AGDC Kicks Off Tomorrow
The Australian Game Developers Conference kicks off at the Melbourne Convention Centre at 9am tomorrow. Formal sessions begin on Friday, while developer and company displays open in the morning. I was all set to go down but a friend announced his wedding recently on the same weekend, so it didn’t work out for me. I’m a bit bummed as I was looking forward to catching up with some industry friends, but hopefully will be able to cover some of the conference from up here at least. If you’re in Melbourne over the weekend and feel like a bit of gaming action, don’t forget the day long LANFest going from noon Saturday to noon Sunday.
posted by monty · at 10:10 pm · filed under News
I was lucky enough to get the time off to attend - being a first-timer, I thought it was excellent. A couple of the keynote speakers however dropped out, namely Ian Livingstone from Eidos Interactive UK and Seamus Blackley, apparently the man behind the Xbox.
There were about 22 exhibitors and the unsigned games section for indie and professional. My two favourite unsigned games won, Frost from the AIE and Ash from White Noise Games.
I spent most of my time in the general design and bus.dev sessions. Highlights of the event for me were:
- Phil Harrison, Exec VP of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe outlining their R&D for the 3D web and the upcoming release of the PSP - their mobile device which should be launched mid next year.
- Ian Fischer, Lead Game Designer for Ensemble Studios outlining their iterative processes to games dev.
- Kevin Burfitt, Atari Melbourne House and their work with their "monkeys" or automated tools that they use in their dev process. Especially liked HamletMonkey, an app that tests the game by mashing keys at (almost) random. Very funny to watch the footage.
- Paul Steed, Microsoft Xbox and his "Building a Digital Goddess" in 3D Studio Max - man, there’s a man obsessed with his model!
- The nerf gun fight at the gala dinner.
Lowlights:
- Watching England win the World Cup
- Sleeping in a dodgy cheap hotel
- Having to come home and work for a living.
I’ll post up some (very bad) disposable camera pics from the conference at http://www.gridwerx.com.au in the next day or so if you want to have a squiz.
Feel free to shoot me any questions around the conference - I’ll see if I can answer them.