Utah Indie Night - Winter 2008
Whew! I got in just ahead of the snow storm. That's the part that sucks about January in Utah. Actually, pretty much everything sucks about January in Utah. I guess the Wasatch Mountains are pretty, all covered with snow and stuff. On the days when you can see them. I don't ski, but I guess that's pretty awesome in January. So there are some things to look forward to.

The quarterly Utah Indie Game night is another thing to look forward to, which falls in January. This month it was once again at the Taylorsville ITT Institute. We had a pretty good turn-out, though a lot of the people - like last time - were ITT students of game design and development. They brought in some excellent Mexican food this time - a nice change of pace from pizza.

As to the night itself, it pretty much went the opposite of how Greg Squire, the founder, had planned. That was unfortunate. His initial plan was to have the formal presentations take only a half hour, and then have the rest of the time taken up by various discussions and little mini-presentations throughout the room.

This time, though, there were no other computers (I'd even neglected to bring my laptop this time), and the main presentation was stymied due to technical difficulties. The main presentation was LinkRealms, a great upcoming indie MMORPG. It seems they use the same ports as World of Warcraft, and ITT has all of those permanently blocked to prevent students from playing WoW on campus. D'oh! They made due - at the end of the evening - with some videos of gameplay. And Herb talked at great length about the game, their technology, their business plan, and what the indie MMO space looks like.

Prior to that, we had impromptu presentations by Greg Squire, who showed his "inner space" inside-the-blood-vessel shooter, and he also took several minutes to show a non-Utah-made game, the very-very cool Crayon Physics game by Kloonigames (which unfortunately looks to have exceeded its bandwidth for the month, so the link today no worky...) I also delivered an impromptu update on Frayed Knights. Since I hadn't actually prepared to give a demo, I wasn't entirely certain what to show, but I spend a bit of time wandering around, using a cheat code to clear out combats (one of the guys in the back would play the Final Fantasy victory fanfare music on his cell phone every time I did that), and clicking on various boxes and dialogs.

But I was pleased to be able to show the game to Mike Nielsen, who is going to be composing some custom music for the game. Steve Taylor was also there. And I got some feedback about the dialog system that I'm not entirely certain how to handle (yet). It needs some help. It can get confusing. Suggestions included getting rid of the comic-book style presentation altogether in favor of a different presentation (but I also had suggestions NOT to get get rid of it), to use face icons next to all the lines of dialog, and to color-code the boxes based on who is speaking.

Stuff to consider.

I also had some opportunity to talk to Herb about LinkRealms in a bit more detail, and had an awesome discussion with Mike Rubin about indie games in general, and Vespers 3D in particular.

My suggestions for the future:

* Limit all presentations to 10-15 minutes, max. And have somebody there to help the presenter keep track of time. I honestly have no idea how long I took. Though I think half the time was taken up by trying to get the game to work on the ITT machines (we'll call that an "alpha" bug...)

* Make sure there are computers (or desk space for laptops) in the room, and help people get stuff set up. Make sure everyone who needs to use laptops and an Internet connection has a WEP key or a network cable. I think there were a few games that would have been presented if they weren't done in front of EVERYBODY.

* Red Iguana food - definitely worth doing again.

* Instead of just presenting the whole game to a bunch of game developers, we may want to consider instead having presentations about certain aspects of game development. Like - for example - JUST the particle editor of LinkRealms, or JUST the dialog system in Frayed Knights. Short presentations on other subjects - like marketing, building communities, making deals with portals, the "state of the industry," console development for indies - stuff like that.

* We definitely need a better way to form the informal discussions. I noticed a few discussions ended up taking place in the hall outside the classroom we'd had allocated to us.

Next report in April. Hopefully with some new, fresh games to talk about!

UPDATE: Here's the poster advertising the event, done by one of the ITT students. Very cool. Now I wanna go... again...

Labels: Frayed Knights, Indie Evangelism

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