GDC 2026, New Builds, New Devices!

In this week’s newsletter:

• Quick thoughts on GDC

• A surprise encounter

• An exciting update for CONNECTOME (and CONSTELLATIONS)

• Teaser: Hands-on making a MIDI Controller for Art Installations

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I started writing this article as I was waiting to board my flight back to SEA from SFO, delayed by winter weather conditions that backed everything up at SeaTac airport. I was in San Francisco attending GDC (aka the “Festival of Gaming”) for the very first time. It’s a huge event (10s of thousands of ppl) but spread across a large enough surface area that it doesn’t feel overwhelming.

Sitting in the airport I thought I would write a quick GDC retrospective and hit <send>. That clearly didn’t happen. It’s now been a couple of weeks (wait, three!) and I feel like I’ve been through one deep side quest after another.

I ran into a real-life reader of this newsletter and a CONNECTOME fan! It was day one, the first session of my morning. As I was standing against the back wall, I turned to my right and recognized a face. I immediately knew this person because I have video of her talking about CONNECTOME after having played it last year at the Seattle Indies Expo (SIX).

Ray, it was SO nice to see you again. It was great to catch up, and it meant a lot to know that you read and appreciate this newsletter - I hope to see you at another gaming event soon!

While there’s tons of great official GDC content (workshops, presentations, panels), there are so many off campus events, mixers, parties, etc., that many people don’t even buy an event pass. They just show up to network. I did have a pass, and I don’t regret getting it, but I spent most of my energy figuring out where to be after the events of the day.

It’s at these after hours events where the real work of networking, making friends, and (sometimes) launching new partnerships takes place. It was great to see many friends I know from the XR/VR community - some for the first time in person, others I haven’t seen since AWE or Meta Connect last year. (you may recognize a few familiar faces from the XR/VR YouTube community above 😉)

I am SO excited to share that I now have early builds of CONNECTOME working on both Apple Vision Pro (AVP) and Pico 4 Ultra! Yay! My intention has been to be on the AVP from the very beginning… it was only until very recently that I believed I was blocked based on the drawing library I’ve been using (the wonderful Shapes library by Freya Holmer).

Turns out, I’m not blocked 🎉🎉🎉 I had to learn (through some deep digging) about the special combination of checkboxes required between Unity and XCode to make this library work on AVP. I still have some fine tuning to do - getting hands working just right across devices is critical, but I’m VERY close.

I’ve been diligently working on what I now call “ConnectomeCore” off and on for several months. This effort has been motivated by my desire to bring these products to other devices and in order to do so I had to change some under the hood plumbing.

A nice side effect of this work is that CONNECTOME (and ultimately CONSTELLATIONS) will both get controller support. I designed both of these as hands-first experiences (I still stand by that decision), but adding controller support has always been on my backlog. There are times when hands don’t work well (poor lighting, certain sitting positions, etc.), and some people genuinely just prefer using controllers.

IF you have an Apple Vision Pro or a Pico headset and you’re interested in doing some early testing for me, please reach out or Join my Discord! I’d love to have you join as beta tester for either (or both) of these devices!

If you follow me on LinkedIn you may have seen my recent post about leading a maker workshop for the very first Electric SEA event here in Seattle. I led a two-day workshop during the last weekend of March that “combined hardware building/prototyping, digital art, MIDI, and some AI-assisted coding thrown in for good measure”.

I called the device the “ELECTRIC SEA_MK1” and I just love how it turned out! I built these kits by hand - running every machine in my workshop, from the CNC router (Xcarve) to the laser cutter (Glowforge) to the 3D printer (Ender 3 S1 Pro) and beyond. I even designed my first custom PCB and had it manufactured overseas for this workshop.

I’ll share more about the project and the first live demo in a future post. For now, I’ll leave you with a few pics…

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

Until next time…

Grant