Bob's blog

Hurricanes, BBQ & Video Games

I had an interesting week of travel to Texas for the Austin Game Developers Conference last week. It seemed like a great time of year to visit Austin until Hurricane Ike headed towards the Texas coast and I realized that I had a connecting flight through Houston. Somehow, it was okay and my flight into Austin was only an hour late. That was important because I had to start on my BBQ quest before heading to the conference and stopped from some decidedly non-NJ style brisket for lunch.

I spent the afternoon at a session on Developing Games with Open Source Technologies. It was very interesting to hear about the tools that are available through open source communities for developing and deploying games. The afternoon concluded with an overview of Project Darkstar including examples of how to code to the Darkstar APIs. It was good to get that perspective and the talk concluded with an announcement of the Project Darkstar Developer Challenge - a chance to win some great prizes including passes to the 2009 GDC. Somehow the day ended with more BBQ while I was exploring Austin with the Darkstar team.

I was impressed with how much activity there was in the expo hall at GDC. This was a good group of game developers and most were interested in learning more about what was being presented. I've been to a lot of conferences with Sun and this was one of the more actively attended booths. The demos were crowded and attendees were stopping by to find out more about Project Darkstar. There were crowds in the booth from the start of the expo on Tuesday until the show was turning off the lights on Wednesday afternoon.

I'm glad that I got to attend the conference, it's always good to spend time with our CGO and the talented Project Darkstar team!

Posted at 11:37AM Sep 23, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |