This was the first full day of the conference. There were a lot of great sessions to choose from and even more friends to catch-up with. I started the day by watching Clint Hocking discuss his approach to game design in FarCry 2. It was a great look into his thoughts on design and how he is working to define the process he uses to make games. After Clint’s session I went to a panel that was supposed to reveal some insight on the development and publishing process for XBLA, PSN, and Wii Ware. It was a bit unstructured and Johnathan Blow really ran away with the session.

Lunch was relaxed and afterwards I attended the Game Developers Challenge. This is a yearly tradition at GDC and this year promised to be a good one as three designers were pitted against each other to build an autobiographical game based on their “first time.” It was a bit disappointing to find out that Valve would not let Kim Swift participate due to the topic and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Valve is a company that builds very violent games. Keeping an employee from simply discussing an idea about a game that will never be made that may be loosely based on the topic of sex is a bit disappointing.  Everybody is an adult at the conference. I find the acceptance of violence and the denial of sexuality in the industry to be a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Games are art and art should express the full experience of being human.

I ended the day on the expo floor. The booth crawl started at 4:30 and it involved a large number of game companies serving drinks and building an informal environment for socializing and professional networking. This was a great opportunity for making new friends and for talking to a lot of passionate and dynamic game developers.

At night I met up with about 12 game developers, artists, writers, and designers from the Philadelphia chapter of the IGDA. We had dinner at Tres Agaves and talked about growing the Philadelphia game scene. It was cool to have the guys from Cipher Prime stop by and spend time with us. If you haven’t played their game you should. You should also buy their game to help support game development in the Philadelphia area and to help feed the young developers who made the game.