Well, I made it to my first session today, which was An Agile Retrospective given by the CTO of High Moon Studios and discussed how Scrum works in the game development industry. The talk covered the entire agile process and several key methodologies like XP (eXtreme Programming) and the concept of programmer pairing. It'll be an interesting writeup and I have a video to go with it too.

So then I got to sit down and talk to Mike Agustin from Gendai Games after signing an NDA, so obviously that's about all I can say. It was nice chatting with Mike though because I hadn't spoken with him in a while. I also stopped off at the press lounge to say hi to Teresa Tyndorf, who helped me greatly in getting all 20 of the IGF interviews completed. I also bid farewell to the rest of the press staff as I always do at the end of the conference.

Then I ambled back over to North Hall to check out the Expo some more - stopped off at the GG booth to see who was around. I'm wearing the same black GG t-shirt as most of them are sporting today. Then I wandered over to Guitar Rising, which is the Guitar Hero-like game that uses a real electric guitar to play the songs. I played it on the second hardest setting with Smoke on the Water and managed to pass (barely, hahaha) but it was just as fun and addicting as Guitar Hero and just as difficult as when I first started rocking out on the plastic guitar. So yea, I could see myself getting better through lots of practice - just like GH. And I think one of the biggest draws (again, like Guitar Hero) is that you don't just strum a tune, you play a song, with bass and percussion and vocal accompaniment. That I think is the biggest reason why people who play GH don't ever feel the need to go out and learn to play real guitar, because then they lose all that and end up just strumming and humming to themselves. Not quite the same (tho pleasing for many people).

Anyways I'm glad I didn't make a complete fool of myself and managed to pass (one star is still one star in my book!). Now I'm sitting in my next lecture and still wondering why the hell I suddenly have internet access in here when I was in the same room on Wed and got diddly-squat. But, guess I can't complain. Much.

Dunno when I'll be able to update again, maybe not until I'm back in the hotel tonight. But I did finally activate my mobile twitter last night so I'm texting updates to my twitter feed if you want to follow along.