Introduction

I flew into cold and rainy Eugene, Oregon on Tuesday morning, October 9th to attend this year’s IndieGamesCon (IGC) being hosted by the lovely folk over at GarageGames. I was picked up from the airport and driven straight to the GarageGames offices by my friend Rich Grillotti from PixelJam (you may remember them from this year’s IGF competition). Rich was my chauffer for the four (excuse me, five) days that I was out there, I’m deeply in his debt. My flight from San Francisco to Eugene had been delayed by almost an hour and a half so I was a bit anxious to get to the Garage to attend the special Associates Day gathering, where they were set to reveal their new InstantAction platform. I was afraid I’d be late by I ended up arriving with time to spare, as people were still milling about the offices and snacking on food that was laid out in the large common area. GarageGames is in the middle of a huge expansion right now thanks to the IAC acquisition, so they were in the process of building out their office space into the rest of the building. But it all still had a very homely feel to it – I immediately felt comfy and relaxed as soon as I walked into the door.

They sat down all the associates and press (I think I was the only one – I’m not an associate) and spoke to us about their deal with InterActive Corp (IAC) and the new InstantAction technology, which they then demonstrated, playing Marble Blast Ultra on networked computers set up in the room. They actually had keynotes and lectures on this during the conference itself (which is where I’ll elaborate more) but they wanted to give the associates the first outsider glimpse of what was to come. After the brief lectures the gathering broke up and we all slowly migrated over to a local night club called the Starlight Lounge a few blocks away, which GG had rented out for the night. It was a nice club with lots of elbow room, a comfy lounge seating area, a pool table in the back room and a patio outside in the rear (both of which I didn’t even realize were there until like halfway through the evening). After eating some food, drinking lively (it was open bar all night, though I don’t booze it still helped keep my throat from getting dry and sore from talking so much), talking shop and meeting with lots of cool people, and losing horribly at games of pool to crazy pool shark Brett Seyler, I called it a night to get prepped for the real conference starting the next day.

So speaking if the conference – what exactly is IndieGamesCon? Well it’s not your general type of independent game developer’s conference, like the Austin IGC or the Toronto IGC – those are both events that focus on the industry in general. IndieGamesCon focuses primarily on GarageGames, with the generous side-helping of people involved in independent games development converging on one spot to swap war stories, ideas and the like. It should also be noted that a lot of these people (practically the majority) also use Torque engine technology. I’m not saying this like it’s a bad thing, I just want to make sure you understand exactly what IndieGamesCon is all about. Regardless of the heavy GarageGames slant, it’s still a lively gathering of like-minded people involved in the games industry, which still means that anyone can attend, not just Torque users and GG fan boys. This year the conference was held in a huge sound stage at a production studio, with round tables spaced all over the floor, which was nice because you were able to sit and talk with groups of people rather than being next to just two people if the tables were in rows. It was also nice to be in one spot and not have to run around to attend different sessions like at other conferences. To one side they had four long tables set up, three were stocked with PCs (about 6 to a table) for people to upload their games onto for others to play, and the last table had about 8 PCs running Marble Blast Ultra on InstantAction. I got pwned so bad every time I tried to play that game…

Day One - Keynote