GDC 2022

Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference as a Conference Associate. It was an awesome experience and I met a ton of cool people. This was my first time truly interacting with the industry and I learned so much and can't wait for next year's conference.

As a conference associate, I worked for the conference performing jobs like badge checking, crowd control, and providing guests with information. As a CA I had ample opportunity to network with the other CAs who were all either professionals or people seeking to become professionals like me. During this time I met more people than I can count and it was my first-time professionally networking, and I found that I was unprepared. Next year I plan to do far more searching into networking before the conference and put more effort into remembering people and actually building bonds.

The conference also gave me plenty to research and experiment with. During this time I learned of several job titles including technical designer, a role I find myself in quite often and enjoy thoroughly. I also learn a bit about software engineering or the discipline of planning software architectures and development to reduce or eliminate the bug-fixing phase of development. I want to learn more about this and modeling languages like UML and experiment with using them to plan my projects in the future. I also learn about many other things like methods for measuring the fairness of procedural generation and I now have access to the GDC vault which I will be using in the future to learn about more advanced and fascinating concepts.