So today started by somehow waking up at 7:40 to get my act together to head to the convention center by 9am to take advantage of the media-only Expo hour before the show floor opened to the public. I spent 20 minutes standing in line to try and play Red Dead Redemption and finally gave up. I wandered around taking plenty of pictures, and I also checked out Split Second, and arcade racing game. It was pretty cool, but I'm more in favor of the Gran Turismo style of racing gameplay than straight up accelerator mashing. I also swung by the Shank and Scrap Metal booths to say hi to those guys, as well as checking out Dejobaan's "AaaAaaaaAaa" base jumping game and catching up with Newground's Tom Fulp over at The Behemoth booth. So it was an hour well spent. Afterwards I had breakfast with a friend to energize myself for the day ahead.
The goal plan for today was to not be screwed over by the massive amount of people lining up for sessions, which meant that my only option was to just get in line like an hour and a half early and wait. Yes, I spent about 4 hours today just stainding around or sitting on a cold floor. My butt kinda hurts. On the flipside I made it into all three sessions that I wanted to see today, so that's something compared to yesterday. What did I see?
Well first up was a panel with Chris Oltyan from ZeeGee Games, Eitan Glinert from Fire Hose Games, Ichiro Limbe from Dejobaan and moderated by Darius Kazemi from Orbus Gameworks. The panel was for anyone interested in making a game and what that all entailed. So basically fail often, prototype even more often, playtest often, etc etc. Very basic stuff but things that are always great to hear out of the mouths of actual game developers, and stuff that's worth pounding deep into people's skulls anyways. It'll just make things better for everyone, after all.
Second session was from Naughty Dog; a batch of designers sat on a panel and went through the process they use to develop a level, designing a new level for the original Uncharted (Drake's Fortune) set between chapters 3 and 4 (the jeep outro to the plane flight intro). Some great insights to level design were shared in addition to the design process Naughty Dog utilizes to create their levels. It was great to watch as they walked through the rough level design in Maya, explaining all the details at each step, from the intro cutscene to Drake's stealth approach to the plane hangar to how the two heroes make off with the stolen aircraft. They also justify the existence of chapter three and a half as a means to flesh out the Navarro character more.
Third session was Tim Train, head of Big Huge Games, talking about how close BHG came to total annihilation last year when THQ sold them during their huge layoff plan. I was especially interested in this talk because I had attended a BHG talk last in 2002 when Tim and then-co-founder Brian Reynolds (now heading up Zynga East) were giving their one-year postmortem as a new company. So this was a nice full-circle-ish kind of thing from my perspective, as BHG was pretty much "reborn" when 38 Studios swooped in and saved them literally in the 11th hour (they had three days until they had to send out the 60-day notice to all employees). This whole saga of events regarding BHG I was following closely in my Dailies so it was nice to hear the full story from Tim.
(Obviously I'll be writing all these sessions up in greater detail for my full coverage later on this coming week.)
My last event of the day was the concert. It started at 8 and that's when Tim's session ended so I feared not being able to get in (the line started at like 6) but fortunately my media badge acted as a bracelet which gets you into a special first-access line so I walked right to the back of that line which was already moving when I got there and was able to snag a good seat up on the balcony of the main theater.
The concert tonight hosted Video Games Orchestra, Paul and Storm, and Jonathon Coulton. I really only cared about VGO, as I had seen them previously in a more intimate setting and was very captivated by their musical style. As a group you can tell that they are very dedicated and talented musicians (I'm a former semi-pro musician myself on the Sax) and their arrangements are always well done. They performed an epic set including the classic Mario Bros, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and a Castlevania rock sequence that was absofuckinglutely amazing.
I skipped out on the rest of the concert because I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast at 11am so I was rather on the brink of expiring. I ended up hanging with some friends and then chilling in beanbag alley listening to people up on the open Rock Band stage, nearby in case a group needed a guitarist.
And that's day two! G'nite from PAX East :)
