Last Wednesday we had our inaugral User Group meetup. Unsuprisingly, It was great!
We ended up choosing the Toucan pub in Soho (my company's official 'Central London office'). Unfortunately this was a bit of a last minute decision, workloads thwarting our plans to tell everyone days in advance, but we still managed to convince a bunch of our wonderful users to come out and play.
Our almost entire lack of planning was reflected in the fact that, err, we hadn't actually told anyone what we looked like (Leaf usually wears a red carnation in his deerstalker, but that evening was an exception, and my flashing XNA mittens were in the wash). Luckily we were helped out by two facts : firstly, the Toucan is just about the smallest pub in the world and thus people looking for other people are quite easy to spot, and secondly - it's Soho! Anyone not ranting about how excited ITV3 is with their revolutionary new reality show is clearly a visitor.
We were : Gareth (F4T C4T), Dan (YourFurryFiend) [that's half the team who created the Award Winning Herriman! Ed.], John (Joops) and finally Dan's work colleague who promised us he'd sign up to the site the following morning. We haven't seen him yet, but to be honest the thought of doing anything the following morning excuses him.
So we all found each other pretty quickly, and turned our attention to the important matters of beer and XNA. Fantastically, Microsoft had provided us with both of these things! There was an awful lot to talk about - games, coding, art, games/coding/art industry gossip, where we all worked, everyone's personal projects, whether anyone has ever beaten Herriman and - the big question - how could Pizza Express have possibly run out of pizza dough?
We had a few drinks, we headed to Nandos, the stories flowed with the Peri Peri sauce and before we knew it the clock said midnight. We parted with promises to do it again soon, and we definitley shall. Perhaps even more of you can be tempted out next time?
We had a great time - thanks again chaps! And of course - many thanks as usual to Paul Foster at MS for helping us out : )
(ps if anyone has any photos from the night please drop me a line - my phonecam pics all look a bit like this...)