Michael Klucher’s Blog

GDC: Day 2, Day 3 (Keynote Day!)

Saturday, September 20 2008

(Again worth keeping in mind that these are back dated posts)

There's not too much exciting stuff that went on Tuesday and no time for sessions so I am combining day's two and three.

Tuesday

Tuesday was all about getting ready for the keynote. I worked on a bunch of Xbox 360's to get them up to date with all our other stuff. I also worked on getting a bunch of Zunes (Now that I can say what they are!) up to date with the latest games as well.

If you ever wondered how hardware gets to a show, basically there is a group inside Microsoft responsible for trade shows. They come in and set up and have all the hardware, but usually you need to get your stuff on the console as they don't really have context into what needs to be done. For most demos this means bringing a DVD with the latest build of your game burned on it. For us, it means flashing the kits with the proper version of the OS (If it's not already), deploying XNA Game Studio Connect, XNA Game Launcher, any games that need to be shown. While the process doesn't sound bad once, we did it about 20 times for different kits around the show. I'm not going to complain to much, the groups we work with for these shows are amazing, and they have a lot more to do. For the Zunes, I took them on the plane with me, you would think carrying 11 Zunes in your carry on luggage would cause suspicion. But I guess they see that kinda stuff all the time when leaving from Seattle.

Tuesday afternoon was spent hanging out to watch the practice run of the keynote. It was pretty awesome, there we're all kind of people there that I would have loved to talk to: Peter Molyneux, Tomonobu Itagaki, Cliff Bleszinski just to name a few, but needless to say I'm pretty sure they didn't want to be bothered while practicing.  It was a cool thing to be a part of, even if doing nothing else but hanging out and helping set up. The practice run went well and took most of the day. Everything with the Zune demo looked great and I want to make sure it really shined. Unfortunately I didn't get to go to any sessions because I was so busy but it was worth it to help out!

Wednesday

Today's the big day where we lay it all out on the line, the day started really early at about 6:00 AM. There was one final run of the keynote, and I wanted to be there to make sure all the stuff I set up yesterday actually worked. By 9:00 AM there was already a line forming for the 10:30 AM keynote. After the doors opened and they started letting people in, the XNA Community Game Platform team sectioned out an area in the back for the team to sit. We didn't want to take good space from customers of course. I logged on to IRC (EFNet #XNA) where I tried to keep everyone up to date on what was going on in the keynote. The big announcements for our team were: Community Distribution of XNA Framework games over Xbox LIVE Marketplace and the introduction of XNA Game Studio 3.0, the first major feature being that you can write games for your Zune Media Device. This was a big deal because this is what I have been primarily working on for the past 6-8 months. I'll talk more about it in a different post.

We also announced that you can download seven of the community games right now on your Xbox 360! So go get them while they are hot. If you missed the keynote it should be available for download on your Xbox 360 so take a look for yourself. All of the announcements involved a lot of hard work from the team, it was awesome to finally share the excitement we've had internally for so long with everyone at the keynote. I think it was a great success.

Again not really any sessions today, it was mostly spent prepping for my "Game Development on Zune" talk tomorrow. Hopefully it will go well and without any trouble, I've run through the talk at least a dozen times but only the demo once so I need to practice it more. Anyway, not to much other details or time to write today. Got more interesting stuff coming up on Thursday!