I got to Gamecity a tad late, so missed the Eyetoy stuff in the morning, which I didn’t mind missing much – since I don’t have a PS3 🙂 I visited Indiecade for a bit before meeting Alice – who I met at GDC and another IGDA scholarship winner – and moving to Gatecrasher for some talks.

Firstly was the session “Amanita Design : Inside Macharium EXCLUSIVE” – the designer (I presume Jakub Dvorsky despite him not being named anywhere in the programme as presenting it) walked us through most of Machinarium, then went into the team and how levels and the games are designed – very interesting, especially since they solely use flash. Machinarium should be out next May or so I think he said, which is ace, despite me being poor at the puzzles in the game (feedback is a problem).

At the same time it was on, I missed David Braben talking about Lost Winds – he did, I was told after it, a similar talk to what he said in Brighton at the Develop conference, including his part about used games.

Next I saw the end of Tom Kim’s talk about how games helped him through illness (a brain tumour), which was very interesting. He explained his difficulty with playing games that kill people too.

Sadly, the Splash Damage guys doing “Splash Damage : From Frags to Riches” were late, and clashed with From the “From the Desk of David Jaffe” talk – and of course no one mentioned it either. Oh well, I missed them 🙁 but I got to ask David Jaffe some questions about some topics 😀 (like leaving Sony for instance).

After this was DS Night for an hour and a bit, where we got some good 8 player Mario Kart going – then onto One Life Left’s curry evening show. The show was great, with live 2 live doyouinverts songs (with part of the band, since the others were on tour) being “7 out of 10” and “Random Encounter”, and Craig “The Rage” McClellan doing some of his older poems live! At the end I also got an amazing thing to remember the night – the doyouinverts band member gave me his lyrics (attached authentically to a menu) and Craig gave me his poem copies – noting there were more then he read out, so he had to choose. Awesome 😀

I did get videos of the doyouinverts and Craig performing and 2 of the OLL record breaking stunts, they’re on my youtube channel I’m trying out, and in a playlist too. There’s a lot more pictures too in my gallery.

Throughout the day, I got autographs – since the Gamecity “Programme” was a brief thing which looks like a Passport. At the end of the day, I got the Gamecity organisers, all the One Life Left crew, Amanita Design and Tom Kim sign it – David Jaffe would have been tough to get, being on videocast though 🙂 Great way to remember the things going on though, I’ll get more today (Friday) I’m sure.