The Road Warrior Returns: 7 days, 3 Conferences, 2 Countries, 1 Man

The week before Thanksgiving was a little bit nutz for me. I did a 7-day, 3-conference tour that started in San Fransisco and ended in Austin Texas.


It started in San Francisco to investigate the much talked about "Green Economy" at the "Green Festival" . I met one of the event's founders earlier this summer and was intrigued by his financial argument investing in Green businesses. His talk piqued my interest because I happen to know Mark "Take a Walk for Peace" Frohnmayer and have been following the growth of his start up electric car business, Archimoto, for the past year. So, armed with a hemp shirt and stack of Archimoto flyers, I set out to investigate this so called "Green Festival."

The hemp shirt made me feel right at home at Green Festival, because the place was a sea of hippies. Seriously. I LIVE in Eugene, one of the last hippie holdouts in the country but Green Festival maxed my daily hippie quotient by the time I reached the registration booth. Fortunately, unlike Eugene, which is mostly made up of burnt out and scrub hippies, Green Festival was filled with high energy entrepreneurial hippies. Entrepreneurial hippies are actually pretty cool, because, unlike their ideological and broke counter parts, entrepreneurial hippies have a business plan, a web site and investors to back up their Fair Trade Certified, 100% Organic rubber line of soccer balls, Green Bank or solar lap top chargers.

The speakers at Green Festival were practical and focused in explaining how large problems (energy, climate change, habitat restoration) could be overcome though a combination of innovation and incrementally changing daily habits. However, I left the conference without ever having an 'ahh-ha that's the big idea' moment. I did, however find an eager audience for Archimoto's vehicles once they start shipping next year.


Next stop, the Montreal International Games Summit (MIGS) with Brett Seyler. This was our second year at MIGS. MIGS has a rather unique approach to business networking. Where as, at GDC and most other game shows, studios and publishers rent booth spaces/ meeting rooms and set their own appointments, at MIGS the conference organizers set up your meetings for you. This has pros and cons. On the one hand it frees you from setting up a kagillion meetings in the weeks leading upto the conference and lets you meet people you might not otherwise. On the other hand you're on the hook to meet with middleware companies, localization companies, payment process companies and/or studios that don't necessarily overlap with your company's interests or market. Last year these meetings were almost a total waste of time. But they fed us well and Montreal is a beautiful city, so Brett and I agreed to go again after they invited us to speak on a panel.

This year the business lounge worked out a lot better for us. We had a better success rate of getting matched to companies who already knew us. Addionally, some studios, like Calibre Games from Brazil, were showing games made with Torque.


We had some good meetings with indie studios GeeKaySoft from Montreal, Abducao games from Sao Paulo, as well as Flashman Studios from San Francisco. MIGS '08 was also a great place to catch up with game conference junkies like IGDA President Jason Della Rocca, Games for Health and Serious Games evangelist Ben Sawyer and of course the legendary Jay Moore. (who assured me at MIGS that Austin Independent Game Conference was off his schedule, before flying to Austin the next day ; ))


For the last leg of my conference bender, I too flew out to Austin for Game Path's Austin Independent Games Conference. I was invited to speak on the "iPhone Games" and "Game Engines" panels in between the Indie Games Night and "Captains of the Chess Team" rock show. Both panels went really well and were well attended.

On the iPhone panel I had a chance to meet Brian Greenstone of Pangea Software who shared some eye opening numbers on their success in the iPhone App store. Also serving on the iPhone panel was Gendai Games' Joshua 'Yoshi' Seaver. Joshua was there demoing their new "GameSalad" 2d game creation tool. Paul Trowe from Pulse Interactive served as the facilitator for the panel.

Brain was pretty open about their daily sales figures for Pandea'games. On the high end he said a top 25 app will sell 800-1000 copies **per-day* where on the low end simply being listed in the App Store will yield 50-100 sales per-day. He also said that Enigmo had sold about 800,000 copies as an app store launch title.

The Indie Games Night was a lot of fun with all kinds of games being demoed. The first game I played was a Flashed based "Zombie Ping Pong" game using a WiiMote input. Also on display was, Singularity, a TGE toy soldier adventure reminiscent of Blockland.


Perfect Dork Studios was showing off their Toqrue X based platform adventure game "Box Macabre" and apparently I scared the crap out of them as their recent blog post indicates

Another Torque Game on display was the tile based puzzler, Crunch Time, by Tamdem Games. I had a chance to see Crunch Time before at GDC in February, where I also got a limited edition VCM Labs Flash Drive wrist bracelet. However, Tandem's newest project "Domain of Heroes" peaked my interest as a smart modern MUD with a micro-transaction business model. Super Cool.

The last game that caught my eye was a tank combat game which used the Rock Band drum kit as a controller. The tank's turret rotated by pressing the foot pedal and shooting was a matter of hitting the correct drum pad for each screen. The game featured triple screen displays, untextured models, a hud, no score board and was just plain fun play.

Other highlights from AIGC included Gordon Walton's discussion of being an indie vs working for the man at EA/Bioware; and Harlan Beverly's presentation on the history and evolution of multiplayer game networking. (This session I was a little partial too, since it had lot of love for TNL in it).

Overall it was a very fun, well run conference for indie developers. I want to thank Steve and Mark from Game Path for inviting me this year. Also I want to give a shout out to Donald Harris and Billy Cain for the hospitality and endless nerd banter.