GG at MacWorld 2005

It has been a long day since the 4:00 pickup by Jay and Julie Moore for Jay and my flight down here to San Francisco. After a quick layover in Portland, we landed in San Francisco just before 9:00.

We the proceeded to the BART station to take the train to downtown, where we are staying at a Best Western a few blocks (very long city blocks) from the Moscone Center. The neighborhood is not in the best of shape, but provides for encounters with some interesting characters - from helping an aging blind man across the street to being solicited by a off-season carnival worker who held us up with his balloon sword.

After a quick nap we headed down to the floor of the show - where everything was still under construction - the Apple booth shrouded in tall black clothes. They do like their surprise launches, it will be interesting to see what tomorrow's keynote has instore.

We have a machine to demo games on in the Mac Game Arcade, which is significantly more spacious than it was last year. This should give us plenty of room to show off without crowding people out as we did in last years cramped confines. We also happen to be located right next to the Myst 4 and World of Warcraft demo machines, so with luck there will be some representatives of a couple of my favorite development studios around to chat with when things slow down over the course of the week. Last year we were situated beside Linden Labs' Second Life, who's crew were certainly a lot of fun to speak to.

Apple's Rich Hernandez managed to get us time to present on the gigantic plasma screen in the theater on one end of the arcade. Apparently the nVidia rep was quite ill and unable to present - so lucky us, we get to pimp Torque and our games for a couple 30 minute session each day. Really cool of Rich to line that up for us - he's been a great help to GG and everyone doing indie dev for the Mac.

As Jay mentioned on the Zap Bots thread, another Apple exec saw us test-playing against the bots on the big screen and shouted out "What game is that? It looks awesome!" And indeed it did. Where many 3D games graphics suffer from being blown up to fill a huge screen; textures stretched to be nearly unrecognizable and polygons painfully obvious - Zap looked fantastic, is simple sharp rendering really pops on the high-contrast plasma display, and there is nothing like a match of Hunters with 20 or so bots to show of the frenetic pace of the game.

The bots will be a fantastic plus, since we won't have to rely on high server populations throughout the week to provide great gameplay. Kudos to Ben for getting them up and running and remarkably smart for only 2 days work... though they do seem more interested in repairing turrets and each other than fulfilling mission objectives in Zone Control matches :)

Stop by our GG station to see not just Zap, but also the latest build of Dark Horizons: Lore, the Show Tool, and all the other great GG Games for the Mac. Look for Jay or myself in our snazzy new GG Jackets.

In response to Pat's post on the atmosphere at GG - I couldn't agree more. I think that it is kind of ironic that Sunday night I was gnashing my teeth in frustration over having to be gone for a week to MacWorld - even though I wanted to go and know I'll enjoy it - because there are so many other cool things I am working on at the office that will have to be put off longer than I'd like.

It is shaping up to be a great year, and I'm hoping this MacWorld gets us off to a good start.