If you haven’t heard, Freeplay is going to happen in Melbourne in about a week and half. It’s turning into a pretty significant event. Not only because of the stellar lineup of people. Not just because most major game conventions in Australia are slowly dying. But for me it’s the way the talks have been put together. Grab a bunch of people and take them out of their comfort zone. Then put an audience in front of them. What could go wrong.

Why am I mentioning this? Well I’m on a panel called “101 things I learnt in Game Design School”. The idea comes from this book, which is a personal favourite of mine (buy it, it’s really good). The way it’s working is that all the Freeplay speakers (there are about 600,000 of them) offer a thing they learnt. And then we panel about them. The last bit is a little hazy but Helen assures me that it’s under control.

Before my friends get out the pitchforks, it wasn’t my idea. I’m not a game designer. And I never went to a Game Design School. But I do run one (which might be the only reason I’m on the panel) and I hang around a lot of Design people so I’ve leached a lot of ideas though the years.

As prep I sat down to see if I could write out 101 things that I actually do know. I present them below as a way of throwing myself at the mercy of the court. If I’ve learnt anything it’s because people much smarter than I already figured it out and shared it with me. This talk is for them.

Click Details to get the list.

a Pollock via iPhone and Pollock via Pollock by matt ditton (AKA polymonkey)

Tomorrow is Saturday and it’s really my last day of holiday. Sunday I’m getting a tour of the TOKYO GEIJUTSU DAIGAKU new media department from my old processing buddy Saito. I get the plane home on Monday, touchdown Tuesday and stand up in fronts of the first class of the year on Wednesday. I’m already damn tired and I’ve got a backlog of 40GB and growing of photos and video to get through. I’m leaving the photos for the plane.

Just one thing though. Visually this country is exhausting, Tokyo specifically. I’m good with iconography and body language so I’ve had no problems getting places or talking to people, just no existential topics. But I can’t read the language so I’m constantly searching for english in any signage. And the sheer number of fonts is driving me insane. How do people stand it here? After a day walking around I’m happy for any small part of familiar grounding. It did make me smile when I thought I saw comic sans at DisneyLand.

It’s going to take a while to finish uploading all this stuff. As now I also have video. This was one of my favourite finds. The flamingos at the HK zoo

Of interesting note is that this video has white boarders. Sure it’s dead easy to upload and sure it’s dead easy to embed. But tweaking it sucks hard.

Update. White boarders are gone. Well spotted Mr Freakdesign. Well spotted.

this is a test. lets see if it breaks everything.

things learnt from the test.

1. youtube doesn’t seam to work under IE 7.

2. youtube didn’t put a keyframe in the first frame. but that is probably my fault

3. the video is too wide for the site layout.

interesting. I’ll work on 2 and 3. number 1 isn’t my problem.

but if you want to view the test at youtube. go to this link

Siabluhiabjliubliabulia
Hong Koooonnnnnnnnnng!

lyrics by Jalacy Hawkins (Screaming Jay Hawkins)

MattD

We flaked out today and took it easy. I am totally stuffed. I’m going back tomorrow to watch the fans.

MattD

P.S. yeah I bought that camera from 2 posts ago. The pile of things to bring back home is huge. It is phat loot. It is pirate plunder from the orient.