GDC 2019 was beyond amazing.
The event broke last year’s record attendance, attracting more than 29,000 people to San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center.
So…
What exactly did we do at the largest game industry event in the world?
What I want to say is extremely hard to put into words…
You had to be there.
But I’ll do my best to paint you a picture of a typical day of an Enjin team member at GDC 2019.
It’s early morning as you enter a convention center in downtown San Francisco, sipping a coffee you grabbed along the way.
You go down an escalator and enter a magical world—a colossal hall filled with colorful, futuristic wonders being checked out by tens of thousands of game industry professionals.
There’s more than 500 booths manned by everyone from tiny game industry startups to titans of technology like Nvidia, Oculus, Sony, Unity, Unreal, Intel, Google, and Amazon.
Your booth is at the same place as last year—a badass, purple-themed 1,200ft² space.
On the left, there’s the Developer Corner, where people come to check out the Enjin Platform.
In the middle, an info desk chock-full of purple swag.
On the right, there’s the Early Adopter Showcase, where 9Lives Arena, Age of Rust, AlterVerse, and Bitcoin Hodler are showcasing their games and the Enjin Blockchain Gaming Multiverse.
As you enter the booth, a game developer approaches you and asks, “So, what do you guys do?”
You respond, “We created the Enjin Platform, which allows you to create blockchain games without a single line of blockchain code.”
Five minutes later, you’re explaining the ERC-1155 token standard, pointing to the Early Adopters, and being utterly amazed because, unlike last year, you didn’t have to explain what blockchain is.
Not even once.
An hour later, you’re chatting with a business developer from a massive international corporation and exchanging cards.
Time passes. Since Enjin runs on coffee, you grab another while you explain the awesomeness of a decentralized gaming multiverse to a group of devs.
GDC 2019 taught us a valuable lesson: if you build it, they really will come.
While thousands of developers flocked to our booth at GDC to learn about the Enjin Platform and check out games being created with it, The Six Dragons and Forgotten Artifacts announced that they had successfully integrated our technology into their games.
Exciting times, to say the least.
On behalf of the entire Enjin team, I’d like to express our deepest gratitude to the six Early Adopters who joined us at booth S563.
These guys and girls were the real stars of the booth, evangelizing blockchain gaming and the Enjin Platform with relentless passion.
In addition to introducing thousands of new developers to our tools and technology, we managed to produce some amazing, insightful interviews with 9Lives Arena, Age of Rust, AlterVerse, and Bitcoin Hodler which we’ll publish in the upcoming weeks.
The Expo was clearly awesome…
But what about that big party?
To cap off Blockchain Day, we hosted the Official GDC Blockchain Mixer.
At the event, we were joined by the Blockchain Game Alliance, a coalition of gaming and blockchain companies committed to advocating for the democratization of blockchain within the gaming industry.
Comprised of industry leaders like Ubisoft, ConseSys, and Enjin, the BGA seeks to develop common standards and practices for the use of blockchain technology in gaming.
The Mixer was a really nice way to end the second day of GDC surrounded by old and new friends, colleagues, and partners, and making valuable connections.
Witek Radomski is Enjin’s Chief Technical Officer, inventor of the ERC-1155 token standard, and the (un)official Wizard of Blockchain. 🧙♂️
As part of the conference’s Programming track, Witek presented two blockchain game development sessions.
In this session, Witek explored how blockchain technology can be used in creative ways in game design and new forms of gameplay.
He discussed Enjin’s suite of blockchain development tools and demonstrated Enjin Beam by beaming out some collectible tokens that were made exclusively for GDC 2019! Finally, he showcased some of the most interesting games being built on the Enjin Platform this year, and took a dive into the world’s first “multiverse.”
Witek was joined by SpacePirate Games Founder Chris LoVerme, who demoed Age of Rust, a dark sci-fi adventure game being built with the Enjin Platform.
In this live demo, Witek showcased the Enjin Blockchain SDK and showed how to integrate fungible and non-fungible blockchain assets into a Unity game.
He minted new tokens on Ethereum, added them to a demo game, infused them with functionality and metadata, and then demonstrated how to create a simple web application to offer blockchain assets for sale.
Next, Godot Engine Co-founder Ariel Manzur presented the Enjin Blockchain SDK module for Godot, explaining how to create blockchain games with the popular open-source game engine.
There is so much to say, but so little I can reveal.
For starters, our development team is hard at work on the Enjin Platform Mainnet release, doing their very best to make it happen in the upcoming months.
To say there’s a demand for access to the currently closed beta (Mainnet) version of the Enjin Platform would be an understatement. This question has been asked countless times, both at GDC 2019 and via our online channels.
So, we’ll do something about that…
In the meantime, stay tuned. Our development team always has a few has tricks up their sleeve.
Thank you for reading — and if you’d like to check out the Enjin Platform, head over here, create an account, and play around.
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