Digital Dave

Sorry, Darius… I swear your articles didn’t go to the wayside today. For some unexplainable reason, I found it incredibly challenging to “bug” people today while they were looking through all the swag, or hanging out in between sessions. I had plenty of opportunties to fire up a conversation, but I just couldn’t cross that line to initiate it! I hope tomorrow goes a little better. At least I have the luxury of having 4 more days here, versus 2. What irritates me is that I know I am incredibly easy to talk to, when somebody else initiates the talking. If I could just initiate a talk, things would be on the verge of being perfect.

Funny thing is that, as many situations as I was in where I could actually spark a conversation, nobody around me tried to do it either. Maybe everyone had the first day hibby-jibbies or something…

Today had a lot of really cool discussion, along with many inspirational post-postmortems. Most notably, the guys from Aquaria. The creator of N/N+. And Pixel Junk.

The first session spoke about the state of the independent game industry. In an effort to not rehash the same content, Adam Martin wrote up a really good “jurnalist” style coverage. Check it out on his blog. http://t-machine.org/

Some quick highlights from today… Because us programmers like to get to the point.

• Input Output Theory
  • Concentrate on what your game outputs to the player.  Make it fun. Make it unique.  Don’t rehash the same ol` same ol` just for the sake of ‘that’s how it’s always done’.  Try to use algorithmic manipulation to do really cool things to give back to the player.  For example: Do strange feedback things with the graphics. See: Everyday Shooter.
• Company
  • You can not sell what you don’t own.  If you have 5 people on your team right now, and 2 years down the road, you decide to finish the game, but the guy who wrote the core code isn’t with you anymore, you’re out of luck.
  • Put together a company
  • Transfer your assets to the company
• Marketing
  • Develop a Personality
    • Introversion: “To challenge perceptions and push boundaries through the release of outstanding video games, to be free to explore”
  • Build Brand Awareness
    • Through employees, partners, press, customers.
  • Establish strong relationship with your community*****
  • Dealing with the Press
    • Send Copies of your Game
    • Do Press Releases
    • ONE point of contact between you and the press
    • Understand their deadline pressures
    • Provide them with an Asset CD
• Online Games (Flash, Shockwave, Etc.)
  • Will be Huge in the near future
  • Sites/Portals to think about
    • http://www.arcadetown.com
    • http://www.instantaction.com
    • http://www.garagegames.com/
    • http://www.kongregate.com/
    • http://www.flashgamelicense.com/

And everything after that became a blur.  While it was interesting, I was tired of moving my pen. (*sniff* where’s laptop *sniff*)

View Todays Pictures Here

MyPicks:

Got to play some games during lunch. Nice Setup!

For some reason, I found this pretty damn funny! The rational for it was that she played KD? for a lot longer than a game like God of War($60), but KD was only $20! And she was curious to see if time is a good way to put value to a game.