Blade Edge

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My coverage is complete – time to review!

The Good

w00t! Back in San Jose! It’s good to return to the old stomping grounds, at least one last time anyways. Having the Fairmont lobby bar again was bliss, and allowed me to practice what I dub “passive networking”. You just sit around sipping a drink or working on the laptop (sipping the drink is more accessible, but people still approach when you’re on a laptop) and people stop by to chat. I met a bunch of people that way.

Once again, I got to see everyone I had hoped to see. It was great catching up with some people, especially George Fan from Flying Bear (InsaneAquarium) who I haven’t seen for at least two years. I also got to meet Michalson and Richard in person, that was such a pleasure. They’re both great guys and I’m glad I got the chance to work with them this year, hope to see them out there again next year as well.

The internet this year was heavenly. I didn’t experience a single connection or bandwidth problem at the hotel or at the conference. Hell even the Fairmont lobby bar had free wireless!! And the JetBlue terminal! Haha. San Jose also had a bunch of public access points around the city.

The GDCA’s redeemed themselves and put on the first show I fully enjoyed in years, that was extremely nice.

The Bad

My feet hurt. A lot. The only thing that sucked about being back in San Jose is that the conference took up every single available square meter of space in the convention center, Marriot, Hilton and Fairmont hotels. That can lead to a lot of walking, not counting just strolling around the Expo floor. Things were closer in San Fran – you never left the convention center.

We were missing some key personnel, like Hattan and Seyi this year, and we suffered for it. It didn’t detract from the overall coverage but compared to years past it did leave some gaps, like the fact that we had no video coverage this year at all because no one had the time to do it.

The Ugly

There wasn’t much too ugly about this year in my eyes. If I had to say something it would be getting sick after pigging out on Chinese food Friday night at the staff dinner. That did indeed royally suck. I felt all stuffed up the next day too. But it went away quick after that.

What I Did Right

The first thing I did right was read my postmortem from last year and made sure to correct my mistakes. Namely, the IGF coverage page, which I think I did a much better job of this year than last, expecially being able to get it up with a bunch of kiosk photos on Tues night.

The other thing I did was give myself enough time between sessions and events to write up about them and post them. It’s pretty much experience that let me work out how much time I would need. Richard asked me on Friday night how I got so much stuff done during the week, and I told him the same thing. After being at GDC for 5 years I’ve seen a lot of what there is to be seen, so I’m more willing to take time to sit down and write. Rich and Michalson experienced their first GDC – they shouldn’t be sitting on their asses half the day writing, they should be out experiencing the awesomeness that is GDC. So don’t nag em for their coverage, it’ll come.

What I Did Wrong

Although I tried to shcedule time for working, it didn’t work perfectly. My Expo coverage was probably the one thing that suffered most because of it. Again, this is the first time I knowingly scheduled time to fo GDnet work, we’ll see if I do it better next year.

I slept in twice by mistake. Whoops 😛 I don’t really kick myself for sleeping in as a mistake, I kick myself for staying awake. I try to be asleep by 2am every day so I get a nice 5-6 hours of sleep. Wed I didn’t go to bed until after 3 and I guess Thurs I was still paying for it. A proper sleep sched during the week greatly improves my ability to stay focused – Fri I dozed off in a roundtable! So next year it’s a strict 2am deadline.

I had my schedule in Outlook, but I never remembered to review it properly at the start of each day. This caused me to miss a session on Friday. I shouldn’t really rely on this one source when I could circle sessions in the quick-glance guide, for example.

What I Want To Do Next Year

Like last year, it’s hard to think of anything else I’d want to do that I didn’t do this year. We’ll see what options we have in terms of coverage next year, like if we can get Seyi back to help us with some video coverage.

What I’m Looking Forward To Next Year

Well, we’re back in San Fran next year so I guess the only thing I’m looking forward to is the continuing evolution of GDNet’s coverage. Help us out by letting us know what you liked and disliked, and suggestions for next year!

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Yup, it’s the last day of GDC alright
So I’m going to make this short, cause I’m not feeling too well after dinner. GDnet had its staff dinner tonight, welcoming along Graham Rhodes as well. We went to P.F. Chang’s and ordered up the menu. The food was great, but maybe the variety was a bit too much for me, because uhm… yea. Gas? Hello! After dinner and dessert we played the “in bed” game with out fortunes:

It is impossible to please everybody. Please yourself first… in bed
Your present plans are going to succeed… in bed
For a good cause, wrongdoing may be virtuous… in bed
He who takes notes listens well… in bed
Watch your relations with others carefully; be cautious… in bed
You will have many friends when you need them… in bed
Participation in sports may lead to a lucrative career… in bed
Promise only what you can deliver… in bed
To be loved, be lovable… in bed
Pleasure awaits your company… in bed
You are very expressive and positive in word, act and feeling… in bed
You’ll accomplish more if you take some time for yourself… in bed

After dinner we walked back over to the Fairmont, Lissa gave me some anti-acid tablets and we all plopped down at the lobby bar. I’m still feeling al little out of it, and I’m sorry to say that this chair I’m sitting on will need to be disposed of after I leave. If I get up now I think the entire room would die. But I’ll have to risk it, gotta get outta here and go to sleep – catching a 9am train tomorrow.

Upon my return to NJ on Monday I will post up my GDC 2006 Postmortem. See you then!

So long, San Jose… miss ya

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That’s a tired yawn not a bored yawn, by the way.

But okay so I managed to haul ass out of bed on time today and make it to my 9am session. It was good – not all of it applied to me since I’m not starting up a game company to focus solely on that company (i.e. I have other sources of income) but I did take away a lot of pointers, which I’ll highlight in my writeup later today – I plan on doing it during lunch.

So yea, DaveRM wrote up Will Wright’s keynote, or tried to. Like I said last night, Will’s a very animated speaker and it’s really hard to take notes. That said it’s also hard when he doesn’t really talk about things that are relevant 😛 His talk was mainly a PR lecture on Spore and a lesson in astrobiology. There were basic points on research he was trying to get across at that he listed at the very end of the presentation, but by that time none of us cared anyways, since we were all caught up in imagining life outside of our solar system. But yea, go read Dave’s report if you want more info.

Okay I have to get going, time to hit up the Expo hardcore and make some use of this exhibitor badge to get in early and hopefully show some GG guys my game. W00t. Later.

Oh yea, the rant session is up. Read it!!

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Geez I woke up late again, but it was okay because I didn’t have to be at the convention center until 10:30 for the Satoru Iwata keynote. Still I had wanted time in the morning to post up the GDCA coverage, and I didn’t get to have that time. Well, I did since I still made it to the convention center around 9:30, but I spent the entire time trying to get the damn pictures up on the site. Yea FireFTP was still giving me problems. I remembered too late that Dreamweaver has an FTP client in it as well. I also forgot that Dreamweaver uses CSS for font style changes and I can’t use CSS in my reports so I had to go in and replace the styles with <font> tags. I did that in the half hour in between keynotes, as well as set up Dreamweaver for FTP use. The Will Wright keynote was awesome, but he speaks so fast it’s hard to write everything down. He had some real cool slides and they were only on the screen for like a tenth of a second. So I’m still debating whether I want to make a formal writeup or not.

So after three hours of back-to-back keynotes I had a short break for lunch and that’s when I finally got the GDCA’s online. I had also started writing up the Iwata keynote while waiting for Wright’s to start so I got that up as well. I hoofed it quick over to the GDnet booth afterwards for a quick hello and stopped by the GG booth to talk some GI stuff with them. Then I had two back-to-back sessions – that was another three hours, before heading off to Suite Night.

After ditching the suites I hung out in the Fairmont lobby and partook in what I call “passive networking”. You sit around in a chair and let people come up to you and start a conversation. So I sat and worked on my reports for the day and met four new people and talked to three I already knew. Not too bad. I also caved in and ordered up some Sushi. Yums.

On the way back to catch the light rail I passed a guy on his cell phone and heard him talking about Gish station and how he thought it was behind the name for the game Gish. I tossed him a shrewd nod over my shoulder. I’ve been answering this question a lot this year. Which is why you always need to read my interviews. They tell all.

Oh and I forgot to post a pic of the new GDNet shirt I got yesterday that I wore today. I had a few people approach me when they saw the shirt, it was quite cool.

Finally, it appears that I will now be buying a DS Lite at the end of the year, as Nintendo is releasing a Zelda game for the platform. The bastards. Why do they do this to me?!? I had to buy a GameCube to play Zelda too! Not that I’m complaining it’s just…. sad 😛

Oh and lastly (I swear) I haven’t gotten up this year’s game developer rant yet because there was a ranter not on the original list of speakers whose name I have to dig up – I’ll ask JDR tomorrow, he’ll know. So it will be up tomorrow.

Okay I have to get to bed, I need to be up on time tomorrow because I have a session I really want to attend at 9. I also plan to spend the bulk of my time tomorrow in the Expo, since I spent all of 15 minutes in there today and like an hour in there on Wednesday. Geez.

K night.

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Well dammit, stupid FireFTP keeps crapping out on me when I try to upload images. It’s kinda working now as it uploads the images I’m going to post here but it’s poking along at like 4kbps sometimes. Bah! So the bad news to go along with that is that I won’t be posting the IGF/GDCA coverage tonight. Sorry. But I’m not dealing with this when I have just over 100 images to upload. I will however update the IGF coverage page with the winners so at least you guys will have that. The report is done, I just need the images.

So DaveRM was nice enough to lend himself to me for picture taking at the awards show tonight using his way more powerful than mine Nikon camera. He took around 270 shots and yes, I had to go through each and every one to pick out the ones I used in my coverage report. Tedious to say the least but neccessary. Great shots Dave, thanks again. I’m sure he’ll be posting up whatever good shots I didn’t use, so be sure to mosey on over to his blog at some point I guess.

So I spent a lot of the day hanging out with Josiah Pisciotta from Chronic Logic (Gish). Seems we were of like-mind today, we both attended the same sessions. After the small studio one I showed him Galaxy Conquest and was quite pleased with his reaction. He offered me his assistance if I need it getting GC out to the public when I’m ready. After that we checked out the Expo for a bit before parting ways for the day. He had to go meet his girlfriend and I had to post some stuff before the awards ceremony.

So yea good day all in all, my feet finally started feeling sore and my shoulders too from my backpack straps. But that’s to be expected. I stopped by the booth to say hi and got darts thrown at me 😛 Lissa loves those blasted things and it’s hard to be a moving target on a crowded Expo floor, haha.

So here’s my graft grab from Day One:

Yes, quite weak I know. I didn’t spend much time at all in the Expo today and I didn’t go over to the game company booths where all the cool swag is. In leiu of Hattan I think Michalson is going to walk away from the conference as Swag King. The bastard was carrying around two S3 graphics cards today 😛 And earlier he managed to pick up another Xbox game. Yeesh, I’m already so far behind it’s pitiful, tho I know none of you pity me 😛

Oh! And check out the next hottest thing from GDNet!

Yes, two stickers made the ultimate sacrifice to create the GDNet badge holder. Can’t wait to show it off tomorrow. And on that note I’m going to sign off – I can barely type anymore, going to bed an hour late but what can you do right?

See you tomorrow…

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Hey people. Just popping on by real quick because I had to sit down, my backpack was getting heavy, my shoulders sore, my legs… kinda tired – but mainly my shoulders getting chafed up. Plus I wanted to write some stuff up so I’m not awake till 4 in the morning. I missed the Booth Crawl but oh well, someone will be covering it and I don’t really drink anyways so no big loss there. The only other session I attended today was the Lifecycle of a Successful Small Studio. I have like 4 pages of notes on that so I’ll write it up tonight, along with my coverage if the GDCAs. I’ll also have more Expo photos to post up as well. Okay well I’m going to throw up a few more pics into the gallery and then head over to the Civic Auditorium for the Big Show! See you guys later!

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Develop magazine had two of their female employees out on the sidewalk today handing out bags with “Develop” on the side and containing a single issue of their magazine, in addition to the marketing automation they already leverage.

Let the swag wars commence!!

In other advertisements, checkout http://www.adinfusion.com online marketing.

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w00t, getting to bed on time again. Yey. Dunno if I’ll be able to keep it up after today but here’s hopin . After today the conference attendee count is going to seriously like triple, I kid you not. The hectic part of the conference is only just beginning.

So yea I putzed around a lot today, haha. None of the tutorials struck my fancy and I’m sorry but I’m not sitting around for 9 hours in a tutorial I don’t want to attend and write something up about it. So I mainly hung out at the IGDA member lounge and ran into a bunch more people.

Another plus to not going to any tutorials was being able to photograph a bunch of the IGF teams at their booths. Since the booths are out in the concourse this year, many of the IGF kiosks were up and running by the end of the day. In fact I’d say pretty much all the student and mod finalists were up and running, whereas only about half the IGF finalists were in any way setup. So that kind of stunk but I still managed to photograph 7 teams. Tomorrow morning I’ll knock off two more probably. This is a huge advantage for me – last year I was going nuts trying to schedule the teams to have all their present members at the booth at the same time for a photo. It’s going to be like that again starting tomorrow so I’m glad I got a bunch of them taken care of. One of the finalists, Introversion (Darwinia) have the awesomest business cards EVAR!! Look!!

Yep, that is a metal card. It’s a plate of laser-etched metal. I show it to people like this: first I tell them to close their eyes, and then I drop it flat onto a table with a loud CLINK! At which they can’t help but open their eyes and stare bug-eyed at this business card on the table. I love it. I want one!!

So I headed over to the IGDA Annual Meeting at 6:30, stayed until 7:15 and then hoofed it over to the Fairmont for the Thompson/CRM author cocktail. Then my cousin and her fiance picked me up and took me out to dinner. It was great to see them while I was out here.

On a final note, it seems Dustin Clingman has been sneaking pictures of me. Well, he can take all he wants – I’m posting all the ones I take of him so hah!!

Of course, he’s prob going to take all the photos he took of me back to Fullsail and let the digital art students photoshop them, and then post them.

Crap I better start looking into flights to Antarctica.

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This was the swag MS was handing out for the Game Developer Day.

Weak 😛