Tag Archives: GameCon

Spring Updates

Just like I did the past summer, I’m writing this update post to summarize the latest goings-on. 😉
First of all the Episode One of the IndieVault Podcast (Italian) is online, and that is important because I will be one of the voice you are going to hear in every episode. 😉
One of its topic is the IndieVault Conference at Gamecon 2010, held on April the 30th at Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples.

I have participated as a Lowpoly Studios coder but my presentation (Italian) was equally covering my internship experience as well as the indie one.
You can find all the episodes (yes, there is an Episode Zero too ;)) on iTunes.

Going back for a moment to Lowpoly Studios I have got to point out the last M3xican post on our official developing blog (
A new graphic style…
) along with a new video (The Undergrounder: Level Editor BETA 4 + New graphic style).

Talking about new releases, I was going to forget that PacStats 0.1 is out!
Have also a look at its new Freshmeat, GnomeFiles and Softpedia pages.

Last but not least, while I still don’t have the time and the patience to make a complete source release, I have made the first step publishing a couple of videos from my internship activity at Raylight: the first one (YouTube | Vimeo) has been taken from the final demo, while the other (YouTube | Vimeo) is a simple yet nice test that I’m pleased to show.

GameCon 2007

GameCon is the only game and videogame showroom in Italy, and, fortunately for me, it is held in my city. 😉
Last year it changed its name from N-joy to the current one and received much more advertising and public visibility, therefore me and M3xican decided to attend it. 😉

GameCon Logo

We had the possibility to view, and what is more important, to test next-gen consoles the way they deserved, on huge LCDs! 😀
There were a lot of XBox 360 running the most recent games, like the first UE3 engine powered one, the stunning Gears of War, some Nintendo Wii made their first Italian apparition at the show and, last but not least, I have heard that the last day a Playstation 3 was previewed!
You could play with many Nintendo DS and some powerful PCs, subscribe to rewarded tournaments in many games, admire original Benoît Sokal illustrations (which unfortunately couldn’t be there as scheduled), moreover some space had been dedicated to a lot of different board games and somebody was enjoying cosplaying.
However, something more interesting happened some weeks before the event, when I got in touch with its Cultural Director.
Our emails shared the common vision to evolve the current target of attendees to include game developers too, for example organizing interesting conferences and gathering the most influential Italian exponents of the industry.

This was what happened this very year, with the announce of Game in Italy 2007, thus on Saturday me and M3xican went there, loaded with great expectations (like the hope to assist to a little GDC wannabe 😉 )!
Even if a lot of important Italian software houses were invited, even if Rasmus Poulsen (a concept artist working for IO Interactive) was present as a guest star, it has been a disappointment.
The event was too modest to even feature a fair-sized room, it was not only so small that just a dozen guys could sit inside, but so hot (damned lamps!) that you couldn’t stand at the entrance, ignoring for a while the fact that there was only one speaker and that you could barely hear what it was said by the participants.
It was interesting to notice that outside the room there was a big LCD showing what was happening inside, but we were surprised to discover that nothing was audible, it was mute! 😯
I only hope they have recorded the speeches…

To draw a conclusion, it failed to meet our expectations, we couldn’t attend the conferences while the rest of the show wasn’t so extraordinary, it has been less interesting than the previous year, maybe because next-generation gaming is now current-generation… 😉
I only hope that next year Game in Italy gains the space, the attention and the visibility it deserves!