Personal Introduction

There's nothing like a sense of accomplishment after a job well done. Standing there in the lobby hall during a break in “GameIS 2008” the annual Israeli game developer conference, I felt like a proud father. I've been a supporting member of the Israeli game development community for nearly a decade now, and I've seen it grown from virtually non existence to a growing, productive, fruitful community of game developers and game development enthusiasts.

Ever since volunteering to co-coordinate the Israeli Chapter of the IGDA, I've been striving to create a nourishing atmosphere for gamedevs to meet, drink, talk, and share their experiences with each other. GameIS 2008 was certainly the pinnacle of these events and it rose high above our bi-monthly get togethers that take place over beer in a local Irish pub. GameIS 2008 is the third annual conference of it's kind and gathered over 300 hundred people, with one common interest – game development.

The conference was ran by Guy Bendov, CEO of “Journeys”, a game company that makes a browser based social MMO with the theme of Journeys, along with myself, Oded Sharon, CEO of Corbomite Games, making episodic adventure games, with the voluntary help of several other members of the Israeli game industry: Ilan Greicer, Creative director of Funtactix, Dr. Yesha Sivav, Dudi Peles from PiSoft, and Doron Freidman from the Interdisciplinary center in the town of Herzelia, who were gracious enough to host the event.

My role was primarily to be in charge of the agenda. For weeks, I emailed lecturers, replied, had phone calls, and discussions until we found a great line-up of lectures that will fit our theme of this year's event : “Guys! Look! We have an industry!”

The theme for last's year event have been “Listen, we have great potential to start building a game development industry” and therefore a lot of the lectures were dealing what what can be done, how to raise money, how to make games and who to make games for.

This year it was all about accomplishments! Over the past year several companies, both fully funded companies, and independent developers made and released a bunch of games out to the world. For the first time in the Israeli game development history, people could stand on the stage and show their wares and products and be proud of them. And of course, I was proud of them too, as if they were my own children which I've been nurturing into adulthood.

I'll now give you a short summary of some of the lectures and highlights from the conference, as seen from my perspective.

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