I went to the Austin "How to Break Into the Game Industry" conference

I decided kind of last minute to go the How to Break Into the Game Industry game conference today.

The more I thought about it this week, the more motivation I realized I had for "needing" to go:

• I manage technical folks, and this conference gave me a chance to look at developers in a different vertical market, see what their needs are, and (hopefully) gave me ideas on to how to make my own folks more successful (and happier).
• I'm a voice and film actor, so I want to do voice work, green screen, MoCap, character reference, and related work for video games and animation-- and this was a venue to meet more folks for that.
• If I were to move from my current financial services job to gaming, these would be the kind of folks I would manage. I should get to know them.

So, was it worth it?

Sure.

I'll write more later, but there were three sessions ("Industry Overview", "Getting in at the Ground Floor", and "Applying Transferable Skill Sets"), and all were pretty good. For whatever reason, I got the most out of the third session (and enjoyed it the most) -- even though it was not concretely linked to the discussion topic.

I also touched base with folks I knew, a couple for whom I didn't have contact information, and with a bunch of new folks (and therefore, new relationships and opportunites).

I've got to crash now for a 14-hour film shoot tomorrow, but check out my brief blurb about a statement made by Online Alchemy's Craig Fryar in the meanwhile.