Unite 2016 Amsterdam
Google searching games conferences europe in june - Results: Pixelfest, Unite16...
Choices:
Pixelfest - Poland or Unite16 - Amsterdam....
I think I'll choose AMSTERDAM!
This couldn't have worked out better for me as I was planning on going to Europe for my annual family visit and I thought that it would be cool to see if there were any game related events happening.
Unite16 was the perfect choice.
The trip to Amsterdam was long but went by fairly quick - I had on board wifi and watched some videos to kill some time; I took the bus from Hamburg to Amsterdam and arrived in rainy weather. I still had to get to Utrecht that day and it was already 8pm in the evening. When I got to Utrecht and got in the bus to get to my friend's place I got given a "break" by the bus driver which means that they let you ride for free if you don't happen to have small change on you. I slept like a baby that night.
The following day the weather was a bit better and I was excited for the event and the opening ceremony. The venue of the conference was inside a large factory building called the "Westergasfabriek", an impressively large construction that was located in the heart of Amsterdam. The people were already flooding in and everyone was excited for the conference to start. The main hall had a vast array of lights and smoke machines that were accompanied by two very large LED displays. The production quality certainly wasn't lacking.
The opening ceremony saw the CEO of Unity giving an introduction and taster to what will be happening in terms of Unity's future and several technical updates and goals were presented by the Unity team.
I was very excited to get to the talks and hear about some game development tips. Day 1 offered plenty of exciting and interesting speakers that gave insight to a lot of technicalities and workflow optimization.
The following days I decided to venture to the Game exhibition and play-test some of the "Made with Unity" games and my-oh-my was I amazed at how beautiful some of the games were! It just opened my eyes to how powerful Unity has become and what intriguing ideas one can transfer into games.
I also used this opportunity to talk to some of the developers/game studios and chat a bit about the journey of developing their games. It was very interesting to hear different stories from an array of game developers from so many different countries!
The festival offered a lot of new material in terms of learning and provided a ton of inspiration to bridge this year and I hope that some connections that I made there will stay alive till the next game's conference - maybe next year I will check out Poland. Who knows?
