Steel Penny Games

I had a pretty decent time at the Austin IGC 2008.  To be honest, I didn't know what to expect, but in the end I did come away with a few new shreds of wisdom and several useful contacts.  The latter being more important in the short term these days, actually.

Our main objective was to attend Demo Night on Thursday and show off our game, with the hopes that some press would cover it.  We weren't disappointed.  Other than accidentally losing my mind and talking directly to the camera for the first few seconds, I think it went okay.  Equally important was the crowd response... it was the first time we'd unveiled the game with other games around, and I was a little nervous about the reaction.  Nearly everyone who played it was intrigued, and a few were quite excited about it.  A new friend, Chris Oltyan at Zeitgeist Games, gave some great feedback on how the UI could be more polished and some comments about the difficulty ramp which were spot on.  A little late for focus testing, but highlights the value in doing so.  Our race to complete the project and ship left only a few days for that sort of thing.  Next time, I want to make it a more integrated part of our development schedule.

Some of the speaking sessions had one or two nuggets of valuable advice.  Gordon Walton was a font of knowledge as well as colorful metaphors.  Sue Bohle was amazing: a self-described firehose of experience unleashed upon the audience.  I drank deeply.  There were others that were more purely practical and interactive with the rather small audience, and a few good things came from each.

The only one I was hoping to find interesting (and was disappointed) was a Microsoft sponsored talk about XNA.  I caught a similar one at GDC 2008, which instead of being a deep discussion about how to get a pipeline for professionals with a pre-existing C++ engine and asset pipeline to work with XNA, we got a rah-rah session about the sort of features one could find on the web site.  Microsoft is making a reach out to the indie groups with minimal experience by creating the XNA Community system, for which I applaud them, however it is useless for professionals trying to reach the XBox 360, and virtually impossible to get access to XBox Live Arcade (not even mentioning the rather extensive QA requirements that avenue imposes).  So, for the time being, I'm keeping a watchful eye on Microsoft.