Brighton is the only place in the world I've seen actual horizontal rain. In July, no less.
So we started Thursday off at Microsoft's shiny new offices by Victoria station, for a post-competition catch-up and a general chat about what's next for the user group. You should be hearing more about all this over the next few weeks, but to quote a few tasters from my scribbled notes : "celebrity bloggers... london/edinburgh games festivals... involve community in real projects... Herriman hi-score challenge... more specific forums... xmas compo???". Exciting stuff all round.
After the meeting, and with rapidly dwindling hangovers, we headed down to 'sunny' Brighton to catch Day 2 of the conference. Develop is the trade mag for the European games industry, and it organises this annual shindig to keep the industry up-to-date with talks such as "Textures and Shaders in the HD Era", "Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2" and "Viva Piñata : Visual Style and the Creative Spark". More importantly though, it's a chance to nab silly freebies (the Perforce balsa wood plane was my fave this year), schmooze new contacts and get drunk with old workmates while re-telling each other the same old stories.
Having already spent Wednesday doing all this with my Slide hat on, I was up for a more focussed roam around the stalls. Now, we're very interested in the academic population and can boast a number of students amongst our users - so I was very happy when Fiona French and Martin Wright from GameLab London, who teach at London Metropolitan University, explained to me that XNA is an important element of the multimedia and computer visualisation & games courses they teach. Hopefully we'll have a longer conversation with them - and all our other new friends - in the near future.
Towards the end of the day, we were very honoured to spend some time hanging out over a beer with Chris Satchell, whose slightly-intimidating job title is "General Manager, XNA". He's a lovely chap, full of jokes, anecdotes and ideas. We chatted about how XNA came about, the vision for XNA's future, and also what we're trying to acheive with our ever-expanding XNA UK community. Displaying the frankness and transparency we're growing accustomed to from our friends at MS, he even talked us through the release roadmap for the next year, other XNA projects in development, and the entries and progress of DreamBuildPlay!
Chris and the rest of the XNA team will be announcing most of this stuff at GameFest07 on the 13th/14th August, so hold tight - there's a lot of good stuff to look forward to.
Following this we had a few more meetings, and a few more drinks, and I guess at some point we must have got the train home. All in all, a really great conference. Roll on the next one!
Oh, and finally - here's Leaf, blowing in the wind. See what I did there?
