It was a blast visiting Xin Wang (Cinematic Character & Prop Supervisor) at Blizzard Entertainment, Bernardo Antoniazzi (Technical Art Director) at Treyarch Studio and the department leads at Disney Imagineering during my LA trip this year. There was so much to see but unfortunately no photo allowed for the most part. I was very impressed and inspired by the creativity, passion and seriousness these people demonstrate for their craft on a daily basis. When working for a such large studio it’s all about finding the harmony between individual creativity and team spirit. While the indie game scene rises dramatically in these couple years and has been considered the new trend, I still truly appreciate the work came out from the AAA production studios, as these are a bunch of incredibly talented people who are willing to push pixels (or codes) and drive for that very excellence in their “small part” of a big machine. We all have our differences in taste of what kind of movies or games we like, but judging the level of “artistry” of a game by it’s indie or AAA is completely non-sense. With that said, I do hope those AAA giants will be willing to invest their wealth and resources on more creative and original ideas instead of making one after another FPS sequels. We need all types of different games to serve different kinds of audience. We are fortunate to have this variety at this new golden age of game development which makes this industry so fascinating.

		Blizzard, Treyarch and Disney Imagineering VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

It was great to see many old friends as well as meeting new friends at SIGGRAPH 2013!

Here are some of the projects that I found most interesting this year

TransWall

AquaTop Display

Project Spark

The Electronic Theater was awesome as always:

This was my favorite piece from the Electronic Theater this year:

And here are some pictures:

		SIGGRAPH 2013 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

E3 2013 was as usual, super exciting with tons of cool stuff to see. This year’s E3 was extra special to me as we were a finalist of the E3 2013 College Game Competition, and the Entertainment Software Association (http://www.theesa.com/) gave us a beautiful booth and invited us to demo our project live side by side with all the AAA game studios. I was too engaged in all the activities around me and forgot to take pictures most of the time, but here are what I have on my phone:

		E3 2013 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

E3 2013 College Game Competition VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

SCAD Interactive Design & Game Development won the 1st place of E3 2013 College Game Competition!

For many years, E3 has been a legendary expo for heavy weight AAA game studios around the world to showcase their best projects. It was an honor to be a winner of its first college game competition in 2013. Our faculty and students really appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this fascinating expo and showcased the game our students produced at SCAD. It was truly an exciting experience for us to demo our game side by side with all the top game development studios in the world. The game industry is changing and there is a bigger and bigger market demand for indie games each year. By hosting and incorporating this college game competition with E3 and bringing that indie student spirit to E3, the Entertainment Software Association once again demonstrates their clear understanding about the latest trend of the game industry and SCAD was honor to be a part of it.

Check out the game development blog of our winning project “Lost in Thought”:

http://litdevblog.wordpress.com/