This past weekend, I attended the voices that matter conference as a sponsor for a new product my team is working called MaaSive. We had an absolute blast at the conference and I learned quite a bit from all of the speakers.

Here were a few of my favorite parts:

Keynote by Graeme Devine

For those of you who don’t know Graeme is a legend in the game development industry. He was responsible for titles such as Quake 3, 7th guest, and Halo Wars. His presentation entitled “Social Gaming is Dead” was spot on. In it Graeme talked about how game developers have become less focused on the quality of games and more focused on “how do I make a profit?”. A statement that has stuck out to me is:

“Be generous with fun. We are mean with it!”

Basically, we are charging our users for fun or making them do real work (see Farmville) in order to obtain it. His message was “stop it, make something fun, and dont’t focus on profit”. Otherwise you are doomed.

Follow Graeme on Twitter

Moving To 3D by Mike Daily

Mike is a good friend of mine and I look forward to hanging out with him at the conference each year. His talk was all about showing the developers how easy it actually is to create a 3D game without the use of a game engine. Mike’s demo (show below) was an absolutely incredible space shooter where you used the gyroscope to maneuver around.

Mike will be posting a series on his blog in the near future about how to make his game using GLKit in the near future.

VTM Game Prototype from Michael Daley on Vimeo.

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Storyboarding by Erica Sadun

Erica is an OG (original gangster) when it comes to iOS development. She has been in the space since way before the first SDK was published (in fact she had a jailbroken dev book almost ready to go). Her current book, The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is a beast containing almost 900 pages!!!

Her talk showed how easy it is to use storyboarding and just how powerful the technique can be.

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Conclusion

It should be obvious from this post, that the VTM conference was incredible to say the least. If you didn’t attend, I strongly urge you to check out their next one. Hopefully you will get to blog about my talk at it (assuming I get my crap together).

Happy Coding!