My impressions : Awesome!

The screen looked great, and controls were responsive and the unit felt solid when slide out. I think gamers will lap this one up, if the price is right. I can’t comment on the phone part though, but then again, who uses a smartphone for making calls these days anyway?

Primarily I was interested in the Independent Game Summit, which is held on the first two days of the conference. In the IGS, luminaries from the world of independent game development deliver talks sharing there experiences, thoughts and ideas about all things game development. I last went to the IGS in 2009. This time, I found the amount of new information was less than my previous IGS visit. Their was still a lot of great information, and it was completely worth it. Perhaps that just says that I’ve got a reasonable idea of what I’m doing now.

The IGS was really the start of what turned out to be a real eye-opening conference though. At the first break, I spotted Simon from The Voxel Agents. Although I’d never met Simon before, I recognised him from winning an award at Freeplay last year. I went over and said hello and got to chatting. Simon then introduced me to Ben from Tin Man Games, who I hang out with during the afternoon. We went for a drink after the conference, and I met Chris from Play Bit Entertainment. These are all people I follow on Twitter, so it’s awesome to meet them in person, forge friendships, and find out that they are excellent people in RL!

By meeting these guys and some other people later on, I was able to get involved with an opportunity that was provided by the Game Developers Association of Australia (GDAA) to met a good number of games journalists. This happened over a few days later in the week. Although I didn’t attend GDC with the explicit goal of ‘selling’ Star Hammer Tactics, or the other projects I’m working on, it turned out that I was able to show the game to some journos and talk about Black Lab Games. W00t!

The point I’m trying to make here : From a decision to go and say hi to somebody I’d never met, I ended up meeting a bunch of game journos which will hopefully get some good exposure for the company. Networking and meeting people are just as important as coding and game design, if you’re looking to build and grow a sustainable company.

L8r, Paul

In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen 3 huge announcements that directly relate to tools, platforms and technology that I use.

First, Unity Technology announced a new version of Unity3D with support for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Android coming soon. Next, Microsoft announce XNA 4.0, a significant upgrade to .NET based game framework. Finally, Sony announce that they are releasing PhyrEngine for the PSP!

Why do these announcements matter? Because I do contract work in Unity, original games for the Xbox 360 with XNA, and I’m currently building a technology “platform” to allow my games to run on the PSP/PS3 – so every platform/toolset I use is being upgraded.

So much craziness, I can’t keep up! And that’s just day one of a five day conference!!