World of Love

Thanks to a tip off from David Hayward, I managed to snag a last minute ticket for the World Of Love independent games conference organized by Pixel Lab, sponsored by Preloaded and hosted by Channel 4. I’m glad I did.

The day kicked off with Chris Delay from introversion demonstrating Subversion, a typically minimal game inspired by Mission Impossible (the TV show, not the movies). It ticked a huge number of boxes for me as a game, but the most interesting thing about the demo is that the game is nowhere near finished and it’s not often you get to see a game this early in production. I suggested to Chris that the game should feature Sporty Spy, Posh Spy, Ginger Spy and Scary Spy. Look out for those in the final version.

Possibly the most inspiring session of the day was Terry Cavanagh’s talk on game jams. Setting the scene with a description of his stalled over ambitious uber project, Terry the rattled off an amazing list of games he made at game jams like Sinewave Ninja which ultimately morphed in to the amazing v six times. I’ve had a ton of fun building mashups at Hack Days so I can imagine adding games to the mix would be amazing. I predict game jams will be coming to Brighton in the very near future…

Definitely the most amazing talk of the day was by Eskil Steenberg who was delighted to be talking at the first conference dedicated to his game, Love. After a brief tour around a beautiful procedurally generated and fully dynamic world, Eskil showed off the amazing tools that have allowed him to build an on line game on his own. A suite of networked art tools allowed him to model then procedurally UV map and texture a 3D model and then demonstrate how altering the model would result in updated UV maps and procedural textures in real time. It was like being given a tour of the future and when Eskil ran out of time I fully expected him to pull out a time machine to allow him to keep going.

The rest of the day included lots of really useful advice for indie game development including talks on business, finance, law and marketing which ended with the Frozen Synapse developers bursting in to blast the attendees with water pistols to demonstrate Kieron Gillen’s last marketing rule — you’re creative, so be creative with marketing.

Overall I prefer the many tracks and everyone gets involved format of GameCamp and at times the talks devolved in to extended biographies, but mostly it was a fun, thought provoking and inspiring day. I spent the evening asking the attendees for their top 5 games (it felt like it was that kind of event) and was very pleased to hear Chaos featured in multiple lists (it’s one of my favourites too, I developed a remake at university. On the strength of the UK indie scene demonstrated at World of Love I’m sure we’ll be seeing more indie games in top 5 lists in the near future.