Hi everyone! We’re finally back from the GDC 2008 at San Francisco with lots of photos.

The IGF and GDC Awards Ceremony

All in all, we’re very grateful with the chance that was given to us by the IGF Comitee as a finalist. We were able to meet many experts from at the latest trend in video-games, as well as experts from the industry, including staff from Konami, Square-Enix, Capcom, Namco-Bandai, and many others.

Read the rest of the article for more photos and lessons learned from the GDC!

Though we didn’t have the biggest exposure in the hall (it was quite big with huge stands from Sony, Nintendo, Intel, Nokia, etc.), some (important) people did have a lot of interest in both Wind and Water and in Yuan Works; including someone from Konami (Online Division) who was really into the game and told us to email him. That felt great!

Sony’s stand while it was still being constructed. Yes, there is a (very) big display on the back!

Most people didn’t know what a GP2X was, and had a hard time understanding why a half Chinese, half Costarican team was developing a game that looked like Japanese on a Korean handheld! It really helped that we spoke four languages.

Among one of the persons we met was the creator of Blood Cross (a Korean commercial game soon to be released for the GP2X).

We didn’t win the IGF Mobile (our category was Best Audio), and one of the lessons we learned is that, at least with this competition, results aren’t exactly based on a objective point of view and are somewhat biased, since we don’t exactly agree that a game that cannot play Music and Sound FX should win this category, while W&W has many studio-recorded songs. And regarding the best game, a game that has only a few repetitive stages shouldn’t win when there is one Nintendo DS game (Drawn To Life) that was so polished. I have this feeling that the contest was more mobile-oriented, rather than mobile and handheld consoles, as it was mentioned in the IGF Mobile website.

The creator of Ookibloks, an IGF Finalist

One of the things we loved about the GDC was seeing a lot of indie games, including Noitu Love 2, Ookibloks, and Fez. Actually, the IGF stand attracted more visitors than any other stand I think, even though other stands were well-placed. We also saw many stands about motion-capture software and equipment.

One of the greatest indie games was Noitu Love 2. Can’t wait to play it!

It was quite a week and we had to work a lot, but it was really great! Meeting and seeing a lot of people who make or made the games we love was great!

Do you recognize him? He’s Ralph Baer, the father of video-games!

A good thing is that we had W&W to play when we were tired!

A great Time Chain, but I still can’t beat my Time Chain 98 record.

We do hope that there is an IGF and IGF Mobile contest this year so that we can go to the GDC 2009 again next year! Since we’re finally back, we’ll add a cool layout for our blog, as well as development about our new projects soon. Keep in touch!

 
“We’re Back!” –Chrono Trigger

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under GDC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.