Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Hey people. I’m sitting on the nice comfy couch in the center of the GG common area here in the offices just chillen out after the last day at IGC. Josh Williams gave a keynote this morning to further demystify the deal that went on between GG and IAC several months ago, ensuring developers that GG has not in fact compromised its integrity or sold out to a big corporation. He says that GG’s independence in handling all game dev matters is actually baked into the contract, but either way time will ultimately tell. Still, from all the info that’s been made available both on and off the record, it seems GG has found a perfect partner to carry it into the future.

After Josh’s keynote we broke up for lunch and to hang out and play games set up on the many computers. I spent most of my time getting pwned in Marble Blast on InstantAction as many of the GG employees are of course demigods when playing that game. There were times I could bring my score into the double digits 😛

After lunch I sat next to Randy Dershner as he led the roundtable discussion on the details about the InstantAction contract and how it’s built to benefit the developers. It’s definetly a nice contract, all things cosidered. Caveats exist, of course, and I’ll be detailing the discussion in my report.

After the roundtable was the IGC Players Choice Awards ceremony, which consisted of the winners being announced and coming up to say “thank you” as it’s more a fun thing than an official GDCA-style thing. Gondolier of Love took first place, followed by Metal Drift and Infinity. As the party broke up I wandered about seeing what people were doing. Most said they were heading back to the Garage so I decided to hitch a ride with Justin St. Clair after talking to Davey Jackson about maybe strumming some tunes in Guitar Hero.

So here I am, sitting on the couch while Nerf missiles shoot past my head as a war rages in the offices through the door. Davey just showed up, so I guess we can get to jammin, tho I’ll see if I can get a tour of this place first, it’s pretty big. My camera batteries died but I wasn’t planning on taking pics anyways.

Oh and I talked to Andy Yang about developer support for InstantAction so if any of you out there are interested in the idea and the platform hopefully we’ll be able to bring you lots more (exclusive?) info on it. And Ben Garney also stopped me to ask about pushing some Torque articles onto GDnet, which I was really happy to hear about, so look for that too as well as general game dev articles from the GG people.

K, time to dodge missiles and jam out!