Michael Klucher’s Blog

GDC: Day 4, Day 5

Saturday, September 20 2008

Before I get too much into days four and five, I forgot one of the bigger events from Wednesday. which was hanging at In-N-Out burger with Major Nelson, TriXie and Chris Paladino from the gamerscore blog. It was a blast and we got to chat with a lot of people about XNA Game Studio 3.0 and the Xbox LIVE Community Games.

Thursday

Slept in today, cause I want to make sure I'm rested for my session today. I also chatted with a lot of people today, Chris Paladino from the gamerscore blog chatted with me about Xbox LIVE Community Games and XNA Game Studio support for Zune. This wasn't planned but I just happened to walk by when Chris needed someone to talk to. I also talked with Laura from On10 about the same things. Make no mistake, I'm not exactly comfortable chatting in front of the camera but it helps spread the work about our product.

Pretty much after that, it was time to head over to Albert and Dax's session on Xbox LIVE Community games. The session went really well and they covered a lot! Most people didn't know about the sessions as they were kinda secret beforehand, but we still had good attendance overall. My session was up next, overall it went great and I hope the people who attended enjoyed it and found it informative. I flubbed up a bit during my coding demo, and forgot to initialize a variable. I quickly turned it into a demo on debugging on the Zune, showing how to set breakpoints and use the watch window. From what I heard most people didn't know if this was part of my script or not.  I guess that's pretty cool.

As I mentioned on the forums, I think Dax, Albert and I will do a webcast of our sessions so that people who weren't able to attend GDC have a chance to get some of the information that we talked about. Look for it soon on the XNA Creators Club site.

By the time the sessions we're over it was the end of the day, well the end of the GDC show for the day. That evening most of the team members had dinner at Chevy's (Large margaritas for everyone!) and then headed to XNA party! The party was awesome, and lots of great people to talk to. There was also the AI Challenge finals, which the final 20 seconds was captured online. Anyway it was pretty late when I called it a night.

Friday

I spent Friday morning walking around the expo hall. I checked out several of the IGF games including Audiosurf a very cool music game, this game really seemed awesome and I want to give it a try. I also got to check out Fez which won the Excellence in Visual Art award. What's really neat is I also heard Fez was built using XNA Game Studio!

The IGF Mobile games we're really interesting as well! I got to chat with the Blackflow developers, which is a cool eco friendly game where you sort trash into a series of bins by rerouting pipes. Another game Steam Iron: The Fallen, which is an RTS running on a mobile phone! I can't believe how good this looked, seemed to play very well too! Finally I got to look at the puzzle game Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles this game also seemed really great and they had it running on a GP2X which was neat. The most disappointing thing was there were only a few of the finalists there, I don't know if it was because it was the last day of GDC or the developers were unable to make the trip.

I headed back to the XNA Suites to chat with the Channel 9 guys with Mitch and James Silva, that took about an hour and just I was leaving they announced that the show was closing! It closed much earlier than I though (3PM in the afternoon!) so that shortened my day quite a bit.

Overall, it's been a great GDC. I'll be heading back to Redmond tomorrow, and I'll post some more follow up then!