First day at pax got up early as I had to first get my badge. So even though I wanted to see the keynote in benaroya hall (a block down from my hotel) had to go up to the convention center find the ticket office (behind the center in a tunnel) queue for a bit to get my badge then head down the hill again to the opera house. Saw the keynote with Mikey Neumann Chief creative champion at gearbox and the voice of scooter from Borderlands. He told a powerful story from his childhood and made some good points about some of the really stupid things going round in the industry with people trying to prevent others enjoying themselves. Then went to a panel on the importance of community in video game development in summary it's important. It was interesting to listen to the people as the various panelists ran the gamut from little 3 person studios to places that had dedicate QA & user testing departments and everything in between including Double Fine. After that I hit the show floor for a bit saw a few things nothing major I'd not heard of yet Evolve, Dead Island 2, Sunset Overdrive, Borderlands prequel, telltales tales from borderlands, Smash Bros, A saints row game or dlc called Gat out of hell, Alien Isolation, Battle Mage Litchdom, some big intel booths. After that I headed out to grab something to eat. I was going to go to the intel future of pc gaming but decided to try streaming it. Grabbed a sandwich and then watched that. Pretty interesting talk by Lisa Graff vp of intels desktop division her figures said there are 711 million pc gamers in the world intel obviously waking up to some money to be made. PC games out sold console games for the past few years. They made some predictions heavy on the VR stuff also Kickstarter got a look in. They announced an 8 core gaming high end chip. They had Chris Roberts of wing commander fame talking about his new game Star Citizen which was a kickstarter and he was interested in the faster better multiprocessor machines as well as vr. Then they had a Dev whose name I forget who was from the people making Lucky's tale an occulus exclusive vr platform game. It was interesting stuff now I'll relax a bit then head over to see the making of thornwatch panel with gabe and finish up with the concerts.
Managed to doze off but luckilly they were streaming the Thornwatch panel. Pretty interesting story it came out of the comics and Mike trying to fix D&D 4e. He felt there was a lot of busy work keeping track of things for the DM and wanted the thing to be more like a card game. He bounced this off veteran game designer Mike Selinker and with a proper team in place and things like version control and proper design docs and card libraries (initially Mike was writing it in photoshop) it took shape. They ran through a demo game and it looked pretty interesting the way you did attacks and powered specials where cards double up as either an attack or fuel for other possibly more powerful attacks. Various cards fix the not paying attention on other peoples turns by having synergy cards that can act only on other people. The wound mechanic looks interesting where you take damage immediately but rather than it having an immediate effect you shuffle x number of wound cards into you deck and when one gets drawn it effectively becomes a dead space in your hand you can’t remove and if you get too many you die. It’s a nice way to make wounds progressive and have a real consequence over your possible actions. Healers and so on can then do things to remove those. It looked pretty interesting and if I get a chance I’ll try and play a game they’re running them in the evenings so we’ll see if nothing overlaps.
Caught part of a live stream of Patrick Rothfuss and two women I didn’t recognize playing the new Gauntlet. They are doing a celebrity league thing with the various semi famous attendees Mike Jerry McFront Paul and Storm couple of others. Which might be interesting I saw the booth that twitch has setup on the show floor for that sort of stuff. Twitch seem to be much more integrated this year last year and the year before there were a couple of streams but it seems like there are more than just main theater this time and it seems to be working better than previous years bar the times the hotel’s internet cuts out.
The new Gauntlet looks interesting I was always fascinated with the old one a friend had an atari st version back in the day and we played that sometimes but I don’t think I’ve ever had a good go at it. I tried running it on my raspberry pi mini mame box but it didn’t work.
Decided not to go to the friday concerts as I was feeling a bit off and Paul and Storm were the only act I cared about. I’ll probably grab a meal and try and get an early night.
I caught a bit of the concert on twitch Paul and Storm were pretty funny they even had a bit to promote their sound bard app by having Patrick Rothfuss read a D&D encounter once on its own then again with sound and atmospheric enhancement.
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