Opportunity, Synchronicity, Synergy, Energy
After a long spell of work and contemplation, the last two weeks have been a whirlwind of meeting new people and doing interesting things.
Two weeks ago was GDC, which is normally a highlight of my year. This year, though, things were a bit tougher. To keep expenses down, I had scheduled a shorter-than-usual trip this year, and I stayed with a friend outside the city. And then I started in on a sinus infection on the way out on the plane. The result was a conference experience where I was there for shorter hours (because of the commute), fewer days, and with greatly decreased mental activity. For some sessions, I literally took notes without comprehending them. Nonetheless, I learned a few things and went to some inspiring sessions. Daniel James, Ernest Adams, and Clint Hocking gave great , among others. I got to present our Slidewalk game from the Boston Indie Game Jam at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop.
Last weekend was , an “un-conference” that self-organizes into groups of people who want to talk about and do cool stuff. It was fascinating — open source principles applied to the conference model. I was looking at the blackboard on Day 1 and noticed a hole…hopped on the conference IRC channel and asked if people were interested in a discussion / birds of a feather talk about Python. Got enough yes answers that I wrote it down in the box and about 25 people showed up. We had , people seemed to enjoy it.
Sunday I went back in for a tiny bit more BarCamp, but I was really interested in a meeting about the OLPC and in particular talking about game development for it. We had a great discussion about where to take this project and I’m very excited about it. I will try to talk about it at more length soon. If you’re interested in game development for the OLPC, please ping me — I’m trying to coordinate some of the energy around it.
Today I went to OpenCoffee Boston, which was organized by Nabeel and Bijan, who both blogged it hours ago. I’m SO 20th century in my response time.
But I have an excuse. I also had a couple of other meetings Tuesday and today that have gotten me very excited about Melting Point, which has been evolving in recent weeks. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I’ve decided to make a Flash-based downloadable web game, and I’ve now got the game design nailed along with most of the details of how the graphics will look, and I’m rapidly working through the software design. It’s going to happen, and I have multiple possibilities for publishing platforms.
And along the way I met a ton of interesting people.