Game Developer's Conference 2019

On the 19th of March I left for the Game Developer’s Conference. The biggest event for game developers in the whole world. I didn’t comprehend the vastness of the event until I saw it in San Francisco.

The atmosphere and the environment was every developer could dream of. New technologies being announced, people discussing our favorite games and what it took to make them.

One of the highlights of day 1 for me was a talk about the underlying technology of the Oculus Quest. One of the directors heading the Oculus Quest projects spoke about how they achieved high performance on a mobile system. He talked about the audio solution for the quest and how games were taking advantage of the wireless technologies to bring immersive experiences to the players.

I was most excited about to check out the new cloud streaming platform announced by Google called Stadia. I really wanted to know how they are able to reduce the latency and is it noticeable when playing the game. When I actually got to try it out I was amazed because I didn’t feel any latency.

I went around to all the booths like, Unity, Microsoft, Amazon, Unreal. Unity was holding their own talks about their new development stack and upcoming technologies. I tried to sit for almost all of them since at the time of me writing this I’m making a VR game in Unity.

Microsoft announced their new Game Development Stack that provides APIs and SDKs that can be easily implemented in your game to store data online and optimize art assets.

I explored Lumberyard, took a look at the new technologies at Unreal, stood in awe of the realistic rendering Nvidia was showcasing. Spoke to a lot of engineers and developers from many companies. Played indie games and networked with fellow game developers.

It is an experience that I will never forget and I think every game developer should at least be a part of this massive event at least once. It is a dev’s dream.