Austin GDC Plz?

As it turns out, there's a new GDC event down in Austin. Which is about a four hour drive away, vs the big GDC event in California which is a good two *days* drive away. It'd $300 to get in, but if you volunteer, you work for two days, you get to go there for free for two days, so yeah, I'm going to give that a try. Another friend of mine is volunteering with me, and we're going to carpool down there, so if you're in the Dallas area and are also heading down there, feel free to comment if you want to carpool also (gas being insane like it is).

GDC Plz

I've been wanting to go to the GDC for a while now, though how much it'd cost me has been the major sticking point.

As it turns out, you can get in for free if you volunteer there - also known as becoming a GDC Conference Associate. (helpfully pointed out by [Zakelro] Corvus on Indie Games Chat on Xfire
January 24th, 2008 (Q&A Session Transcript))

I don't think I'll be able to make it this year between classes and everything else, but I should theoretically graduate by December of '08, so hopefully I'll be able to make it out for the 2009 GDC.

Working on a TF2 map

I haven't done too much mapping this past year, I got burned out on it more or less. Between;
A.) One of the major mods I was involved with collapsing and

B.) A large HL2 mod a few friends and I were working on dying (one of my friends got called up to go to Iraq, the other didn't have much time when he started working on getting his PhD in quantum physics [as you might imagine]),

It was just hard to keep an interest in it.


But today I fired up Hammer (Valve's map editor) and decided to try my hand at mapping for TF2. Hopefully it will go somewhere.

On a side note, when you're not paid, and you're working with other volunteers, actually *finishing* a project is like moving heaven and earth in terms of difficulty. You either have to be a highly motivated team that's in close contact with each other on a regular basis, or the thing just doesn't work out.

Being located far away from each other tends to make things problematic also.