On Wednesday I intentionally missed the Nintendo keynote, which from checking the news didn’t announce anything interesting. I went to 4 sessions in the day – only 4! It’s utterly bizarre…

In any case, the first one was the Anti-censorship Committee Roundtable, which looked to do a few interesting things this year – a cheat sheet for the ESRB, information for debunking myths and regional grassroots campaigners or people who rally against laws. Some interesting people there I met who do European items too, which wasn’t covered much in the roundtable itself.

The next session on adding LIFE to Saints Row 2 was a big lesson in not giving designers too many things to do. 15,000 or something nodes on the map – slowly added over development, constantly erroring, and whenever art got updated the nodes sometimes were then in terrain. It however did add a good amount of artificial life – another big thing was that the basic things, not the special fire breathing mimes but just the smokers or groups of talkers were the best additions to the world since they are so common.

Lunch was the IGDA VIP Luncheon – it was nice to see some great praise for Jason although there was, sadly (and I should have seen if something was going to be done) no presentation of anything to him, even just a card or something else. A missed opportunity.

After lunch was the censorship roundup – an interesting look at the state of American censorship. Some stuff on countries I’ve not had a chance to check up on either. After this was the first AI roundtable – a great look at a whole range of areas, from multi-core processing to behavioural design to the way to implement things.

We checked out the Expo briefly before the awards, where a lot of the IGF games sadly were turned off (obviously all at some pre-awards thing, annoyingly I guess!). The IGF awards gave me a few titles to check out, the main awards were pretty standard – not much, I think, that really pushed games this year as much as some of the previous years, but at least Tim Schafer was fun 🙂

I actually wrote this writeup of the day there too, I perhaps half wished I had something better to do I guess! Notes for this day will appear when all the others go up too.