rAge, IndieCade and not being dead

I repeat, not dead, merely heavily jetlagged (Except for Rodain, who was indeed briefly dead, but got better). That’s what 3 weeks of consecutive expos, festivals and travel will do to you (again, not the dead thing, we have no idea how that happened – we weren’t here).

The three of us were up in Johannesburg for rAge, South Africa’s annual games and tech expo:

At rAge, we helped put together a game development conference of sorts, kindly sponsored by Microsoft South Africa and the awesome folks at NAG magazine and brilliantly masterminded by local hyperactive dev-legend Sven. Our talks have been digitized and uploaded to the global intramind: Thrill to Rodain talking about the motivations and difficulties of making games and shudder as Marc and I get all business-y on the topics of revenue, funding and getting cloned.

Then it was off to the airport and plane-jamming our way to Los Angeles for the week-long IndieCade festival (just in case we weren’t already exhausted enough), which to be honest, was far too awesome for me to cover all of it. How do you successfully write about a week that started with John Romero and Brenda Gorno (previously Brathwaite) buying us ice-cream (actually a sub-variant called gelato) and was filled to the brim with people walking in off the street to play Desktop Dungeons at us, hanging around (and partying with) devs, both indie and mainstream that we’ve looked up to for ages. It felt like suddenly being surrounded by friends that we simply hadn’t met just yet.

Highlights include: Hearing Simon Ferrari deconstruct Desktop Dungeons in his Well Played session (pictured above) and fielding questions from Eric Zimmerman afterward; Playing Johann Sebastian Joust and witnessing the epic shoe of death; Seeing the birth of T-Rex Ninja; Telling Andy Schatz our theories about hats and privilege; Playing Way and [redacted – spoilers]; Existential conversations with the Ordnungswissenschaft guys over salad; Following Mark Essen to other people’s houses; Being amazed by Daniel Benmergui’s new game; Bringing home way too many magic cards and generally just constantly meeting/talking to people that loved doing what they’re doing as much as we love what we’re up to.

In short, IndieCade was brilliant, challenging and a serious chance to learn way too much in the short time we were there. We’re back and raring to get moving on Desktop Dungeons again – huge thanks go out to Akira Thompson for smoothing the way to IndieCade, every awesome person we met overseas and everyone that pre-ordered the game to let us carry on doing this thing we’re so happy about. You’re all amazing.