What a day. Seriously, I can't believe it's only Monday. How will I survive this week?? Well, I've done it before so, I can do it again!

Indie Game Summit Coverage Day One

After rushing out of the press lounge at 9:55 because I didn't realize that the Indie Game Summit was in North Hall (and the press lounge is in West), I got to North about 5 minutes later to find that the one sole room they had reserved for IGS was packed solid - so solid in fact that the air was hot and stuffy to the extreme. I couldn't do it. Ron Carmel (2D Boy) was giving an awesome talk and I just couldn't stay without melting into the floor. So that was disappointing.

So I hung out in the North hall lobby area, ran into Tom Buscaglia (the Game Attorney), managed to find a decent wifi connection to do a bit of work, and then worked my way back into IGS during the 11am coffee break. Even still, I had to wait in a line. Finally I made it in, and they had turned on the air or something because it was cool again, and stayed that way the rest of the day.

Games & Sales: Stats 101

So first up was Simon Carless' talk on game sales and statistics. It was extremely dense, as you can see in this photo in particular, the slide is packed with data. I had no time to write it all down but I do have it all recorded so I can pick through it later. He went over stats for PSN, XBLA, WiiWare, App Store and various PC distribution channels (portals, retail, digital, etc). At the start of each he gave the platform's total unit sales, date it came out, notable titles, etc. Then he went into detail on units sold per platform, estimating what amount of units would constitute a low-end to high-end ROI. I really hope I can disseminate this information properly!!

Indie Games: From Buzz to Business

Then Tom Buscaglia led a panel of past and current IGF finalists (in fact, a nice mix of one past IGF Finalist, one current IGF Finalist, and one past Student IGF Showcase Finalist) on how to turn that media attention into a business. Unfortunately the panelists and Tom spent 30 minutes (half the session) setting the stage so Tom didn't have much time to get the panelists into the real meat of the session, and Q&A ran well into lunchtime. Still, they manage to get out some good info, like how to handle publisher's trying to take advantage of you, how to handle crazy people calling in for support at 3am, and to be ready for the huge load of marketing your game under the spotlight.

Going back to the support call for a second - Michael Wilford from Twisted Pixel (developers of "The Maw" for XBLA) actually provided the voice recording of the woman calling in at 3am local time complaining about a bug. She called like 5 times in the span of 20 minutes, getting increasingly irate that the bug hadn't been fixed and that the game was now horrible and she was telling her friends. It was hilarious. In the full report next week I will include a complete transcript.

Lunchtime!

Then it was lunchtime. I only had about 45 minutes to eat so I headed back over to West to swing by the press lounge for their wonderful press-only wifi. I picked up a salad lunch on the way (all they had left by then) but only just for the cookie. Yup, cookie for lunch. I also was able to pop ninja-style into Richard's video blogs not just once, but twice. Yes, I can see how I look like a rapper with the shades and my badge "bling" [grin]

The Four-Hour Game Design by Cactus

Back to the IGS, first up was Jonatan Soderstrom (Cactus Software) talking about his process of creating a game in 4 hours. He did his entire presentation within Game Maker, which is what he uses to create his games. He started with an opening video that had the Internet commanding him to make a game in 4 hours. He did and out popped a pile of smelly poop! He then launched into a series of awesome images describing the 4-hour process, closing with a woman going through labor entitled "Getting it out there" and ended by the ugliest, fattest baby you ever did see as the unintended result you sometimes get.

He gave several options for making a simple pixel-based game look dynamic, such as taking a bunch of plain squares and adding some jitter, angling them and throwing in some pixelated background effects like rain or a more gradual effect like a color fade. He talked about cloning existing ideas, which he demonstrated visually with another game video of a 3D vector model copying itself. When he said you had to add something distinguishing that makes your copy better than the original, his model grew boobs.

Yea, it was a pretty awesome talk.

Crayon Physics Deluxe Postmortem

This was almost the same talk Petri Purho (Kloonigames) gave at the end of last year up in Montreal for MIGS. However this time around he had more time to think about what he wanted to say, and no doubt incorporated feedback from his MIGS talk as well. He talked about how Crayon Physics (not Deluxe) came to be - starting back to when he first decided to do 7-day prototypes as a means to make him complete games. Crayon Physics was his 10th prototype. He liked the 7-day games because it made it easier for him to show friends and family - if it sucked then he could just shrug it off and say well, it was only made in 7 days. But when he posted a video of Crayon Physics to YouTube, that kicked off the crazy interest in the game that drove him to write Deluxe, which took 20 months. Along the way he came to better understand exactly what type of game he was making, hoping to give people the chance to be creative and feel like kids again, finding different solutions to problems and being proud to show off their work to others.

He did a little exercise where he had handed out crayons while people were coming back from lunch (at the time I thought it was just a marketing gimmick, and it still partly is but not totally) and during the talk he told people to get out a sheet of paper and draw a portrait of the person next to them in 30 seconds here's what mine turned out like:



Yea I kinda started with 10 seconds left because I didn't really want to do it - or really show it off to the guy I had just mutilated - but that was the point Petri wanted to make - that kids would have loved to draw their neighbor and show it off to each other, and he was hoping to let adults find that joy again through Crayon Physics Deluxe.

Embracing Constraints

Dylan Fetterer (Audiosurf) talked about how constraints can be useful in developing games, how we can use them as boundaries with which to enforce design rules upon ourselves so that we remain focused. One example he gave, but didn't really explain fully, was Flashbang Studios cutting hours and sending people home early so they forced a "crunch" period upon people because they had less time in which to work, so they were constrained by the amount of stuff they could get done in a workday, hence they prioritized and got the game out. At least, that's my understanding. He asked for constraint ideas from the audience and one person pointed out the idea of a design jam session where you pick three random words out of a hat like "pig", "star" and "plane" and have to design a game based on those words (I've done this, it's really fun). Dylan also suggested taking a screenshot from a game participants know nothing about and having them deduce what the game is about.

Stardock on the PC Hardcore Scene as Indie

Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, gave a very animated lecture on how Stardock became what it is today, going to its earlier (and many) failed relations with publishers, including Strategy First (another audience member also had bad dealings with them - hey isn't that Danny's publisher?). Fed up with publishers, they decided to just go indie. Brad gave a lot of insight into the sales figures from titles like Galactic Civilizations 1 & 2, and Sins of a Solar Empire, including marketing budgets and total game budgets and dollars earned to date. At one point, while describing the hardcore PC gamer, he listed that 90% percent of them were male. Then he polled the audience and found only 4 females - that weren't PR or marketing. He went back into PowerPoint and edited the slide to say 98% [smile]

During the Q&A, one person asked him about living in Michigan, to which he replied that the southwestern portion is actually the same latitude as northern California :P But also that they had considered moving out of Michigan and that the state had done a lot recently to keep them there, including getting them a fat internet pipe to upload new games to Impulse, tax breaks, etc.

The Night Life

There was one more session, but I didn't stick around for it. I was starving - cookie for lunch, remember? Luckily the IGDA VIP crew was meeting for their usual Bocu di Beppo dinner after the Chapter Workshop - which I didn't attend this year - so I texted ahead that I was crashing the dinner and showed up to platefuls of yummy Italiano food. That filled me up quite nice. Plus getting to chat with the other VIPs I hadn't bumped into yet.

Then me and a crew of friends moseyed on over to the W hotel to attend the Zeemote launch party. We managed to get there just in time for the raffle of 5 Nokia N85 8GB mobile phones with included Zeemotes. I dropped in my business card and the started announcing names. They got to the 4th phone and whoever they called out didn't show up to claim the prize. So they picked another card out of the bowl and flipped it over - in doing so I thought I caught a blue circular logo and my heart froze - then they called out my name. Whooo!! I've dropped biz cards is tons of these things and never won anything before, so this was awesome.



Even if I can't use it as a phone (tho my wireless developer buddy says Nokia is on AT&T) it's got a 5mp camera with flash and would make a second MP3 player as well (to my iTouch). And, worst comes to worst I can sell it :P

After Zeemote we hung out at the W sipping drinks until they had to close our section at around 10pm, at which point we hopped over to the Hotel Union Square, where our buddies Darius Kazemi and Jeff Ward from Orbus Gameworks were hosting a spur-of-the-moment suite party - which meant a whole bunch of rowdy drunk developers in their room. We lasted until 11pm when the hotel threatened to call the cops [smile]

More shenanigans awaited over at Tom B's room at the Westin, but I needed to get back to the hotel to update all you fine people, so I called it a night. In case you weren't aware, we developers know how to party. So if you ever come to GDC unprepared to party, you are coming to GDC woefully unprepared. Just so you know.

Anyways I'm fading fast, and still have to send out the weekly GDNet newsletter before I can sleep for... maybe 4 hours.

Did I mention it was only Monday?