GameCamp Toronto 2: Achievement unlocked
For those of you who were in Toronto but missed it, I just came back from GameCamp Toronto which ran today, and it was a blast.
There were a ton of great presentations from various people and things went very smoothly thanks to the organizers Andrei Petrov and Mark Cautillo (both of their blogs should be in my blogroll links to the right). I was sitting on the sidelines the whole time taking photos of the event which I’ll try to get up at the GameCamp gallery soon. Unforunately, my batteries died by the last two presenters, but I think there were a few people there with spare cameras who covered what I missed.
I think my favourite presentations came in the morning sessions. Specifically, Jim McGinley and Andy Smith were showing games that they have developed recently, reflecting on their experiences and talking about the lessons they learned. Both were very different kind of games in terms of teams and their scope, but I love hearing about development lessons and seeing the development of a game. Maybe it’s because I’m a very visual person and like seeing art from a game, or maybe I just like hearing how others screwed up in their postmortems, or perhaps those who reflect on games they made provide the best insight to share with others. Either way, these two kept me riveted throughout their presentations. Other presenters gave me some interesting topics which I’m going to be looking to further, but design reflections feel more “complete” in my understanding of them within a conference. Check out here for a video that has cheese pliers IN SPACE! Andy’s team is insane!
I’m already looking forward to the next GameCamp. Thankfully it’s seasonal and if everything goes smoothly we’ll see another in 3 to 4 months.
Also, ToJam is coming! If you’re a Toronto game developer and don’t know about ToJam, you should. It’s a 3 day event happening from May 9th to the 11th where you make a team to develop a game in 3 days. It’s going to be hectic and amazing. I’ll try to post about my team’s game as we work on it during those days, and perhaps aim for a postmortem at the end. It will be my first time using XNA (and a crash course in C#) but I’m going to be working with some really talented people, so I’m not too worried.
