I’m finally back in Chicago after another round of travels. Pretty exhausted, but very happy to be home.
There’s lots to update here, so I’m going to go through all the different events I’ve been to in the last several weeks, one event at a time.
The first event I went to right after the Tokyo Game Show was the Dev Workshop Conference, taking place in Indianapolis on September 25th and 26th. I was scheduled to give a talk about the design of Relativity on the 2nd day.
The way this happened was back in June, when I was showing Relativity at Indy Pop Con, one of the organizers of Dev Workshop came by and played the game. He really liked what he saw, and some time later, wrote me an email to invite me to speak.
I got back to Chicago from Japan on Tuesday, and was originally planning to take the bus to Indianapolis on Wednesday. However, I was so jetlagged and exhausted from TGS, that I just couldn’t do it. I needed at least 24 hours to rest without traveling. So I took the bus on Thursday afternoon instead, which was fine, as my talk was scheduled for Friday morning. However, it meant that I didn’t get to see some of the talks on Thursday, the first day of the conference, which was a bit of a bummer.
Here’s a pic I took on the way to Indianapolis:
Anyway, while in Indianapolis, I stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel, which is a really cool place as the hotel is inside an actual train station. It’s actually listed in the National Register of Historic Places and the train station is America’s first Union Station. There are even rooms inside Pullman train cars on their original tracks! Though sadly I didn’t get to stay in those.
If you’re a train lover, it’s definitely worth a visit. 
Walking around, I kept thinking how it would make for a great level in a video game. You get both your hotel level and train level in one!
Dev Workshop had two tracks – one was web development and the other was game development. It seemed that the majority of the people attending the conference were there for the web stuff, but there was also a group that was enthusiastic about games.
I gave the talk on Friday morning and it went really well (or at least I think it did). The talk was on the design process of Relativity, and mostly consisted of me playing through early builds of Relativity, explaining why I made certain design decisions, why they didn’t work, and what I did to fix the issue. It showed the evolution of the game over the course of almost 2 years.
There’s no video of the talk as I had asked not to be recorded, since the game is still not released, and as I went over many spoilers in the talk.
After lunch, I stayed for a talk by Alex Porter on going ahead and just making games. He talked a lot about his experience with game jams and what he learned from each game.
There was also a talk by Evan Todd on shaders and how they work. Sadly, I didn’t get to stay for that as I had to catch my bus back to Chicago. However, Evan has posted the slides here, so go check them out.