So a few weeks ago, I was out of town in Sydney to watch the first UFC event in Australia. I was excited, I had floor seats, I was having a great time and I got a twitter message from an old work colleague that simply read: “Are you going to GDC?”. In my then excited state I replied with “I am if you are”. 2 weeks later, I’m in San Francisco.

Flash Gaming Summit

First on the list was my first Flash Gaming Summit, a meeting of the biggest and best names in the Flash games industry. Meeting a lot of people and having people know who I was was a little strange at first, but when it was followed by “oh you’re just one guy?” I felt I’d regained some of my anonymity. Amongst everyone there I got to meet quite a few guys who are in exactly the same boat as me, which was reassuring. Here’s some of the people I got to meet and hang out with:

Hero Interactive - Jared, Jimmy, Eric and the crew are just awesome guys. They made Paint the motherf’in Fence man! Oh and that Bubble Tanks thing.

Ben Olding - Creator of the Warlords series, still didn’t get around to buying him a beer for stealing that game concept.

Sean Cooper - Who I’ve looked up to even more after I discovered he’d programmed Syndicate in the 90’s. His Boxhead game tech is just amazing. We determined that we’re not competing with each other, somehow.

Sean McGee - responsible for Thing Thing games and Endless Zombie Rampage over on crazymonkeygames. We’ve agreed to co-ordinate future zombie game releases a bit better.

Greg from Kongregate - Really nice guy who’d embedded himself in the Flash gaming community, hope to get to speak more with him next time.

Overall it was a great summit, getting to make a bunch of new contacts and friends in the industry as well as seeing where everyone sees the industry going. My only wish is that it wasn’t so far away, 14 hours on a plane does bad things to your body.

GDC 2010

So the following day after drinking with the FGS attendees until about 2am, came “The Game Developers Conference Twenty Ten”. I was there, I have the seat sores to prove it. Truly, the worst seats known to man, in which you’re expected to sit for 6 hours a day.

Chairs aside it was an inspiring week listening and being amongst a bunch of game design gods. I got to see Sid Meier (Civilization) and Will Wright (The Sims) speak, spotted Patrice Desilets (Assassin’s Creed) and Cliff Bleszinski (Gears of War). Oh and of course Jonathan Blow (Braid) was hanging around the Indie game summit.

It’s hard during all these sessions not to let your brain wander and think about what you’d do in your own games. Got some great ideas and understanding from the talks and panels at the event, especially Sid Meier (blurrily pictured above) on the topic of rewarding players.

Armor Games Office and Home

So after a long week and about 30 sessions later, I headed down to Irvine just south of LA to hang out in the Armor Games office for a few days. It was great to see where Dan, Joey, John and the rest of the crew work and to see how much it resembled my old company in terms of atmosphere. Had a really productive few days working with Joey on this new project.

Now I’m home I’m trying to get my bearings back, been home for 5 days now and I’m just starting to feel normal again. I’m putting together artwork for this new collaboration with Joey for the next week or so, then it’s back to Union City for more work. Until then, enjoy the Alpha from the last post.