I’m speaking at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco later this week. The call for topics went out last summer and usually they tell people they’ve been accepted in October.
They told me six weeks ago.
Ahhh! Panic ensued! This is an hour-long talk on theoretical aspects of level design. When I originally pitched it I only had a rough idea of what I was going to say – I figured that if it was accepted I’d have about 5 months to do some additional research to bolster some of my arguments. No problem … work a few nights and a few weekends and it would come together with plenty of time to spare.
Instead I’ve been scrambling to pull stuff together. I had to read articles I hadn’t read yet, reread a couple of books, do some hard creative thinking. Of course all of this had to be fitted into the nooks and crannies around my actual job and family life.
It took me about three weeks to get a rough draft of the Powerpoint presentation pulled together. Then the really maddening work began. See, this is a conference about VIDEOGAMES. I can’t just get up there and read my bullet points. I need to illustrate everything with screenshots from actual games. But getting screenshots is really time-consuming. In most cases I didn’t have a save game near the shots I wanted, which meant replaying the game, sometimes from the beginning. And scouring the Internet for images to fill in the gaps.
About an hour ago I dropped the last image into the presentation. A feeling of Zen-like calm has now settled over me, the first real calm since I heard I’d been accepted. I’ll probably tinker with it over the next few days before I actually deliver it … but it’s essentially DONE! I will not be exposed to the ridicule of my peers after all … . 