Digital Dragons 2016

A few days ago I came back from the Digital Dragons 2016 conference. I’ve been in talks with these guys in the past years, but timing was never quite right, this time I finally could make it. Luckily for me, it was the same year they invited John Romero, David Brevik and Chris Avellone. In December 1993 my classmate brought an old floppy disc to school. He claimed it contained the best game ever. Obviously, at that time, pretty much any new game was ‘best ever’, so we took it with grain of salt. I still copied it and tried it at home. It was unlike anything I’ve seen before, I just couldn’t put it down. This was Wolfenstein 3D. This is one of my most vivid gaming memories, New Year’s Eve of 1993, sneaking upstairs to keep playing, much to chagrin of my mom. I think I was “programming” a little bit at that point, but it was mostly limited to printing “Maciej rules” on the screen. If you had told me that one day I’d actually speak at the same conference as John Romero, I’d probably have fainted. Almost 25 years later and here we are :). DD2016 was fun, ppl compare it to ‘early GDC’ and while my first GDC was 2005 (already huge), I can see where they’re coming from. It’s still relatively “fresh”, not too many sponsored sessions, you don’t have to pay for every little thing, very strong indie vibe. I definitely hope it keeps growing (within reason).

It was nice to meet my heroes and my old friends, but I was primarily there to present. I think organizers plan to upload videos soon, but for the time being, you can find my slides here. The presentation title is: “Debugging Multiplayer Games. Lessons from Warframe”. It’s probably a little bit too packed for 45 minutes (I had to talk really fast) and I should have removed more slides than I did (some extra slides left), but oh well. If slides feel to cryptic, feel free to ping me.

Old comments

Szymon Kurek 2016-05-29 20:15:19

That’s an awesome presentation! Is there a video somewhere?

admin 2016-05-30 03:19:39

Thanks :) Organizers have been recording all the presentations, so I’m pretty sure videos will be uploaded at some point.