GDC 2013
We attended GDC 2013, via Chicago.
We went via Chicago because that's where Ryan lives, and he put Michal and I up for a week while we worked on KAG. It was a week of lots of optimisation, API headaches and an attempted (failed) ARM port of the server. It was nice to get to know Ryan a little better, and meet his girlfriend Erin. Thanks Ryan!
We also got to see "The Book of Mormon" live in show, which was a fantastic surprise.
At GDC, we saw a good talk by Dean Hall, the DayZ developer, who seemed like a pretty cool guy. I had no idea he was a kiwi. His talk was about how his (fairly harrowing) experience in the army affected his life and developed him as a person, and how he wanted to reflect that in DayZ. There were also some nice micro-talks, about all sorts of things. If you ever attend GDC, make sure to set aside time for that session.
We stayed in the Indie Hostel again and the folks there were every bit as cheerful as the previous time. We had to move down the road to (what we dubbed) "the no-fun-allowed hostel" for a few days in the middle though, which sucked.
While we were there, we met up with one of our long-time community members, Alex "Rayne" Conatser. He was a chatty character once he got over the shock of meeting us, and worked with us on a partial port of KAG classic zombies over to the new engine, though he didn't finish it. I sent him my old laptop after the trip, as a thank you for sticking around so long... and because his old computer was a toaster.
While in San Fran we also met up with Mare and Raigan of Metanet Software. Raigan was a big fan of soldat back in the day, and impressed with KAG; I am a big fan of N. It was nice to share a bit of mutual appreciation.