For those of you that have been longtime GDC attendees, speakers, or lowly exhibitors, this year may have taken you back to years past. Smaller crowd (the line would tell you otherwise), More intimate sessions, and cool swag! If you didn’t make it out, be sure to check out the vault for online recaps.
I wanted to send out a few takeaways from our group:
The biggest thing we get out of GDC each year is the direct contact with users. This year was no exception. There’s only so much we can do to create actual dialogue with developers through marketing and GDC is always an opportunity for us to get past that and hear from you. If you stopped by our booth, even briefly in the hustle, and gave feedback, know that our team is already working on ways to integrate that into our dev plans or even our existing roadmap.
The opposite side of this coin is getting in front of people that don’t use us at all or haven’t in a while. This year with Epic and Unreal Engine being absent, there were seemingly many more Unity developers. As you may know, our strength has always been C++ over C#. That’s frankly because of how well Visual Studio handles C# and we show massive gains with C++ (feel free to ask me about our secret sauce). In any case, it was good to chat with a few developers that primarily work with C#, some after years of not using Visual Assist still had good feedback for us around C# tooling.
A final takeaway for me personally was the passion that you have for your tooling. Whether it be things which we provide, native tooling, or other extensions. This passion is pretty contageous as our team walked away a bit refreshed and excited about the future of our tools and the game development space in general.
So what do we do with what we learned?
Much of our action items from GDC is turning your feedback into feature requests or bug reports with our Dev team. But bigger than that we want to open more lines of communication. We’ve started holding focus groups specific to two industries that we see benefits for our tooling (Game Development and Finance). We’d like to take this one step further with the launch of an MVP program. The goal with this is to give a select group of developers inside access to our development team, latest builds, and roadmap, in order to help guide the direction of our efforts in a meaningful way to continue producing great releases that you’re used to. Stay tuned for more info on each of these as we solidify the plans.
Lastly, Special thanks to those who stopped by to discuss our sister companies Embarcadero and UltraEdit. If you’ve been a developer for a while, Rad Studio and Delphi may have been one of your first IDEs and languages. Check out the awesome things we’re doing over at Embarcadero.com. And for those of you that want to use a text editor that’s got some enterprise stability and security check out UltraEdit!
Thanks for having us at GDC. Hope to see you again next year!
