GDC Bosslady Blog: The Countdown Begins!

[In her latest Bosslady Blog update, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio fills attendees in this year's new summits and some changes to the 2010 event.] Now that my calendar reads 2010, I can officially start the “Countdown to GDC.” It goes a little something like this: 1. Find March 9th on my laminated wall calendar 2. Count the weeks back until I reach the current week. 3. Curse out loud 4. Start a list of all the things yet to do 5. Break into a light sweat. One of the items on my to-do list is to talk a little bit about what we’ve been up to here at GDC headquarters - besides being excited about the Independent Games Festival Nominees while also being inflamed about Spider-Man 4. Inflamed! When not already missing Sam Raimi even though Spider-Man 3 was awful, we’re surprisingly productive. Some of you may have seen the announcement of the newly-formed iPhone Summit taking place March 9-10. Focusing on both the technical and business aspects of developing games for the platform, the iPhone Summit at GDC 2010 will run 1050m before hitting a wall and tumbling to a Canabalt postmortem. To avoid tumbling to your death, there will also be a session on knowing what you’re signing by understanding the iPhone contract along with how to capture the female iPhone gamer (hint: hot vampires.) The iPhone Summit program is coming together quite nicely, and I suspect there will be more good stuff to announce in that department soon. Also new this year is the Social & Online Games Summit, affectionately referred to as SOGS -- and running March 9-10 as well. We took our extremely successful Worlds in Motion Summit and combined it the longstanding and well-received Casual Games Summit, to form this comprehensive multi-track event. Headlining the Social & Online Games Summit as keynote is Gareth Davis, Platform Manager at Facebook. Gareth had a career in traditional video games, having produced games for both Sega and Electronic Arts before heading up games at Facebook, making him well-qualified to discuss the future of the social game phenomenon. We’ll be talking a lot more about the sessions and speakers of GDC 2010 (sounds like a sexy calendar – “Fluid Simulation-Driven Particle Effects in Dark Void” can be June!), but I also wanted to remind everyone of a couple of major changes taking place this year, the first change being the days of the event. For the first time since our glorious years in San Jose, GDC will be taking place Tuesday through Saturday. Back in olde thymes, we held the event Tuesday through Saturday ,in order to keep the Expo Floor open on a day attendees didn’t have to take off work. That no longer being an issue, we shifted the week to Monday through Friday. Unfortunately, due to the schedule of the Great Wizard of Convention Centers, we are forced into a Tuesday through Saturday pattern. Just. This. Once. The other recognizable change this year is lunch. We reduced the price of conference passes by the cost of lunch. That boxed lunch that you all know and love and wish you could consume 5 days a week all year round is $40 a day. I’ll give you a minute to stop choking on your Doritos. Ready? Yes, $40 a day for a sandwich, chips, apple/cookie and water/soda. I could not make this stuff up even if I wanted. We decided to give attendees a choice this year. Spend as much as you’d like by buying from one of the many onsite concessions or nearby food repositories, or pre-order and pay for the $40-a-day meal. It is now your decision. I trust you to make the right one. That’s it for now! There will be some exciting announcements this week and next so I’d advise you not to move from this spot. Just stare at the pretty colors and wait for the magic to happen. [Meggan will be updating throughout the run-up to the Game Developers Conference 2010 show (part of Think Services, like this website). You can also catch up with the latest GDC news on the official GDC weblog.]