WOW. Day two of GDC has come to an end and I’m exhausted and hyped at the same time. If anything it was even bigger and better than yesterday with people everywhere, heaps of fantastic talks and some really great visitors to the ARM booth. Having slept like the dead after a hectic but fantastic first day it was back on our lecture theatre first thing this morning to welcome even more awesome speakers.
Lecture Theatre Life
It’s so humbling to see how many of our partners are keen to share the stories of what they do with ARM and how Mali GPUs enable them to create bigger and better devices, applications and games every single day.
The standout presentation for me, and a lot of others judging by the massive crowd it drew, was by Zak Parrish from Epic Games who gave an incredible live demo of exactly how easy it can be to create a mobile game in Unreal Engine 4. Not only was Zak a heap of fun but he also gave away a brand new Samsung Galaxy S7 to one lucky talk attendee, hard to beat!
It’s often the unexpected that provides the most entertainment and this proved true for me again today when we had a scheduling clash with one of our speakers. With a packed lecture theatre audience ready and waiting, a couple of us ARM bods had the chance to what we do best: play! True to our inner kids we whipped out my current favourite Samsung Gear VR game, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. With the help of a volunteer we got the whole crowd involved to help diffuse a virtual bomb live on stage, saving the virtual lives of all present and providing us all with a good laugh at the same time!
VR fun with 'Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes'
Last up for today, Ellie Stone from the ARM Enlighten team took to the stage to show us their truly beautiful new demo, Seastack Bay. This shows the effect of true global illumination on large world games and the impact it has on realism and believability. With the rapid growth of VR this could be a huge help in achieving true immersion and the expansion into mobile is really exciting for the future of mobile gaming.
Ellie entertaining the masses with Enlighten Global Illumination demo Seastack Bay
Smashing the Sponsored Sessions
When you’re manning the lecture theatre it can be hard to tell how things are going elsewhere in the event so it’s always great to get feedback. Especially exciting for me was when people started approaching me after our sponsored sessions which take place in various halls over the venue and seem very distant when you’re based on-stand. Not only had these guys sought us out specially but, even better, it was to tell me that that they were keen to make sure I knew just how amazing those sessions had been.
One of our senior engineers, robertolopezmendez, gave an incredible presentation with Unity and nDreams on how to achieve truly high quality VR games and having seen him speak before, I knew it would be good. When people come out of their way, though, to tell you just how inspiring it was, it feels like a real honour to work with such knowledgeable people so willing to share their expertise.
'Achieving High Quality Mobile VR Games' – Roberto Lopez Mendez, ARM; Carl Calleweart, Unity; Patrick O’Luanaigh, nDreams
Friday Finale
It may be a little quieter tomorrow with some attendees heading home, but there’s still so much to see. We have more lecture theatre talks running until 2pm and we’re STILL giving away a Pipo P4 tablet after every single one! Our very own Stephen Barton will appear, and might be familiar from today’s sponsored sessions where he and Stacy Smith used practical case studies to show how to optimize your mobile games. He’ll be running a live Mali Graphics Debugger session at 10.30 before speakers from NHTV, Deepoon, Cocos and Perfect World each take to the stage with their variety of game development talks to round out your dev ed experience at GDC 16.
Don’t forget to join our thunderclap to share the joys of the Mali Graphics Week kicking off April 18th and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for the last day of a truly epic week!