Rabidgremlin's
Soapbox

Just a quick post to cover my first day at Animfx. Apart from some AV glitches everything ran pretty smoothly and all the speakers were fantastic. The MC is hilarious but he didn’t really introduce himself so I have no idea who he is!

The speakers that I saw today were:

Lance Priebe – who gave a good account of Club Penguin and its history. Very interesting.

Patrick Hudson – ex Ensemble Studios who talked about their move from big budget to smaller scale games. Some interesting stuff here but it did sound a bit like “we have just discovered Agile dev” (there was more to it then that of course)

Tracey Sellar – from Microsoft’s usability/user research group discussing their work helping tune AAA titles. The video clip of the usability test session with a guy who obviously wasn’t much of gamer playing a GTA style game was hilarious.

Scott Foe – gave a very good presentation of the state of the game industry and what a studio needs to be doing to be successful.  Interesting push for getting a minimum viable product to market and the using Kanban to create content and updates in a sustainable way.

David Rosenbaum – covering the history of the game industry, the current platforms and the next cycle of platforms and delivery channels.

Sean Kauppinen – threw up lots of facts and figures covering trends in technologies, platforms and markets. Nice interactive session.

And lastly Enrico Casarosa from Pixar who premiered “La Luna” the new Pixar short film. Apparently this was the first time it had been shown in the Southern Hemisphere!  He then proceeded to give a detailed and fascinating account of the development of the short. I only wished that they would have played the short a second time so you could see it in light of all the great background detail that Enrico gave. Here is a YouTube clip from the short:

All in all very cool day. Tomorrow I’m in the “Games Master Class” which should be fun and on Thursday we get to go hang out at Weta which should be awesome.