Holy wow it's 4am. Hells yea for 3 hours of sleep!

Three Rings Studio tour

I tagged along with the IGDA student scholars (one of whom I'm mentoring) as they went for a tour of the Three Rings offices down the street from Moscone.

While Daniel James, Three Rings CEO, managed to stand and talk to the IGDA scholars for a good hour, he dispensed a very detailed history of Three Rings as a company, no doubt giving the students as much information to chew on as possible. Many remained rapt, but a few started to glaze over at about the 40-minute mark. After some Q&A, he finally offered to walk the students around, at which point the scuffle of chairs on the floor was immediate as they all leapt to their feet, ready to go.

I'm saving the full gallery for the coverage page (still need bulk image upload access) but the shot I share above is from a secret room hidden behind a huge bookshelf that swings open. Yes. This office is that awesome.

Indie Games Summit

Pixeljam on Web Games

I got back from the studio tour in time to catch the tail-end of a talk being given by the Pixeljam duo Miles Tillman and Rich Grillotti. They have a great web games history with games like Dino Run, Rat Maze and the IGF-nominated Gamma Bros. I didn't take much away because I was so late but one thing Miles mentioned that struck me was how you need to build interest in your game/company/characters in order to sell without having to rely so much on advertisements.

Making LOVE in your bedroom

The sole guy behind the game LOVE, Eskil Steenberg, gave a talk about the tools he created to make his MMO procedurally-generated user-content world. It was some pretty fucking amazing shit. Yea - I had to say it like that. He has tools all linked together to a tools server and programmed so they can communicate with each other and the game. For an example he loaded a model in his modeling tool, then loaded the game and placed that game model down in the world. He then grabbed the edge of the model in the editor and started pulling it about - in the game the exact same changes occurred in real-time. He also has a tool that generates UV maps for models on the fly - as he changed the model geometry you saw the UV map update. The interface to all this would make Apple crawl away in shame - he even had a built-in asteroids clone easter egg!

Best of all his tools are free. Completely free. As in, source too. Get them. Get them now.

One of my friends said it best: "He's like some super genius from the future."

Making games you hate

Last lecture of the day went to Alec Holowka and Tommy Refenes, who made Aquaria and Goo!, respectively. They talked about all the shit they had to go through to make their games. Alec suffered depression, relationship trouble with family, and at many times just hating the game. Tommy had it worse, living off of savings at one point while working on Goo! and dealing with Sony and Microsoft promising to publish his game or give him a dev kit and never delivering. Multiple times. Only the fact that the engine he had developed while working on Goo! let him be involved with the upcoming Super Meat Boy made it worthwhile. While no actual advice was really dished out, the moral of the stories was "Suck it up and push on!".

Then some dude took the Q&A mic and led Tommy on a rendition of Bill Pullman's ID4 Independence speech. Then ran onstage and high-fived him. Wha?? I dunno, but I laughed and applauded anyways. Okay.

Oh but Eskil wasn't done yet. No, he came back in and stayed, demoing LOVE, until the event people kicked us out for the day.

Expo Setup

After the summit was over I met with Dave and Lissa (and Kevin later) in the half-setup Expo hall to make sure the booth was all together. It was, mostly not. After a bit of wrangling we got everything pretty good and set to go. Our booth item this year are mini frisbees - this should be interesting! We hope to see them flying around and bonking people on the heads. That may make them curse GDNet but at least they'll know about us. Uhm... that kinda makes sense.



Of course we just couldn't keep them all to ourselves (we have a LOT) so Kevin and I went over to the Course PTR booth and artfully arranged them on their table [smile] Can't wait to hear what their reaction was in a few hours, bwaahaha. We're all buds, so it was a friendly prank.



And while we were there we of course couldn't help but notice the large shelf of GDNet Collection books. Awesome? Yes. Yes indeed.

Party Time!

Parties continued tonight, kicking off with the 10-Bit indie game developer party at The Cellar, which was hopping by the time I got there at just past 8pm. Got to see and chat (chat == scream, really, during parties) with pretty much everyone I knew in that neck of the development woods, so that was awesome. Even ran into a few old friends. Always nice. Picked up a new piece of flair for my badge as well.

Next it was over to Jillian's at the Metreon for Minna Mingle, which is hosted by the Casual Games Association. That was packed too, and I met up with my student scholar and introduced him to a ton of people and met at least the same amount if not more from the people I saw. I had to go back to the hotel on the way to the next party to pick up more business cards!



The next party was the annual IGDA members-only party, which I never really went to in years past because it was always too crowded. This was one of the reasons I went there last. More people, more great conversations, more introductions. I even got to rock out with air drums and air guitar by these fellows from the Netherlands. Real nifty toys - check em out.



Finally the night ended up at Tom Buscaglia's suite on the 27th floor of the Westin, where I was able to have a few nice quiet conversations with friends from GarageGames and Push Button Labs, and Tom brought Big Huge Game's Tim Train back to the suite - who I hadn't seen in like 2 years and we were able to catch up over some drinks. I'm really hoping those guys pull through and don't have to shut down.

I walked around the corner back to the hotel (man, so nice to be located close to everything this year), passed a few drunken developers here and there, and now it's time for me to close my eyes for a few hours.

Why bother stay up and write all this stuff?? Well, I wouldn't want to forget it now would I? Because, seriously, I would. Soooo much more stuff happening in a day than my brain is used to. I got back to the hotel room and was looking over the business cards I got - 3 or 4 of them I just flat out could not remember where I got them or who gave them to me (as in faces). And they were all from today.

Of course, I don't see how sleep deprivation will make things any better - but at least I'm used to that

P.S. - all the photos except the ones taken for the Facebook gallery were taken with my new camera. How about that? I am happy.