Sam's GDC Post Mortem - The Story of a CA

During my time at GDC 2017 I was working as a CA or a Conference Associate and I worked to help make the conference a great experience for all attendees. I was able to meet some incredible people that both working in the field and plan to work in the field in the coming future. I was able to talk with some amazing people that were already in the field or had been in the field in the past and they gave me some great advice for moving forward with my career.

I was able to meet with a Game Designer by the name of Jeff Howard that gave a talk about comparing the design of a video game with the music of Metal Rock. He told me to just have hope and to work my best to get noticed by potential employers. I also got to talk with a professional voice actor and I told him that I have some interest of getting into voice acting, especially for anime or cartoons and, of course, gaming. He told me to start getting some recordings of my voice on a reel so that I can send it to potential employers that could hire me for a role. I will need to do some serious work, but I believe that I can do it.

I also was able to meeting with a worker from Double Fine Productions and he was able to talk to me all about getting into their company. He was able to give me some tips about always working on some kind of project no matter how big or how small to keep myself working. Another company that I was able to speak with a representative for was Lumious who is a company that is developing a system to make cars that can drive themselves. I would be working with them as a programmer and designer in Unity to make environments that the car’s program can simulate in.

During my time off from working as a CA I was able to go by the Columbia College Chicago booth that was in the South Expo hall. I got to see plenty of attendees play the different games that Columbia was showing off including our game, Read Em & Reap. I talked to a couple of different people who played our game and they gave us some great feedback.

-Sam