This year I had an amazing opportunity to go to GDC. And now I want to go every year!

It is so full of life and I had the chance of meeting so many interesting developers that made me even more happy to be in this industry.

I went to a game design workshop (which was a bit basic, but insightful if I’d ever want to teach game design).

Although I’m not an animator, the First Person Animation of Overwatch was really interesting and I learned a lot about how the team tried (and achieved) making the character’s personality in every detail. (And how Blizzard do a loooot of workarounds to make that happen).

Rewards in Videogames and The Gamer’s Brain in a certain way complemented each other, giving practical and academic background to understand player’s motivations and how to create rewards that matter for different types of players.

I was surprised by the quality of the Pandamic Legacy conference (and now I can’t wait to play it) – the board game presentations were new this year and totally worth it.

The only talk I was a bit disappointed was the Pokemon GO one, it was super full, but in the end, they shared the story behind the creation of the game with some images of the game during development. Nothing really new from what you could find in already published articles, except perhaps their expected number of players vs. the real number of players (50x what they expected).

As for Analytics, I liked the talk from DeltaDNA. It was a bit short, but straight to the point and they shared numbers which sometimes can be rare for those types of talks.

Bonus: One of the most interesting talks I’ve seen is on Youtube, and if you are a game developer (and a Zelda fan) I totally recommend- Breaking Conventions with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild