Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

I'm currently in San Francisco attending GDC, it's only my second time here, it's an awesome, huge (and expensive) event!

There's a ton of people all over the place, although it feels less crowded compared to last time I was here, and the energy is definitely quite positive despite the fact that the industry as a whole is still going through a slightly rough time.

So far I've been to a few talks, mainly on the topic of VR development. One talk on choosing the right input method (hand tracking vs controllers), one on using the recently unveiled Unity AI MCP + Meta AI to quickly prototype a VR game idea by having the AI handle all the setup for you, and a talk on how to find success on the Meta Store and how their algorithm works.

Meta invited me over here as part of their brand new Meta Horizon Insiders program to push VR forward so I'm required to attend their talks and will be doing a video summary on what I'm learning here. I've always been interested in VR and now this is the perfect excuse for me to start actually making some tutorials on that topic.

Then I also went to Unity's Indie Celebration event, which was a nice mini-event and a nice talk by Chris Zukowski and Xalavier Nelson Jr on the topic of how to find success in games nowadays. It's a quick 30 minute event so give it a watch if you haven't seen it. I finally met Chris in real life! In case you don't know Chris is a Steam Marketing expert, I've worked with him previously on some videos but I had never met him in the flesh until now, nice guy!

Next I went to a meetup of Asset Store publishers (free food and drinks!) then off to Unity's Indie Arcade party which had music, playable games, and some talks. I did a mini-fireside chat with Genies which was a pretty fun event, chatting about indie game development in general, what are the biggest challenges nowadays, the best ways to use the current tools, and answered a bunch of questions from the audience.

Today is the day the show floor is opening, I'm very much looking forward to going in there to check out all the booths and see all the awesome stuff people are building in this incredible industry. I remember last time seeing booths dedicated to some countries (like Germany developers, Polish developers, etc) so I'm especially curious to see if there is one for Portuguese developers. At least I've heard there is a booth for developers from Brazil so I'm looking forward to going there.

Then on Thursday I will be going to a Unity talk all about their updated AI tools, I'm very very curious to see a real time demo to see if those tools genuinely work as well as in the video from last week or not.

If you're here at GDC and you see me walking around come say hi! I've already met about 30 people and it's always awesome to meet people in real life! It makes my job feel quite a bit more real to know there are actual humans watching the videos or reading this newsletter and it's not just numbers behind a screen. If you're at home I hope you're enjoying watching the various livestreams and stay tuned for a summary video from me when I get back next week!

Thanks for reading! Best of luck in your game dev journey!