This year was the first time I attended the East Coast Game Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event was impressive and is growing every year. This year they hosted a plethora of studios, ranging from triple A studios, such as Epic Games and Bioware, to indie studios like Pie for Breakfast Studios. They even included tech giants such as IBM and some higher education panels like Wake Tech Community College. The keynote speaker, Bioware’s Dragon Age Creative Driector Mike Laidlaw, delivered a thoughtful analysis on Dragon Age Inquisition and its successes and failures stemming from its new open world design.
Over the course of the three day conference, I attended over a dozen seminars all teaching me something new about making games or discussing career opportunities in the industry. Whether it was learning how to make 2D games in Unreal 4 from an Unreal 4 engineer or deliberating about how video games are an art from with American University’s Chris Totten, the East Coast Game Conference delivered a stimulating and refreshing experience. If you are a student or game developer on the East Coast and you are interested in meeting new people in the industry, learning cutting-edge mechanics for design, or having a scholarly debate on where the video games industry stands as a whole I would highly recommend attend next year’s East Coast Game Conference.
Tyler Buczek: Video Game Producer 