11th November, up at 4:30 a.m. to reach Dadar station to catch a bus to Pune for the Nasscom GDC. Just the night before night Krishna and me realized that we would infact have the time and could actually attend the NGDC. At first we thought it’s too last minute but by midnight we decided, lets go for it. So, groggily we met up at 5am outside the station and got on a Shivneri after a 4 hour journey spent in a half asleep state, we reached Pune and head right to the venue, Taj Vivanta and “freshened up” there. EXCEPT! that was NOT the venue! After speaking to a couple of friends we realized that the venue was Hyatt Regency (I still can’t recollect why we were so convinced that the venue was Taj). Feeling like a bunch of idiots we head towards Hyatt and spent 2 days attending sessions and meeting lots of interesting people.

There were some really good sessions this year. I particularly enjoyed Rajat Ojha’s Post Mortem of their upcoming game SNS. It was a simple talk of What they did, How they did it and what did or did not work for them. I wish them luck for the launch and with their new games. Jason Bay’s session on freemium games also had some great insight into the hottest business model in the games indsutry today. Then there were the fellow Indies, Yadu, Kinshuk, Shubhank, Apoorav and the whole bunch. They were lively and passionate with good ideas for the way forward for Indies and game development in general in India (like the BYOG). My personal favorite moments, however, were the heated discussions between Vijay and Yiannis. :)

The NGDC ended quite well with a great meeting with Ian Livingstone. I demoed our upcoming game to him and he seemed to think it had potential (YAY!!!) As you can see, it was very Heart Warming. :)

OMG. A poorly coded flash game. You don’t get to see to many of those ever since flixel/FlashPunk has been around. However after much persistence and few days of bonded labor I have finally come up with a deliverable. It may not be the best versus game you ever played , but I’m pretty sure you guys enjoyed button mashing on your clicky sounding keyboard. OH and please refresh the page if you want to play again, my retry() function asked me to retry writing the code. Please do report in your volcanic adventures.

Music Credits: Brad Sucks – Dirtbag (Blackberry’s Dirtbeat Remix) on CCMixer