This is the first part of my personal GDC review. It was my first time there and it was just incredible to basically meet every single person that ever has been an influence to me on making original games. Thank you all for this great week.

Sunday

The conference week already started on Sunday with the first Flash Gaming Summit organized by Mochi Media. It was a one-day event that was only around $50 if you registered early, and the excellent catering alone was worth the ticket. Unfortunately most of the panels were a big disappointment. Most panelists spoke from the perspective of the big Flash portals and advertisement companies, advising aspiring Flash game developers to aim for easily consumable “hit games” and doing as many sequels as possible. During the first four panels no one talked about creativity, innovation or inspiration, even though Mochi Media claims that they are “fueling the creativity of the gaming community”. The MochiAd business model is good for creating revenue, but the Summit underlined that a big share of the Flash games scene acts more like the antipode of creativity, producing very few really interesting games. The day’s highlight then was the appearance of Edmund McMillen in the last panel discussion, arguing you should not aim for a certain target audience but make the games you are really interested in.

Monday

Probably the most interesting presentation of the Independent Games Summit was the keynote given by Ron Carmel from 2D Boy. In “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Going Indie But Were Afraid to Ask” Ron gave away lots of interesting numbers like how much money they actually needed to make World of Goo. Ron covered stats on distribution and how sales are directly related to press coverage. An interesting fact is that of all World of Goo sales from 2dboy.com 25% are Mac and 10% are Linux sales. So developing for Windows only could make an indie lose 1/3 of the potential sales. For all the numbers and slides a PDF of the presentation is available.

Next in my list of memorable lectures is “The Four-Hour Game Design by Cactus”. Jonatan Söderström’s surreal presentation on how to make a game in four hours made me cry laughing, feeling I am dreaming all this. Coverage on Destructoid, Offworld and TIGSource made me realize – it was all really happening. The presentation was made completely in Game Maker and is available for download (Windows only).

Another really interesting one on Monday was Petri Purho’s postmortem on Crayon Physics Deluxe, last years winner of the IGF Seumas McNally Grand Prize. In his presentation Petri explained how important prototyping is for actually making a game. Before starting prototyping Petri did never release anything and worked on a game engine for around 2 years of his life, without achieving anything more than a black screen. (From my own experience I confirm that developing your own engine does not get you any closer to making your own game.) There is a good summary about the complete postmortem on Destructoid.