Save GameTunnel!

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Meg

GameTunnel was one of the first websites that focused on the indie gaming scene. It was founded in 2002 and had years of great coverage, monthly game roundups, game of the year awards, indie game reviews and more. The founder of the site left a few years ago and the new owners tried to carry on the site’s monthly coverage and legacy, but eventually got overwhelmed and stopped generating new content back in September of 2009.

Indie Game Magazine to the rescue!

Everyone here at the Indie Game Mag had been fans of GameTunnel and checked in on the website monthly and were sad to see the indie coverage drop off. Eventually, we got in contact with the site owners and ended up buying the site…

Like every other exciting indie games project, this one needs funding. Mike Gnade, my editor at IGM and an awesome guy in the indie games community, set up a Kickstarter page for the project.

Via Kickstarter

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Still Life With Japanese Translation

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Meg

Taken right before I met up with Casey from The Kartel for the Cave Story talk at GDC. Of course, I pretended that the gizmo was actually translating for me instead of just playing the translator’s voice. It’s more scifi that way.

 

Related: Casey’s writeup of the Cave Story talk.

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GDC Press Pass

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Meg

 

GDC Press Pass, by Simpson’s Paradox

 

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Palm Springs — San Fransisco

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Meg

DEMO was held at a gorgeous resort, and I was completely impressed. This is, quite literally, the view from my balcony. I woke up every day completely amazed that this is my real life. (Of course, I spent the rest of each day rushing around, vibrating between the excruciating boredom of answering the same three questions* over and over, and the terrifying strangeness of interviews and all the other bizarre new activities that has somehow become my job.) I think I’ll come back to launch my next tech startup here, too!

After DEMO, I flew to San Fransisco for GDC. My Geary Street hotel has the thickly-painted doors and aggressively ugly linens that I’m starting to expect when I pick a hotel based on price, proximity and wifi. More importantly, it was full of students, small-studio devs and journalists in town for the conference. Game chat was constantly breaking out in the halls or over lounge coffee, and it wasn’t a rehearsed exchange of elevator pitches. The game journo dorm is definitely more home than the resort.

* Those three questions are:

1) So, it’s like Second Life, huh?

2) So, it’s like World of WarCraft, huh?

3) Wow, a girl computer gamer. Are all the boys are crazy about you?

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The Right Problems

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Meg

One of our demo laptops bluescreened at the booth, so I rushed back to my room to grab my netbook and hotfix some gameplay videos. I picked up my netbook, and ran back to the pavilion. I was running up a sweeping marble staircase, under the palm trees, worrying about kludging a demo of my MMO, when I realized I was stressing about running through the palm trees in time to kludge a demo of my videogame.

Because I’m not a waitress anymore!

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Social Gaming

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Meg

It was at this precise moment when our heroine realized that she usually prefers playing videogames alone.

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Daily Grind, Part 2

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Meg


Guess I did a couple game demos at the booth… In other news, our Facebook integration is working smoothly.

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Freakishly Accurate Candid Shot

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Meg

 

 

Registration at Demo Spring 2011, by The DEMO Conference

 

Setting up the game to present at DEMO.

This is what a potential connection problem looks like. Unfortunately there’s no picture of my happy dance a few minutes later when I got it working.

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Punchbacks

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Meg

Figment came to pick me up at LAX to bring me out to the resort where DEMO was being held. He made my few hours in LA even more awesome by taking me on an epic quest for all the West Coast-only drivethrus, actually eating Del Taco in the line for In-and-Out Burgers.

A few minutes in, he turned and gave me a weird look. I followed his eyes to the VW bug pulling out in front of us. There was a pause. With meaningful eye contact. I knew what he was thinking. The only questions was which of us would say the thing that was on both of our minds…

“Oh, are we starting that again?” he said.

It is a two hour drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. I’m just saying.

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Not A Metaphor

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Meg

The other night, I told my parents my travel plans for California to go to DEMO and then GDC.

“When you’re driving out from LA to Palm Springs,” my dad said, “and you look out the window and see how green everything is, remember that your dad irrigated that desert.”

“You know, Dad,” I said, “when I was growing up, every time you referred to dropping out of an Ivy League college and digging ditches, I thought it was a metaphor.”

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