Animex 2013

Animex. Animex was stupidly good. Animex is always stupidly good. Why weren’t you at Animex!? It was a surreal week. Over the past three years of Animex I’ve gone from being an eager student having his mind blown by all kinds of game wizardry, to being a graduate game designer taking a week off work to have his mind blown by all kinds of game wizardry, to getting invited to give a workshop to a lab full of students and play an actual role in the blowing of minds with game wizardry.

From the feedback I’ve had so far, it seems like the workshop went really well! I was terrified about the prospect of teaching anything live for weeks. I often have to re-record bits of my videos so I was a bit panicky about getting stuck in my own code while trying to demonstrate things. Luckily everything I actually presented worked. I had to spend a few minutes tinkering when helping individuals out with their own problems but that’s to be expected. I’m actually pretty satisfied with how I was able to think up approaches and solutions on the fly to stuff I’d never personally done before. That said, the advantage of starting so many projects throughout my life is that I tend to know at least one approach to pretty much everything these days.

There are too many other awesome things that happened at Animex to really cover. Alex Trowers has a pretty thorough summary over on his blog. It was fantastic. I go every year. I’ll keep going every year. You should go. Every year.

Actual game development work didn’t meet my goals for February but I’m getting back into actually working on games which is good. The problem is still that I’m dividing my time over too many different projects. I find it very difficult to work on one thing day after day. I’m really sick of not finishing and releasing things though.