May devLAN Review
FYI, this is my second blog post from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta, and I’ve used Word to upload the images!
The May devLAN got off to a rocky start for me since I had an unexpected rocking time at Firkin in Centurion the night before; making me late and with the feeling my head was stuffed with cotton wool. Insult was added to injury since the venue also didn’t have power (a state they’ve been in for the past 2 days!).
Thankfully a solution was readily at hand and we packed up all our gear and headed off to Danny Day’s place. After a quick setup of tables, chairs, PCs and chips and drinks (of which there was an over-abundance since I over catered) Danny quickly got to the theme and goals of the day.
The theme for May’s devLAN was “non-violence†which included no shooting, no dying and no killing; the goals were to come up with a design first and answer 3 important questions:
-
What is the creative aspect of the game? (Where’s the fun and why is it enjoyable)
-
What are the challenges or obstacles for the player? (Minimise challenges to solidify gameplay, difficulty curves, etc.)
-
What do I need to make this work?
It was really cool that Danny didn’t disappear to make his own entry for the competition but rather went from person to person helping out with fleshing the designs, implementation options and other development issues. I think this, combined with the design stage at the start, allowed the attendees to push ideas beyond the limits of their capabilities and try new things they wouldn’t have done on their own.
The atmosphere wasn’t as energetic as the last one, but we had fewer people and everyone was concentrating more seriously on their game; I believe we’ll find a happy medium as we have more devLANs. Everyone still enjoyed themselves though, and took away something that they could add to their future games.
From what I hear from Danny, we’re not going to have another devLAN until after rAge so an idea I have is to have a “dev session†after the monthly Hot Labs where people can bring their PCs and we can chow pizza and work on whatever projects we’re individually running. I enjoy the atmosphere and camaraderie of everyone making games and I find it conducive to getting my own projects completed.
I took a couple of photos and they can be found in my gallery.
So all-in-all it was another awesome event and I eagerly look forward to the next one!
