IndieCade Day 1
Much of IndieCade takes places outdoors. There are 5 locations: IndieCade Village, Fire Station One, Culver City City Hall, Foshay Lodge, and the Ivy. 
Culver City City Hall, Foshay Lodge, and the Ivy are where the conference parts of IndieCade took place. Since I didn’t have an access pass, I couldn’t go to any of the talks, so I didn’t make it to any of the locations. My time was spent instead between IndieCade Village and Fire Station One.
IndieCade Village
IndieCade Village is a collection of tents in a parking lot. It is where most of the games are. The tents are split up by sponsors. There are a series of large tents belonging to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, as well as a series of smaller tents from places like NYU (showing some of their student games). Some of the official selections were there as well, in two tents titled “Digital Selects”. There was also a tent for big games (games involving large groups of people), a board game area, and a social game area.
There was also a stage where there were live music acts throughout the day. 
Here’s a shot inside the Nintendo tent: 
To be honest, I wasn’t such a big fan of the outdoor tent setup for a few reasons:
1) It was extremely bright out, and the glare made it very difficult to see anything on the screens
2) I have a prescription glasses, and was forced to constantly swap between sunglasses when outside and my glasses when inside a tent.
3) Because of how sunny it was outside, there weren’t really places you could sit down with people to look show each other games you’re working on, if you’re outside of the festival selection. When I went to IndieCade East in NY back in February, one of my favorite parts of that experience was being able to sit down in the cafe on the first floor, and show other developers my game. I got a tremendous amount of useful feedback this way. At IndieCade however, there wasn’t really a setup conducive to this.
Fire Station One
The Fire Station is an actual fire station. It’s where the official selections of IndieCade are shown. I quite liked the set up here, as it was a large indoor space, and there wasn’t as much glare on the screens, so you could actually see the games. 
New Friends
I spent much of the first day going back and forth between IndieCade Village and Fire Station One. The best part of IndieCade is meeting other developers and making new friends! So many people have traveled to Culver City for IndieCade, it’s a really great opportunity to network.
Here’s me getting frozen yogurt with a bunch of new friends I had made:
A few of us stopped by Culver Hotel a little later for some snacks, and of course ended up playing more games: 
In the evening, there was a party organized by Sony at a place nearby IndieCade Village. It was pretty fun.
After the Sony party, I went to a midnight screening of a bizarre movie called ‘The Astrologer‘ at an art house cinema called CineFamily, along with some Glitch City people: 
All I will say about that is that it was a pretty weird movie.