So I’m just back from GDC, where our game Poto & Cabenga was part of the Gamma IV event, with an amazing party on the Wednesday night where all six games were projected on huge screens, a bunch of DJs played electro sets and there was much drinking, dancing and shouted conversations with new friends…   then the following morning saw a complete change of scene, as we set up our stand on the Expo floor to allow people to play all the games.. this was also very cool, but in a very different way – fantastic to see people enjoying Poto & Cabenga up close, and chat to them about it, but we definitely had expo-fever by the end – having spent hours in an unnaturally lit aircraft hanger full mostly of depressing stands only tangentially related to games (we were right across from some company selling customer support software). Mind you, we weren’t complaining when these stands started giving out free beer toward the end of every day! And we ended up making a couple of significant changes to our game as a direct result of watching people play it.

Big props to the Kokoromi Crew – Heather, Cindy, Damien and Phil – who did a great job of making us very welcome,
and ensuring everything ran smoothly. Thanks guys!

Overall, GDC was an awesome experience. Was great to hang out a load of other indies and talk games, play theirs, andwatch them play ours..  My favourite two talks were Jon Blow’s ‘The implementation of rewind in Braid”, which reminded me why I make games, and “Changing the time between shots for the sniper rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds for Halo 3″ by some dude from Bungie, which reminded me why I don’t make games for large developers! I also managed to play most of the IGF entrants – including Monaco and Tuning, both of which were worthy winners!

I’ve updated our flickr with a GDC photoset, which you can see here. And there’s an article about all the Gamma IV games on the IndieGames blog here.

We intend to make Poto & Cabenga available to play on the internet really soon – watch this space!

I’ve been pulling in a large number of bitmaps into flash recently (in fact importing them from Photoshop psds). I’m scaling the objects in my game, so I need to set the properties of each bitmap to ‘allow smoothing’, so they anti-alias as they scale (i.e. they scale smoothly rather than going all pixellated).

Quite unhelpfully, the Flash GUI doesn’t allow the Properties of multiple library objects to be set at once. And even more unhelpfully, it defaults all Bitmap Properties to ‘don’t allow smoothing’. This means I would have spent the whole of friday afternoon going left click.. right click.. left click.. left click.. left click.. grind teeth.. repeat..

.. if it wasn’t for this lovely Extension which allows you to select a folder, and recursively set the properties of all bitmaps below it with just a couple of clicks.

So thanks Devon O. Wolfgang! You just saved me HOURS of toil!

Okay, your normal exciting game development news service may resume…

/shuffles off..