We started by creating a feature list which we felt would be a minimum set of deliverables for the show. It was a very daunting list and after reviewing it there were some doubts as to whether it could all come together before the conference. We got a committment from everyone on the team that they would do whatever it took to get everything done in time.
The following 2 months was completely insane. Since all of us have day jobs it meant sleeping for as little as 4 or 5 hours a night for 60 days of development. The week before GDC is just a blur at this point. The whole Magicosm team really pulled together to get everything done. Even those on the team who are not artists or developers spent a lot of time testing and reporting bugs throughout the weeks prior to GDC.
We went right down to the wire. At first our code freeze was set for 2 weeks before the show, but in the end we committed our last pieces of code just hours before we all headed to sunny San Jose, California.
Bobby Martin flew in from Dallas, David Yazel came from Boston and Paul Schwanz came from DC. We got there at different times on Monday but it was not until Tuesday that we assembled at the Sun Microsystems booth. It was at that second that all of us met for the first time in person after more than 2 years of development. It was an awsome experience. All those months of ICQ, Yahoo Groups, Wiki, conference calls and e-mail are no substitute for the thrill of meeting people face to face!
Sun wanted to show how the game could be run cross-platform, so they set up two displays, once for Windows and one for Solaris. We were a little nervous about the Solaris because we had never run it before on that operating system. We installed all the software and booted it up on both machines. The windows version (on DirectX) started up right away with no problems. The Solaris version ran, but there were some issues with drivers which has to be worked out. After about 2 hours of work we had Magicosm up and running on Solaris.
We had decided right from the beginning that we would run against the server in Dallas so that other team members could log in from around the world and participate in the demos. We had no problems signing into the server from our booth at GDC and shortly we had a fuly multi-user demo up and running.
The next few days were completely crazy. We had at least 5 people talking to us and trying the game out at any one time. As news of what we were showing got out, more and more people came by to see what we were doing. On several occasions people told us we had the coolest stuff in the show. Not because it was technically better, or prettier, or faster, but because we were actually demoing a multi-user game right on the expo. No other group did that and in fact most other online games did little more than show screenshots, a video or pass out information. One person told me that our stuff did not look as good as Asherons Call II, and of course having seen their screenshots I would have to agree. But the kicker was that we were showing real stuff and AC2 was only running a 30 second video at their booth. We had set the demo up to be as sexy as possible, using a fire elemental and some cool magic spells we cooked up just days before.
People generally wanted to talk about 3 things: 3d, network/server and gameplay. Thankfully we had three people from our group who were experts in each of those areas and we never had to say we didn`t know the answers. We discovered very quickly that trying to read someone`s nametag when they walked up was too awkward, so we just took each person at face value and talked about whatever interested them. I suspect that most game companies aren`t very forthcoming when it comes to discussing technology secrets, and our total willingness to discuss anything was a shock to some of them. At one point there was a group of four engineers peppering us with questions about the performance of the 3d client. We even stopped the demo and pulled up the client in local mode so we could trigger a stress test with more avatars at once. They asked a few more questions and then moved on. Turns out it was the Everquest development team that had been so curious. I doubt they were extremely impressed, but the fact they were so interested was one more affirmation that we were demoing something worthwhile.
As the expo rolled on we passed out hundreds of flyers and met a lot of interesting people. Several press representatives interviewed us and while we were a bit nervous, we were excited to get the word out about Magicosm.
All in all, the GDC expo was a wonferful experience. Our thanks go out to all the people who worked so hard to make it happen.
David `Dilvish` Yazel
