About rAge 2011
blog post | You know, rAge 2011 was amazing.
_ There was so many things that were awesome this year, that I am not even sure I could remember everything great about it. I know that we had Evan Greenwood (Black Ships Fill The Sky/Free Lives) up from Cape Town, we had the QCF Design guys up from Cape Town as well. We had a really amazing attendance that packed the room, people sitting on the floor, standing around the edges and even people looking in through the windows to see what we were up to.
The talks were awesome too. We had a super interesting discussion with people about breaking into the game industry around here. We also had some artists talking about art for games which was interesting as always, with some good questions on the processes and workflows involved. After that we had Rodain Joubert talking about Desktop Dungeons and about how tough it can be working on a game sometimes, but also ways around it - and much more. Then we had Danny Day and Marc Luck talking about making revenue, funding and cloning of games. Talking about things like letting a game make money while you sleep rather than eating the game you are currently making. A great insight into how the funding and industries look at games too.
After a short break we resumed with Luke Lamothe from Luma Arcade who brought along a few of the team to come and talk about Blade Slinger and hang out with the community. He also touched on Luma and it's history, how it can work out when working as a game development company in South Africa and the 12 years later look-back where things are starting to change for the industry and community as a whole. Shortly after that we took another small breather after the crazy attendance had the room heated up and laptops overheating - Dave Russell from Microsoft SA spoke about working on games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform and how using XNA can simplify your working process when testing and developing games. We also spent a lot of time just hanging out, answering questions, playing games and most importantly just being the community of game developers that we are. We had a few local games from developers around set up and people played each other in games like BattleMass, we had a few people playing Desktop Dungeons and quite awesome to see people buying the game directly from the developers for real world cash in hand. We also of course had many discussions about the games we were working on the designs behind them, getting new ideas, finding problems and just figuring out the best way forward. We also were lucky to have Gazza_N who is currently recently relocated to Sydney send us a new build of gGuardian to play and send him feedback on. We obviously have a million people to thank, most notably the organisers of rAge 2011, they were unbelievably supportive of the community and the needs we had. They supported us every single step of the way. Also thanks to Microsoft and Dave for specifically sorting out all the equipment we needed and covering costs that made everything possible. The amazing thing is, we didn't have to pay for a single thing to have such an amazing event. Although we did have a bit of trouble with the Locust, everything ran incredibly smoothly and everyone did an awesome job. Another big thanks goes to the NAG guys who also helped us out before hand, the Open Window who came and showed big support every single day sending people to support and hand out pamphlets and help out, every single one of the people that showed up to support, show us games you are working on, listen to the talks and just ask us good questions. Also thanks to all the local gaming sites that spoke of the event giving us the push we needed, where I thanked each of them in this post here. We have to extra-thank the guys who flew up from Cape Town,and other guys from all over South Africa who went out of their way to make it possible. There is no point to community sessions if the community isn't participating. I am super grateful that our community was so active and involved and made this one of the best community gatherings I think we have ever had. We even ended up on National TV on Sunday morning talking about Game Development at the expo and how things are going in SA courtesy of great people at The Lime Envelope Whew, now that is a lot of stuff to be happy about...The only slightly silly thing was that while we were out having such a ridiculously good time, I totally forgot to take photos. If you have any, please email them to me! [email protected] , especially photos of the elusive Nandrew in the wild :P We did however get all the talks on video and will have them all live in the next few days up on sagamedev so be sure to check them out and visit the page for all the videos of our community talks and sessions. Thanks Leslie Young for filming, as well as Julian Pritchard who also covered a lot of the talks on video.
