questions to ask.

From a business development point of view, the conference was awesome. We've been looking into building relationships with publishing partners in the South East Asia region, so we had an opportunity to speak with many such companies to see what they could do to promote Path of Exile in that part of the world.

We had an opportunity to speak with around a dozen journalists and participated in many interviews. It was really good getting to meet some of the journalists that we had only talked to digitally before that point. We had a some cool news to discuss with the journalists (our plans for release late this year and information about future league/race plans).

I only got to spend a brief amount of time at GDC itself - the show floor was interesting to wander around for an hour, and I did manage to attend four of the scheduled talks (one by a security company, two by Blizzard and one by Riot). I'd have loved to have seen more talks or spent more time on the show floor, but the business meetings and journalists were obviously far more important for the company.

The parties were beyond amazing. I met Wyatt Cheng (Diablo III - Senior Technical Game Designer) at the Steam party and he invited us to the Blizzard party the following evening. We were extremely impressed by the scale of the Blizzard party. The food and atmosphere were amazing, and there were so many awesome people to talk to. I spent three hours talking with Jay Wilson about game design. He was kind enough to take a photo with me, which I promised I'd post to our community. Jay and Wyatt are both really humble, nice guys. They explained in detail what lessons they learned from the development of D3 and gave up a lot of their free time doing so.

Speaking of Diablo developers, we also had dinner and drinks with Max and Erich Schaefer (of Blizzard North/Flagship/Runic Games). We took a photo with them too (from left: Rhys Abraham, Erich Schaefer, Chris Wilson, Jonathan Rogers, Max Schaefer). We've known Max for a few years now, so it was great to catch up with him and to meet Erich. It's hard not to act like a fanboy around the guys who created Diablo II.

One of the highlights of the trip was the fan meetup on Monday that I wrote about previously. It was also awesome to be surprised by people throughout the conference who recognised the Path of Exile shirts I was frequently wearing. It was great to see how many of our fans are in the game development industry themselves.

We're now back at the office and are catching up on PMs/emails. The team made great progress while we were gone, so we're expecting to deploy 0.10.5 late this week and the 0.10.6 patch next week.

While working on the Community Q&A during the brief moments of sanity last week, I came to the realisation that many of the answers could be better explained in a more permanent way than just the answers to a single Q&A event. I'll probably be bringing back the "Beta Manifesto" that we had during Closed Beta - to explain what our plans are with each area of the game and roughly when we expect to have them completed by. I expect to start posting entries to this within the next couple of days.