Monday 22 August 2011

Back from GDCE/Gamescom

Well, I survived!

I have a hell of a lot of thoughts running around my head after this last week, and I plan on putting them down in words here over the next few days.

Quick comments in the meantime:

- Many of the speeches really didn't feel worth the effort.
- Lots and lots and LOTS of triumphal nonsense about social games taking over the world. Unsurprising but still annoying.
- A few genuinely awesome talks, however. I'll get lists of actual names later, but the standouts were the guy from Epic talking about company history and storytelling, the guy from Bioware talking about Mass Effect monster design, and the guy from Doublesix talking about marketing Burn Zombie Burn. All of which were an excellent mix of hard data and inspiring verbiage.

Meanwhile, I've officially entered Gestalt into the Indie Games Arcade at LGS/Eurogamer Expo in September. We'll see what happens.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

GDC Europe and ZX81 Roguelike

Well, this time next week I'll be in Cologne at GDC Europe. I've actually bought a Main Conference Pass as much of the stuff happening in the Independent Games Summit is actually of limited interest to me compared to a lot of the things happening in the mainstream track, and I couldn't quite justify the additional expense of an All Access Pass. About the only thing worthwhile in the Indie Summit would be the networking opportunities, and to be honest that's something for further down the line. I'm much more interested in what some of the foremost voices in the industry have to say, to be honest. I've never been much keen on the ghettoisation of indie developers.

After that, Gamescom. I have a couple of meetings lined up but for the most part I plan on simply enjoying the festival. And I also plan on enjoying Cologne once again - it's a truly beautiful city and I have the massive benefit of a couple of friends there. I'll be travelling with another friend, a fluent German speaker, and we plan on making the most of a week away.

Finally, my colleague Ian is working on a game for the ZX81!

He's been working with a new internal memory expansion for ZX81s, which is enabling us to provide collectors with original ZX81s upgraded to 16k or even 32k of RAM. For this reason, we decided to produce a game which could take full advantage of these memory expansions, to give them more than simply collection value. It's currently untitled, but it's essentially a roguelike adventure game (although Ian is insisting it isn't for some reason, against all evidence to the contrary :D ). We'll be getting a video made later on and I'll link to it here. It's well under development and should be finished quite soon.