If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been having a blast at the Game Developer Conference Online 2011 all week in Austin, TX (what a fitting destination for a Sooner after thrashing Texas over the weekend). This was my first business conference of any kind, and GDC was definitely a great start.

I spent Monday through Thursday learning from the best in the business and getting motivated/inspired to bring some great new experiences to the players of GoldFire Studios games. Even though I only had the basic expo pass, I was able to catch some great sessions on data analysis, data security, HTML5 gaming, MongoDB, cloud gaming and more. I also connected with a lot of great people from all corners of the games business, making the week overall a great experience that was well worth the time and expense. Special shout out to the ever helpful guys at the Joyent booth, Yaroslav from Xsolla, Adrian from Trendy Entertainment (good luck on the upcoming game launch), Darius from Bocoup, Tyler from Tap.Me and Yelena from Papaya (sorry if I missed anyone, I've now got a stack of like 100 business cards on my desk).

Without boring you with anymore of the details (besides saying that even if you aren't in the industry, you should go check it out next year), here's some pictures from the week for your viewing pleasure. Oh, and yes, I was as excited as that first girl when I played the HTML5 game demo at the Google booth.