GDC Highlights: VR demand, strange lives, and indie design tips

Day 1 of GDC 2016 is complete! With VR demos, indie design talks, and loads of interactive spaces, the conference was off to a roaring start full of interesting ideas and valuable lessons. 

For those of you watching at home, we’ve pulled together some notes from Twitter and our own coverage to give you the most important highlights of the day’s events.

VRDC attendance is through the roof, and demand for access to talks literally exceeded initial capacity. Midway through the day, the conference announced it would expand room sizes for VR talks, responding to massive developer interest at the show. 

Among those high-interest talks, Colin Northway took to the podium to explain how even eating needs to be redesigned in games, and Scott Stephan, Alex Schwarz, and company broke down some of the basic lessons for building room scale experiences. 

Across GDC, the social impact of games took high interest as advocacy talks and design talks discussed the way games influence real-world problems and the lives of game developers. Life is Strange’s depiction of a suicide attempt was put on center strange, as developers Michel Koch and Raoul Barbet broke down to attendees the decision to take on a highly charged subject matter for their game.

And lastly, we took some time to talk with indie dev and gather a few small tips that might help smaller or up-and-coming designers with their next game project. You can watch the Vines we shot below! Keep an eye on @Gamasutra for the rest of the week as we poll developers with more questions about life in the games industry.