Wow, end of quite a busy week.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on the “Low-Fi Game Prototyping” panel at VIGS (Vancouver International Game Summit) this past Thursday.  I enjoyed the experience and the chance to have a dialogue with Design Directors/Senior Designers from Relic, EA, and Threewave.  The talk was well attended although we finished nearly a 1/2 hour early so that worries me that we were actually pretty boring.  Or perhaps we covered all the material very efficiently! (Hopefully the latter, of course).  Game Prototyping is a subject close to my heart, and I see it as an integral, non-optional part of game design and development.  It’s just a matter of figuring out what you’re going to prototying and what tools to use in the effort.

Friday I had to turn right back around and do a 3.5 hour workshop on how Game Writing interfaces with Game Mechanics and Gameplay.  This talk was for the NSI/PlayWRITE “Game Writer’s Bootcamp” program that was hosted this week.  I covered a lot of things in the workshop and I suspect I left the participants in a state of combined bewilderment and enthusiasm.  At least I hope so–the workshop was a little unconventionally structured but I figure games are supposed to be fun, so talking about developing them should be as well!  Giving long lectures or workshops is always hard work and a bit stressful because it’s all for naught unless you succeed in imparting some useful knowledge.  You don’t want to babble for hours and just put people to sleep.  After successful lectures, I always feel like I left a small piece of myself in the room (it’s that tiring for me) and this one felt that way, so hopefully it was enjoyed!

Aside from both of those speaking events in the same week (!), I also had several game pitches, attended a few conference sessions, socialized and met some good industry people at the after-reception, and on top of that managed to keep the DS team organized for an upcoming demo build we’re working on.

Needless to say, I’m a bit tired and looking forward to trying out AGE OF CONAN tomorrow at some point.