Control Inspiration – Mark Essen and Daniel Benmergui
(summary) | My Summary:
Huge waste of time. First guy had no real presentation prepared. Second guy stammered about the process of one of his games.

1. Mark mumbles over horrible tiny font slides (kinda like this)about his early experiments with joust and remaking Crystal Castles from memory.

uhhhh. fail? … did he just show UFO flying game from the punk rock gaming talk?
Both presenters seem to be giggling at how bad they are are presenting. sigh. “there’s no structure here. just random inspirations. giggle giggle.”
Mumbles incoherently about robots learning to walk, and using video memory to generate music. and then plays random awful music clip and asks “is this video game music? I dunno.” then shows his experiment using random memory as part of explosion.

2. Daniel Benmurgui takes over. much more structure. yay. but thick accent. seems to be trying to be bad, to match humorous indie-cred of previous speaker.
Today I Die has interesting “drag text” around mechanic. maybe.
He talks about using this “Poem Mechanic” to influence world view. what? Does he mean in game? Then “past tense”. These slides make no sense.

Game example looks interesting. He is going through it’s evolution. You drag words around and to swap them out, but this changes them.
He talks about giving up, based on feedback. Switched over to making a space sim.
Then going back and trying to cut poem mechanic. then decides that was the good idea.

In the end, I am left angry at the time wasted sitting thought this talk. But also cringing that my Drag-On Blade idea may appear derivative of Today I Die. Have to focus my efforts on getting far away from these people.

p.s. After playing through Today I Die, I am left very impressed with Benmergui’s ideas. Note to self : play more of his other games