Last week I crawled out of the cave that is my home office and traveled to Las Vegas to attend the D.I.C.E. Summit, an elite game industry conference where the biggest and most influential players in the game industry meet to network, receive awards, and enjoy some time away from work for a few days.
A ticket at the door will set you back $3700, which is far outside of my modest indie developer budget. Thankfully, I was one of five lucky recipients of the Intel Indie D.I.C.E. Scholarship, which Intel and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Foundation, who hosts D.I.C.E., sponsored this year. While this was their first year of sending indie developers to the Summit, they have supported a scholarship for game development students for a number of years.
D.I.C.E. was amazing. I have attended countless industry conventions and meet-ups, but the density of powerful members of the industry had me completely floored. It seemed like everyone I met was a CEO, executive producers or lead developers from one AAA studio or another. Truthfully, for someone generally so bold and outgoing at similar events, I also felt an unexpected twinge of shyness; My accomplishments are few and minor in this realm of giants.
