NASSCOM Gaming Summit 2009 – Tour Diary

An article by my colleague Arjun Nair about our trip to Hyderabad 2009 GDC

The year 2009 will be remembered in the history books of Indian game developers as NASCCOM finally blessed the gaming industry with its very own “GDC-like” event to be held every year henceforth.
The NASSCOM Gaming Summit 2009 (which I’ll refer to as NGS09 henceforth because life’s too short) aimed to bring game developers across India (and some from abroad) under one roof where they could exchange ideas, stories on game dev, case studies, visiting cards and generally show off their development talents.

Here are the highlights of the event:
•    We got off our plane at 8 in the morning at Hyderabad Airport - a stunning piece of architecture that manages to make Mumbai Airport look like a Dharavi slum. It made for a great first impression at the very least!

•    Ernest Adams, legendary game designer, set the tone and mood of the conference by both being frank and witty. I was surprised to see that his presentation consisted almost entirely of text – so much for the theory that successful people use eye-pleasing presentations to engage the audience! Obviously, Adams hasn’t heard of it.

•    It was refreshing to see developers giving case studies that were both honest and in-depth. This is precisely the kind of exchange that Indian developers need in order to grow and learn. Games like Pahelika, Hanuman and Gajini were covered by their respective developers and its quite interesting to see the different approaches and thinking taken by them in the development of the games.

•    When FX Labs were concluding their presentation on Gajini, which consisted entirely of “Things that went right”, someone asked them, “What about things that went wrong?”. Imran Khan, VP, FX Labs said, “Can’t think of anything that went wrong”. That should be a first in game development! Anyone who’s played the game care to comment? ;)

•    During the BioShock (the 2d and 3d mobile games) presentation, VLC media player managed to crash spectacularly during playback of the video of the 3d game and hung the laptop. A surprising number of people recorded this event on their phone cameras for posterity. Sanity was restored by the combination of the good ol’ “three fingered salute”, Task Manager and Kill Process method.  I suppose that’s one way of grabbing audience attention!

•    The most number of laughs (arguably) in the conference were elicited when Purnima , in the course of her presentation, showed off a video (taken in the IG office) demonstrating developer ignorance about the Game Design Document. She went around the office asking people, “What is a GDD?” and the responses were hilarious! If you haven’t seen the video yet and need a good laugh, do yourself a service and ask Purnima for the video.

•    A note on food and drinks at the venue: The non-veg, esp. lamb gosht was fantastic but I have it on good authority that the vegetarian food wasn’t up to the mark. A good thing I’m non-vegetarian then eh? Also, I had probably the best Tiramisu (a sweet pudding in case you didn’t know – I didn’t!) ever! Apparently there were a beer party in the evening at 6 but unfortunately, I can’t comment on how that went since we had a plane to catch. You could say though that everyone left the event in “high spirits” in more ways than one.