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Post GDC Summary

Posted by Peter Jones on March 16th, 2010 in General

Woah, were we in San Francisco last week? A full seven days of catching up with other indies, schmoozing at parties and handing out Snapshot Promo Cards like they were candy....eye candy. Kyle and I kicked things off with the First Annual Indie Disc Golf Open hosted by our friends at Wolfire Games.

photo by Chrissy Chubala

Numbers grew from just a few to at least a dozen indies. Thankfully, no one was injured and further more, no one kept score. It's safe to say we all had a great time catching up, and I hope it becomes a pre-GDC tradition.

Festivities continued into the first day of the conference, and the start of the Independent Games Summit where Ron Carmel explained the Indie Fund. It's an awesome program designed to help fund indie games without the inherent fine print that comes with most publishers. You can read more about it here. To name a few others: John Graham of Wolfire Games spoke on community, Colin Northway gave a postmortem of Fantastic Contraption, and Cactus explained how to torture the player for fun. All in all a great week of sessions.

Thursday night was the Independent Games Festival, an award's show near and dear to Retro Affect's heart. This year's entries were astounding. Monaco by Andy Schatz took the Grand Prize. It's a cooperative game about thievery, stealth, the French and most certainly deserving of its recognition.

There were so many other great games in the mix. The IGF pavillion was easily the hot spot of the conference expo hall. Make sure you check out igf.com to read more about the other finalists.

Those little promotional cards we made worked wonders. They fit so perfectly in our badges it was like we planned it. I even heard of an attendee asking, "Where can I get those badge inserts?" Success! If you managed to snag one these gems, hold onto it! I can't say why quite yet....but let's just say I would contest if you gave away those cards.

The rest of the week saw a lot of parties, a lot of games and very little sleep. So, keep an eye on our blog! We'll post some of our take-aways and I'll have more to report once I recover...