The first day of GDC 2010 in San Francisco has come and gone! All photos of things described in this post, and other stuff from GDC 2010 can be found on Flickr here.

We got to San Francisco from Palo Alto via an exciting train journey, where we found that this weeks issue of SF Weekly has an interesting tagline about an interesting sounding article on San Francisco. After that, we had some steak and relaxed; we went to the movies to see both “Cop Out” (awesome, but completely stupid) and “Alice in Wonderland” (typical Tim Burton genius). At the cinema, we were fortunate enough to see the Old Spice “I’m on a horse” ad on the big screen – which would more than made up the price of admission, even if the movie had been rubbish!

Soon enough we registered for GDC and checked in to our glorious hotel rooms. We’re staying at the San Francisco Marriott on 4th, and it really is quite high. After attempting to pose the Secret Lab business cards against the view and miserably failing to show off both the awesomeness of the view or the majesty of the business cards we gave up and got more food, this time far too much pasta (some of which is still sitting in our hotel room fridge!) We went for a wander to Union Square, and wandered around Borders for far too long – and, as usual even though we both use Sony eReaders, came away with more books.

The next day, GDC started! After being welcomed by a threatening Wario banner we proceeded down the grand (ahem) staircase of Moscone North before figuring out that we actually needed to be in Moscone South – after a swift adventure through a maze of tunnels, we found ourselves underneath Moscone South. We planned to attend the 10th Annual Game Design Workshop after having heard so many good things about it.

A host of amusing personalities, led by the seemingly inimitable Marc LeBlanc begun leading us through, and lecturing us on, a variety of fascinating topics on game design. The first thing we did was create a new set of rules, and a new setting, for the game SISSYFIGHT 3000. Paris’ team came up with “Constructing Thermonuclear Robot Wars” in which we used the papercraft Wario that Nintendo gave us as parts to represent building a robot. It got far, far more complex from there.

After some vigorous playtesting, brainstorming and laughing the activity changed, and we started to brainstorm “Epic Performance” moments of a game, with an eye to improving the “epicness” when a player fails. It was fun, but I’m still not entirely sure what we came up with! Following that, we moved to inserting a rule for player behaviour into a game called “100 Zombies”. Let me tell you, trying to figure out how a character labelled “Math Whiz” moves and fights zombies is no small challenge. So far, we’ve come up with a system whereby he “triangulates” the position of zombies, throws set squares and kills the zombies on the tip of a 3-4-5 triangle. I’ll post a diagram when I get a moment. We also, of course, collected our free phones from Google!

After that, we went to Unitys iPhone Networking Reception, and met up with the ever-friendly Tom Higgins from Unity and a whole host of other awesome Unity users and iPhone developers. From there, we set off to Chieftan’s Irish Pub (at the recommendation of Tom) and grabbed some dinner (including Bangers & Mash and Irish Stew!) with a small group of developers, artists and sound designers. It was great to meet so many awesome people in one day!

So, today (Day 2) we’re going back to the Game Design Workshop to continue work on “100 Zombies” and other exciting things! Tomorrow, the conference begins in earnest!

And now, since it’s 8:20 AM and the conference begins at 10AM, it’s time to go and have coffee! More photos are here.