GDC 2011 Wrapped

I only spent a day at GDC 2011 but it was jam-packed with lots of useful talking and listening. I had breakfast with an old friend who now helps run Ogmento who recently released a free iPhone game featuring some extremely cool augmented reality technology. Their ghost game has some of the best 'mark' tracing capabilities currently around!

I got caught up with a game journalist friend who's since gotten out of that business as he said big websites continue to turn to younger writers in an effort to find cheap labor, seemingly not valuing any true experience in writing. Don't get me wrong, you very well could be a good writer right out of college, but when big sites are paying less and less and not working to retain experienced writing talent, it hurts the readers and the writers.

Next I journeyed to a nearby hotel to have a very fruitful meeting with Microsoft. More on that hopefully in a few months!

I then swapped hats and went to talk to Sony about another platform of theirs. Very excited there as well.

In the afternoon, I joined the XBLIG panel featuring Ska Studios, Magical Time Bean, Zeboyd Games and Mr. Game Developer Magazine where we talked about what's been good with the Xbox 360 service and what's been not so good. To anyone that attended, thanks for coming! It was a pleasure to be there.

I wrapped up conference, taking in a great talk by the amazing Will Wright. He spoke about what he'd change now with his game from 1984, Raid on Bungeling Bay, and a really interesting side story about Russian space travel.

I got a delightful tour of Double Fine studios from a friend who had worked on Stacking there, and then had drinks with sound design guys from Austin.

Ian (Magical Time Bean) and I closed the night with a round of Deathsmiles on his sweet, big-screen setup.
All-in-all one of my shortest, but best times at GDC!

Oh, and I stopped by the DBP booth at the show and got some sweet Indie Games swag. If you'd like one of these little white stickers that say "Xbox LIVE indie games", stop and visit me next week at PAX East at the Devolver Digital booth (I-16) in the "Indie Alley".

(Link to pdf of PAX East map: http://east.paxsite.com/expo_map.pdf
Booth I-16 is in the middle, straight down.)