SUPER Game-Filled Week

This past week has been filled with one game event after another. Before I jump into that though, I have to admit that I'm still getting used to putting my opinion "out there". It's still strange to me (as someone who's incredibly private) to post these blog entries. I'm trying to get over that feeling. I keep reminding myself that to be a good writer is to whole-heartedly put yourself into words for the world to see.

Anyway, back to this past week.

Last Sunday was the hackathon held by Games.com and the NY Games Forum meetup. At the last minute, me and Brian (another intern) were asked to represent GoPrezzo at the event since our original rep couldn't make it anymore. We trekked out to the hackathon early in the morning to do just that. It was fun seeing all the demos people created in just 23 hours! (It was supposed to be 24, but they lost an hour because of daylight savings!) We got to choose our favorite game which won our $250 voucher from TekServe. I was stupidly nervous about speaking in front of the crowd. (It's stupid because this coming Friday I'll be presenting a linguistics talk at Nerd Nite NYC in front of ten times as many people and don't quite feel nearly as nervous about that.) But! I did it! I spoke! I gained some XP.

On Monday was the NY Games Forum's Deep Dive session on how to master story telling for games. The presenter was David Kuelz of Awkward Pegasus Studios who I had the pleasure of meeting at one of the previous demo nights. He took Blake Snyder's fifteen beats of a successful screenplay and showed how the stories in games like Mass Effect and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker fit into the fifteen beats. I really enjoyed his talk and found it helpful in terms of thinking about how to integrate story telling into games.

Wednesday was the first time I attended an event for the HTML5 Games meetup. The event was Making Money with HTML5 Games. Clearly, I don't have an HTML5 game to make money with, but the event was free and I figured I could still learn a thing or two. They had a panel of industry to vets to answer questions. Something I took away from the event: One of the advantages of using HTML5 instead of working natively is that you have more distribution channels immediately available to you. (This was also the first time I heard "native" used in this way. XD)

From this event, I heard about OnGameStart, an HTML5 game conference which was held on Friday. It was an all day event with talks from a variety of HTML5 game devs. Admittedly, I couldn't follow most of it because there was a lot of tech talk that I didn't understand. I still had a good time though. Later in the evening on Friday, I attended a play testing group at the Parsons Game Club for the first time. I met up with Mohini Dutta of Antidote Games and participated in their live action card game. The game involved forming a set of four with other players and lots of shouting (which is always fun). In the end, I had a really awesome time!

My game-filled week was wrapped up yesterday at Jesse Freeman's workshop for the New York Game Makers meetup. We played around with the level editor in ImpactJS. It's a great space to get working on your game while having some guidance at hand. I'm glad I went (despite how DEAD tired I was).

And that was my week. The only days I missed were Tuesday and Thursday... on which there were game events I could've attended but was seriously too exhausted to do so! Unfortunately, next week is kinda slow. Although, I suppose I should get cracking on my Nerd Nite presentation. ^^

Dys4ia

Finally checked out Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia. I like it conceptually as an experience and I like how the message of feeling awkward is conveyed. Though, I wish the small tasks didn't cut away so quickly. I was looking forward to trying harder to "fit in" and floundering and/or finding out that I couldn't "fit in". Instead, the scenes would cut away before that feeling really sunk in. Overall still a very interesting take on using a game as a form of expression.