Music / Sound Design / Audio Services by Marie Havemann: GDC Europe 2014 and Respawn Gathering

This year I had the chance to not only visit the GDC Europe and Respawn Gathering but also be part of a film team that interviewed some of the speakers and guests. We had a great time in cologne, heard some interesting sessions and met some inspiring people there.

Le Team

The interviews were made for Aztecfox and are online on his blog and youtube-channel. Take a look at his blog and don't miss the interesting and heart-warming interview with Oscar Clark (Unity).

I have been to quite a few conferences in my life, but I have to say, the quality of the speeches, the presentation and the timing and organization in general of the GDC where by far the best. One of the speeches that impressed me the most was "The Independent AAA Proposition" by Tameem Antoniades (Ninja Theory). It was intriguing to see the industry with their eyes, hear their company history and stories about the difficulties they had - especially as I love some of their games and feel inspired by their attitude when it comes to AAA titles.

Another shorter, but still great speech was "Indie Audio: Outsourcing on a Budget" by Richard Ludlow (Hexany Audio) which was addressed to developers and producers. The speech was compact and touched on all relevant audio subjects during a game production - budgets, concepts, licensing - and I would wish every producer and game designer in the world to watch it. Unfortunately, and typical for every industry when it comes to audio topics, only audio folks attended. I still hope this to get better next year and I still hope for more audio related speeches, as there were in the years before (especially 2011).

In contrast to the GDC, which addresses to the whole games industry, especially AAA developers, the Respawn Gathering has its focus on indie games, is a lot smaller and took a completely different approach on their conference setup. It was one big room with different spawn points and ports with head sets - so the atmosphere was more familiar and you could switch between the speeches even without moving. I could not watch many speeches as most were parallel to the GDC speeches I wanted to watch, but I really enjoyed the atmosphere there and had the possibility to meet a lot of people I knew before and could also get in touch with people I did not know before really easily.

One of the games I created the music and the sounds for was showcased there, it was "Fuck yeah!" an endless podracer that usually has to be played with two Force Feedback Controllers:

Laura, one of the game designers of "Fuck yeah" playing our game

All in all I have to say, I am really looking forward to the next year and both conferences! Oh and of course I also visited the gamescom and saw a little bit of everything. And did I mention that we had our own apartment right in the centre of cologne?