Hey all, Emory here! We’re back from GDC! It was an amazing week of cool talks, career hunting, and parties (oh and I guess we got to present our game in front of a huge crowd at Intel’s booth).
We had spent the days and hours leading up to the conference passing out flyers and businesscards. Decked out in our team hoodies, we got a lot of questions like “Core Overload? What’s that?” We ended up telling people to check out our demo at Intel’s booth on Thursday, and boy, did they come! We had the largest crowd at Intel’s booth of the entire conference (and also successfully stopped foot traffic in the area since the seating area overflowed into the main hallway).
The hours leading up to our demo were a little nerve-wracking. As an online game, we required stable internet to demo properly, something that isn’t really an option in San Francisco’s huge Moscone Conference Center. Intel had its own dedicated wifi node at its booth, but after a quick pre-demo test, we realized it wasn’t stable enough for a good demo.
Our last fallback option was to do a totally local demo with our AI-controlled bots. One of our gameplay engineers, Cameron Donley, had been working on the bots for the past 2 months, but we had been running into some critical errors with them that led into crashes all the way up to 2 days before our demo. It ended up working like this:
As we added bots, the chance of crashing went up additively. We could crash a game within 4 minutes with 7 bots on each side, but a game with 4 bots on each side crashed after 2 hours. As the team lead, it really came down to my decision: how many bots do we use? More bots lead to a better demo since there’s more action, but they also carry risk with each addition. In the end, after some thinking (and even plotting out bots vs. crash time on a graph), we decided on 4 bots on each side and cut our live demo time down to around 6 minutes to minimize crash risk, and filled the rest of the time with ship build demos. We didn’t crash!
The rest of the conference we spent visiting various booths, talking with industry people, and generally having a blast! If you’re reading this and have never been to GDC before but are interested in games, I highly, highly recommend you go. There isn’t another conference like it that draws together over 20,000 game devs in one place.
We’ve got 1 big demo left, and that’s Demo day on May 14! Come check us out then at USC’s Norris theater. We promise we’ll be going out with a bang!