It was early when we woke up, my brother reaching up to the top bunk to shake me. I slunk off to the bathrooms a few flights up, while my brother told me to meet him in the cafeteria. I was down soon enough, and we grabbed breakfast on hard plastic, before returning to our room, washing up, and walking off to the next tram station. I was feeling fairly confident in my button-up as I watched Amsterdam from the tram, and we reached the train station with some time to go, so we bought tickets and walked up to get to the platform. All the public transport here is incredibly efficient, and always on time. It's really creepy, actually. I can imagine an old dude getting caught in the doors as they speed off, ten seconds behind schedule. We hopped on the train, and I plugged us both into my iPod, where we got revved up to some tunes, and he trained me in his networking crash course. He knows what he's doing. I mean, he even pointed out the exact people on the train going to the same Game Release Party at Breda as us. The hour and half passed, and we stepped onto the platform, heading to Coffee and Cream from our previous visit. Then, my bro and I, with a coffee and chai respectively, walked the blocks to the IGAD programs building, where the presentations were taking place. We knew we'd miss a little of the program, but that was fine, I needed the sleep. Heading through the front door once again, we were given name tags with a company section. 'Student' went onto my brothers, and on mine was scrawled 'SG inc.' We then entered the presentation room. We had to sit on the tables at the back, squeezing beside other attendees. We caught the tail end of one showing, and the rest went as follows:
Two second year full game presentations (one was a 3D tower building, RTS game named 'Moonscrapers', and the other a funny, smooth puzzler called 'Trial and Arrow'), each with incredible art and stylized gameplay, made from collaborative teams of 10-15 as their final project of the year. Then a break. After this, it was two world building presentations, where groups of art designers crafted entire cities from concept to completion in the course of 28 weeks, each world ready to be exported into any MMORPG. Then, two presentations by third-year students, one who redid an old game with new features and graphics, the other who combined LOL with Warcraft 3 with TD. They dubbed it 'Purgatory', and it was brilliant. Lastly, there was a project done mainly by only one student, as his graduation project, which was basically Tomb Runner where you balanced on a rope, using the iPads accelerometer and gyroscope. All very clean, and very impressive. During the short break, I took the opportunity to head upstairs and try out some of the games, and well as network a little. The first guy I met was a lead designer, who played against me in his project for the past semester, and naturally whupped my sorry butt. He was very nice though, and I headed off to the next game with confidence. My brother faced off against me in 'Moonscrapers', me coached by the lead coder, and him by the lead designer. He won, but I put up a good fight, and I got to know the programmer behind me. I also played this ridiculously difficult walking game (its...unique, certainly), which left me with a good lesson. After the second half, I got to talk to a friend of my brothers, who is, like me (to an extent), interested in making educational games for kids (we might set up a collaboration, in the future). Then I went and chatted with my programmer friend again, and, when I asked about the Masters Program, he brought me to the lead art teacher, who apparently did all the art for the new Spiderman and just teaches there as a hobby. The teacher regaled me, and a gathering group of students, about life at IGAD, what the program entailed, and various stories about his experience in industry. Then, as he's talking, some guy walks up with a beer in hand, and greets him like an old friend. The man turned out to be the owner of Gorilla Games, a huge game company in Amsterdam. Just, you know, casually. That's what it was like. There were industry leaders all over. We got a detailed specs presentation on the new Playstation, from a Sony engineer. There were independent producers, leader of companies, and experts on the newest and greatest. They even got into a debate over the effects of the Oculus Rift on Game Dev. It was brilliant. I met coders, designers, artists, got business cards, talked about the programs, ate at their BBQ, and guess what? Everyone, and I mean everyone, spoke MY language. I could say I was working on a graphing platformer to teach kids cartesian and radial methods, and they'd respond by asking how I planned to market it, what the main demographic was, suggesting that it might play well with their adaptive parent leveling system. I could say I just finished a tower defense, and they'd ask if it was upgrade-based or space-based. I could say I knew 13 languages, and they'd only look impressed for a moment before saying I knew 7 just from extending C. This likely sounds like nonsense to you, but to me it was immersive. Then my brother and I were hanging out with the production team of 'Moonscrapers', playing some other games. And eventually we had to go. We shook hands, took the 1.5 hour train back, with more chill music this time, and walked the 40 minute walk to the youth hostel. S was already sleeping, and my sis and D had gone out to a jazz club, after visiting the NEMO that day. My brother chose to sleep as well, and I nearly joined him, but first I sat behind the soda machine, plugged in to the wall, and wrote another blog post. It was 2 in the morning when I went to bed, first sending my sis a text to ask where they were. I was shook by my brother a little later, and he said that the two of them had called him, saying they needed help. His only response to my questioning of what happened was "They were being stupid". He and S went out to find them, telling me to go to sleep. I wasn't too concerned at the time, but I had reason to be, as I leaned later.
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