Thanks everybody for a fantastic time at Develop Conference!
It was really good to be back down in Brighton and hanging out with the rest of the UK game development community. Although for all intents and purposes GDC is bigger and better, it does lack that sense of camaraderie that Develop attains. Especially when everyone is angry at the government for the lack of tax breaks.
I felt especially privileged to attend as a speaker, and being able to give something back to the community. Steven Tovey and I spoke on SPU Assisted Rendering, which I hope everyone enjoyed! You can check out the slides here if you’re interested:
If I was to take one thing from Develop, it’s that in the games industry we should always prefer quality over quantity, and the long-term over the short-term. These are thoughts I’ve had for a long time, but at Develop, we were discussing these issues over a pint in the bar at night, then woke up to find people like Greg Zeschuk and Tim Schafer confirming them in the mornings’ keynotes. It’s always good to discover other minds that think like yours!
However, what often turns out to be the best thing about conferences is hanging out with people from your own company. Sometimes these are people you’ve never spoken to, at other times your friends and regularly people at all stages in between. You can never ever put a value on that, or the added enthusiasm everyone returns with.
This year we actually managed to make most of that hanging out happen in pubs around Brighton. Two years ago, all of our evenings ended up being taken up by a variety of other activities, but this time we actually got to see some more of the city at night. In many ways Brighton reminds me of Cambridge, with lots of pubs scattered all around the city centre, cropping up in quaint and winding lanes intermingled with a variety of interesting shops. We made a concerted effort to hit as many of the pubs as possible, but there were just too many, so…
Roll on next year! Probably have to think of something else to speak about first…
