// GDC 2016 – Post Mortem

GDC 2016 – Post Mortem

The Booth

What a week GDC was! After finishing our 3rd GDC attendance I can say I think we are all quite exhausted. Now, three days later, I feel rested enough to chronicle the adventure for those of you interested in knowing what Clickteam was up to at the latest Game Developers Conference in “sunny” San Francisco!

The story really begins months before when a few of us sat down and discussed on how we can differentiate ourselves from the endless other 10 x 10 booths at the show. I have personally yet to meet anyone that didn’t think Fusion was awesome after being shown, but we needed something booth wise that would grab peoples attention but also have them remember their time spent with us. This way when they get home they will remember us and hopefully at least check out the free version of Fusion and maybe join the #IwantToCreate with Clickteam movement! We came up with the idea of representing the core of our user base the true “Indie Developer” that is the guy that works from home. We have a ton of success stories from guys and gals simply working from a living room, garage, basement or bedroom.

And as such the Bedroom booth was born. Basically we built the Wall segments you see in the above photo, wall papered and trimmed it, Cut out a “window” and inserted a monitor. I wrote in Fusion a display program that rendered a night sky with a cool rising moon, twinkling stars, a house with changing lights and of course a cat on a fence. It would run through a serious of posters in the window app as well. Next to the window we includes a physical poster of our “I Want to Create” hastag and next to it some of the more popular games in poster form. Alonso of Heart Forth, Alicia dropped by and donated a awesome poster of his game as well! On the smaller wall we included a cork board where we pinned the business cards of all the cool people we met.

We built a dresser and a small desk where we had two Steam machines available to play games and demo Fusion. Next to the dresser we built a small “bed” complete with Star Wars sheets to complete the look. Add a throw rug and a random pair of socks and you have what many that visited the booth resembled their own work spaces.  When demoing we would a for people to excuse the mess, kick the socks out of the way, dig between shirts and socks in the dresser to find a business card, etc. All in the name of providing that “hey welcome to my office bedroom” feel.

We demo’d to a ton of people, some having been users long before and some who had never heard of the tool before. Everyone seemed impressed with our little tool that can!

Fusion 3 Information

We took GDC 2016 as the opportunity to first discuss in some greater detail what we have planned for the forthcoming Fusion 3. We are very excited by how Fusion 3 is shaping up and I think you will be as well.

From Scratch: Fusion 3 is being developed from scratch. This will help eliminate many of the issues we have had in the legacy code that was developed from Klik and Play all the way up to Fusion 2.5 and will help us also inject a lot of modern and needed features and functions. For Fusion users this may represent the most exciting development.

Real-time and Export of C: In Fusion 3 it will be possible to not only export out a Fusion 3 project to a C project but in fact if you so choose you can watch C populate in a separate window as you event. We are still deciding how this feature set will fit in the Fusion 3 eco-system and are very excited about this much needed ability coming to pass. Note you will not be able to write in C and convert to events. Only events to C. Fusion will always be based in the Event Editor, but read on, it’s not a bad thing!

Event Editor Power: Fusion 3 will finally begin to bridge the power of the Event Editor to the power of a scripted language. So much so that parts of Fusion 3 will be written in itself. For instance the Picture editor will be written in Fusion 3 using the Event Editor. Because of this if you find something lacking in the Picture Editor load it up and change it how you like it. You could even market your own Picture Editor in the Clickstore to other users. Fusion 3 will even have the ability to import in outside APIs and map to the event editor. As such you can even create your own objects for Fusion using the Event Editor, Amazing!

Multi-platform Native Support: Plans include to have a Windows and Mac OS edit time of the tool. Each possessing the ability to export out all the different export options. We may even have a linux version as well.

We will be releasing more information as time moves forward including finally a release date so stay tuned to Clickteam and our social media. In the mean time you can check out below two exclusive interviews granted to Brokenjoysticks.net about the tool at GDC.

Brokenjoysticks.net Interview Videos

The Pizza Meetup

We had our annual GDC meetup on Thursday evening at Escape from New York Pizza. Meet some new friends and got to catch up with old ones. The pizza was fantastic as well as the conversation. Thomas of Pixel Licker attended, his new game Treasure Buster coming soon to mobile is as much awesome as was his previous effort Slayin was! Long time user Cellosoft attended. He couldn’t remember what his initial objects did as one of the first 3rd party object developers. And was suprised to discover some of them are still a integral part of Fusion today. Long time User Matt E attended and got us up to date on his latest workings in the world of programming. Alonso attended as well. We harassed him about a release date for Heart Forth, Alicia but he was not swayed. He brought some of his uber cool posters to hand out like the one in the booth picture above.  We even meet some awesome developers from the Seattle Indie developer scene.

I may update this article from time to time when I am provided more information and or pictures from other attendees. If you have photos, stories or information from GDC that you would like here please contact us. We appreciate all the people that came out to visit and are excited to share with you upcoming news and developments between now and the next GDC. intill then, Keep on Clicking!

 

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Article by Chris "Kisguri" Carson

Date: 04/05/2016

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