It’s not all fun and games. Sometimes it’s just fun. Or about games. Here are some other things that I took part in.
The GDC Vault is super awesome, but it’s kind of clunky to filter through the content. I had some spare time and it had been a while since I had hacked something together with Python, so I extracted the data and made my own visualizer to browse through the 2018 video content. You can access it in the GDC Vault Explorer.
When I started out as an indie developer, there weren’t a lot of game development events aimed at developers in Brazil (more like none). I was pretty sure there were a lot of people like me, just starting out, but they didn’t know each other. GameCraft was an event I organized to try and get everyone in a single spot. It had two editions, one in 2011 and another in 2012. All the material was recorded and made available.
In a previous life, I used to play the drums. Metal Jam is a jam session that has been happening for over a decade in my home town, Rio de Janeiro, and yearly gathers around 100 musicians (that is the cast in the picture, not the audience, by the way). I’m happy to have been part of organizing and playing in it for most of those years (and bittersweet about watching the latest videos from far away!).
It taught me a lot about organizing events and about the importance of a “scene” for any bunch of independent creators of any kind, which lead to GameCraft. Build it and they will come!
Yanko Oliveira 