Tonight starts GameX. I’m really excited for the Industry Summit, there is a good speaker and session list, should be great. It is awesome to be having a Summit here in Philly and the VGI Philly will be out in full force to make all of our industry peers feel at home and have a blast.

I will be speaking on Sunday with Darius about networking. I will also be taking part in a portfolio review in the afternoon. If you are in the area come check it out, should be a great time.

Wanted to add a quick note that I will be speaking at the Global Creative Economy Creative Summit tomorrow here in Philly. Check it out.
I will be speaking with some of the other VGI Philly folks about growing the industry in your city.

So I forgot to post something about this O_o but I am speaking tomorrow(06/20/09) at Wizard World. I will be speaking at 2pm about breaking into the industry with Mike Worth of Game Music Inc.

If you are in the area come check it out!

I have recently started to become really involved with my local IGDA chapter and it is a good time to be involved. There are a lot of things great things starting to happen here in Philly being  brought about by the IGDA. I am extremely excited to be involved with what is going on. Take a look at a pitch about some of the things we are doing here in Philly that Mike did on Tuesday at an event called bloblive

http://www.viddler.com/explore/ideablob/videos/354/

For those of you who attended GDC don’t forget to follow up with all of the new contacts you made. Be they on Facebook, Linkedin, or email, make sure you say it was nice to meet you. Once again it was great to meet all of you at GDC this year.

We are finally catching up at work from the week off. Wednesday the 15th is our code lock down for our spring release, so we are crunching hard to get all of the bugs out and it looks like we are going to finish on time! Also our newest game was just released on the App store for FREE!!  You can also check out the release on IGN.

I am also super excited that I got tickets to the Muse/U2 concert in NYC on September 24th. Muse is one of my favorite bands and I have been wanting to see them live for over 6 years.

Friday was a very tired day, since I didn’t get to sleep until 5am and had to wake up at 7am. Luckily sense I was speaking at 4pm I was and I was running on adrenaline all day. I spent most of the day to tired to go to a session and learn, so most of the day I walked around and meeting and hanging out with people (Just a note I do go to a lot of sessions but I generally don’t attend a lot of tech heavy ones when sleepy so I can listen to them later and actually learn). I went to Darius’s (see side links) talk, who besides losing his voice still held a QA session (Mad props my friend!) which was great, and he still had a ton of people show up even though the official session was canceled.  After that was my turn and let me tell you the adrenalin was pumping. The room started filling right after Darius finished, and while we set up and hung out for a while we realized how many people were gonna show up. The room filled and there were easily over 600 people sitting in the seats and also lining the walls. Thanks to everyone who turned out, especially my fellow CAs you guys rock. It seemed to go really well and we spent a long time afterwards hanging out cards and answering questions. (If you are here from that welcome!) I also have to say thanks and great job to my fellow panelists Samantha and James, and Jim for being an awesome moderator and calming us all down.

After that was one final meal then the CA postmortem. Then it was time for which hunt! I fell asleep for real during a night phase and was killed in the morning because they said only witches sleep during the day.

All in all it was an amazing GDC, I met tons of people and had a great time hanging with all of them as was learning a ton of new and awesome stuff. One thing to note, this GDC was smaller than last years, with fewer attendees and a smaller expo. But even with that it was an amazing year.

Thanks to Tronster Hartley for the photos

Jim, James, Samantha, Me

Shot of some of the people attending the session

Thursday was the crescendo of the amazing week. In the morning I worked a LittleBigPlanet Physics session which was fun and very informative. After that I went to another LBP session about there production model which is awesome and very interesting. I ended up meeting and hitting it off with some more of the Media Molecule team, who are awesome people. The last part of the day I spent in the Expo again meeting friends. For the last session I went to my buddy Kenny’s(www.gamesound.org) Audio postmortem for LBP. I have to say it was a great one Kenny, and sorry I almost made you miss the beginning by chatting you up.

Afterwords I went out with the MM team and we ended up hopping from party to party (thanks for getting me in to that last one guys) until 4am when we went for Denny’s. I have to say this was one of the best nights of my life, I met so many awesome (and Important/famous) people my mind was blown a bit. The team from MM was a blast to hang with, though I think I started developing a British accent near the end of the night, “You Wankers!” One thing to note as a CA and being under 21 I am not aloud to drink at the conference or anything around it during the week, this was actually nice because I got to be the sober guy making sure everyone was OK :p.

Wednesday is the first day of the full conference, and as the CAs say the training wheels are off. My day started off helping serve coffee and a rousing conversation with a fellow CA which helped me prep for my talk on Friday. I spent most of the rest of the morning walking around the Expo and Career pavilion running into old friends and making new ones. Around noon I was eating lunch when they asked for volunteers to help give away shirts, I wasn’t doing anything so I jumped at the chance to help. Man was I in for a crazy ride when I got to the table where we were to give away shirts I found a few CAs already piling up shirts and a line beginning to form.  By the time we were aloud to give away shirts the line was out of the building and around the block. Thankfully we had kind of thought about how we were going to streamline the process and were able to cut the line down pretty quickly. I have to say though I am very disappointed at how people treat free stuff, first off people were going through the line and taking more than one and then later people were complaining they couldn’t get the size they wanted. People it is free! Please be nice about it.

After the shirts I walked around the Expo until my next shift started, this one was awesome. I got this shift randomly and knew nothing about it except it was a round table for the IGDA. Come to find out I complained about my local IGDA at the right time because a bunch of east coast game developers were present, I ended up joining the discussion as much as working it. What was great is we broke out into strike groups and discussed what we wanted to accomplish in our personal careers and helping the IGDA over the next year. It was a great session and I met some awesome people, and hopefully we can revitalize some of our east coast chapters.

Wednesday night was the IGF(Independent Games Festival Awards) and the Game Developers Choice awards. Imagine a much geekier, cooler and more fun version of the Oscars and this is about it. There were some great games and good acceptance speeches, and Tim Schafer hosting was amazing. In all it was a fun show. I do have to comment on one thing though, the IGF Student showcase is sponsored  by Digipen in Washington, and why I think this is a really great school and they put out fantastic games, I need to point out that they have one EVERY student showcase since they have existed. Keep in mind everyone who was accepted used to be a “winner” and Digipen often had more than one accepted, but since 2007 there has only been one winner every year and they have one every year. While this is great for the school I think it is interesting because I don’t always think those are the best games at the show. Just a thought.

The rest of the night was once again spent hanging out with the CAs meeting new people and playing Witch Hunt.

Like Monday, most of my day was spent attending the Casual Games Summit. I also worked the Serious Games Summit and the Worlds in Motion summit. The last session of the CGS was especially awesome with three awesome postmortems and a game design challenge that was super funny. The contestants had to design a casual game about making casual games.  The three ideas were extremely clever and interesting.

That night I played in the ISM Invitation charity poker tournament for the second year in a row. It was really great I played some good and hands and beast some amazing (and famous) players.

Note: I am not going to cover all of the people, celebs, industry luminaries and nobodies I met throughout the week because it would take forever.

Ok so I know these are a little late but the week was crazy busy. I wrote most of these while on the plane back from GDC.

Monday was the first day of the GDC, starting with the summits and tutorials. Generally Monday and Tuesday have fewer people because the summits and tutorials are all that is going on. So these days are a little easier on us CAs. I worked and attended the Casual Games Summit throughout the day, where the talk was mainly on standing out in the crowd and trying new things. It was really great with some really interesting design sessions, and some awesome postmortems. The last session was a fantastic recap of 2008 in casual games pointing out the key features of what made them great games.

Monday night was spent hanging out with the CAs playing Rock Band and witch hunt. I always like to spend some nights with the CAs because they are such amazingly fun people to be around.