Every significant trip, of course, involves getting good and shafted at least once. My shaft for the week relates to the hotel arrangements. Due to some unfathomable cosmic force, or possibly pocket lint, my pick hotel didn't have any rooms (literally no open rooms) for tonight or tomorrow night. Thus I find myself in my second choice hotel, and I'll have to switch over sometime on Tuesday afternoon. This isn't too much of a problem since I'll be more or less wandering idle Tuesday afternoon anyways.
The irony of the situation is that my second-choice hotel is more expensive, less of a prime location, and not quite as nice. On the plus side, it is right next door to Wolfgang Puck's Postrio, so at least I'll get a good dinner tonight.
I've volunteered to keep a running journal of GDC this year for GDNet, as well as writing up the sessions I attend. I'll leave it to the content management wizards to cough up more details about how that'll be done, but here's a teaser of what I'll be covering to get you started with the salivating:
Monday
- (102) Staging workshop (full day)
Tuesday
- (206) Threading workshop (morning)
- {Hotel SNAFU resolution}
- (207) MS Dev Day (afternoon)
Wednesday
- Getting it into the game (9-10)
- Advanced Dialogue Techniques (12-1)
- Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games (2:30-3:30)
- Audio post-mortem: Halo 3 (4-5)
- Booth crawl - hooray beer! (5-6)
- GD choice awards (6:30-8:30)
Thursday
- Playing to Lose (9-10)
- The Next 20 Years of Gaming (10:30-11:30)
- Comparative Analysis of Game Parallelization (12-1)
- Dynamic Performance Profiling of C++ Code (1-2)
- Improving QA (2:30-3:30)
- Engaging the User (4-5)
- Are Games Essentially Superficial? (5:30-6:30)
- Suite Night (8-10)
Friday
- Designing Conflict Resolution Without Combat (9-10)
- Agile Development - Good/Bad/Ugly (10:30-11:30)
- How to Pick a Lock (3:10-3:30)
- A PORTAL Postmortem (4-5)
You can find more details on the sessions by looking up their names on the GDC site. (I'd add links for each session, but I am way too damn lazy for that business.)
