Me in front of the Palais des congres where the Summit was held

Last week I went to the Montreal International Games Summit to give a talk entitled “The Challenges in Creating Games With Unique Emotions.” I had never been to Montreal nor this particular conference, and I left impressed with both. Montreal is an awesome city, great food, great art, and late nights, oh yeah and the French….what else do you want in a city?
As many of you know, Jenova was supposed to give the talk with me…. or rather, I was supposed to give the talk with Jenova (he put together a lot of the presentation, I was more like back up), but it turned out you need a special Visa to travel to Canada if you are from mainland China! We didn't know until Jenova was at the airport, and I was already in Montreal because I went to Toronto for my Thanksgiving holiday and had just made my way up there. More lessons for us in our ever-developing Ultimate Post-Mortem of starting a games development studio. Lesson number 2: You can Fed Ex overnight from LA to Montreal and it actually works! Thankfully, because otherwise our presentation was totally ruined since our demonstration materials were mainly PC-based and all I had with me was my Powerbook.

The bed Jenova was to have taken. =( Later taken over by Mr. Jonathan Blow.

Jason Della Rocca at dinner on the first night.

Me with Flashbang Studios, from left to right: Steve Swink, Ben Braman, and Matthew Wegner. Steve and Matthew are also organizers of the IGF. Photo courtesy of JDR.

Yoshiaki Koizumi's Keynote, which focused on the challenges in designing 3D versus 2D games.

Yes, it's a games conference.

There was a screening of Danny Ledonne's documentary about his game “Super Columbine Massacre RPG”.

LOWLIGHTS:
Not enough organized mingling/parties.
Feedback on the talks can only be done through the website.
Because of the Visa mishap, I missed a lot of the talks.

HIGHLIGHTS:
The conference was pretty small, so I got to spend more time with people I normally don't get to.
The talks were all of a high quality, VERY few, if there was more than one, waste-of-time talks. (Coming from my experience at the talks I DID make in addition to talking to other Summit attendees.)
It's in Montreal. Montreal is awesome.
The GAMMA256 party, organized by Kokoromi. SO MUCH FUN. People submitted games that had to be 256×256 pixels or less, Kokoromi selected 8. Play them all, then imagine playing them whilst bouncing to dance tracks courtesy of EA designer Randy Smith or 4 GBA's being mixed together courtesy of Bubblyfish.