This was my first ever industry conference – what a shame I waited so long!

I only stayed a day and a half – partly logistics and partly that, being autistic, I find these situations very demanding and I wasn’t sure how much I could absorb before my brain started playing up. I think I found just the right balance for a first-time, but would definitely stay for the whole conference in future.

My only regret is that I was too shy to interact with many of the other speakers. Conrad Winchester is a god send! And Seb Lee-Delisle is a really, really, really sweet person who I instantly felt relaxed with. But I should have pushed myself to talk more with some folk – though partly I was just valuing the interactions I was having with smart people around Robotlegs and so on.

I had the opportunity to talk with Jon Howard, who had the session that clashed with mine, at the speakers dinner. If I wasn’t already doing exciting things I’d have been hitting him up for a job for sure – I’d love to work on his team!

It’s an incredibly well organised conference. I was a little nervous about logistics as nobody had officially said to me “Your session will be in the pavilion, you need to get there x minutes beforehand” – but the number of people who’ve got knowledge of how it all works from previous experience means that my peers were able to gently steer me in the right direction and it was all very smooth and felt like a very collegiate way to do logistics.

Respect to John, and all those who worked hard to deliver Flash on the Beach. A new name is in the pipeline but I won’t hesitate to go back, whatever they call it, as a speaker or as an attendee. It’d be great to see more techy women there in future, but the blissfully empty women’s toilets were a pleasant novelty!

Here’s my take on the sessions I got to attend…

DEVELOPER CONSOLE FOR FUN AND PROFIT - ANDREAS RØNNING

This was a really interesting presentation thwarted only by the fact that it needed to be at least twice as long – every feature Andreas Demonstrated just filled me with questions.

To be honest I had a slightly negative bias against the console as a debugger before Andreas began – I’d seen how technically impressive it was in the video of his 2010 Elevator Pitch, but I’m an ardent TDDer and only fire up the debugger a handful of times each year, preferring to write assertions to explore odd behaviours. As it turns out, the console is much more than just a debugger.

In essence, the Doomsday Console gives you a ton of levers for tweaking your application at runtime. This is the bit that feels exciting!

I totally agree with Andreas’s assertion that text is the best format for this (usually), and the power to do anything from shifting object positions to spawning new processes and objects opens up great possibilities.

I was eager to see examples of actual, non-visual bugs that the Doomsday Console gives you the power to squish, although dozens pop in to my mind already, but this would have taken a second session – so I’ll watch the project for examples over the coming months.

That said, Andreas’s presentation was running in flash, and a problem with the screen setup led him to use the console to hack the position of his content nearer into the middle of his screen. I once did a 3-screen projected animation for the ‘Gothic Nightmares’ exhibition at the Tate gallery, and the capacity to do these tweaks without having to recompile between changes would have made the very painful alignment process a breeze.

I expect that most attendees are, like me, still having regular ‘oh, and I could do *that*!’ moments fairly frequently.

Andreas is also a very lovely guy who generously lent me his Mac->VGA adapter for my session. Phew!

FLASH 11: GET READY FOR GAMETIME – ROB BATEMAN

NATURAL FEATURES TRACKING AND IMAGE PATTERN DETECTION / RECOGNITION – EUGENE ZATEPYAKIN

Sadly I didn’t manage to get in to either of these sessions – both of which had to turn away huge crowds. On the plus side, I got to have some interesting conversations with various folk about very geeky things. There were various ‘not good enough’ murmurings, but it’s hard to know how John could better organise it – and as a speaker I did appreciate that people weren’t coming in after my session started.

SCALING & ORGANISATION: MASSIVE FLASH-PROJECTS – HOW TO BUILD A TOP 10 GAME ON FACEBOOK? – WOOGA

I *loved* this session. I just absolutely *loved* it.

Wooga are pushing out great Facebook games and expanding at the rate of adding a couple of team members each week. How do they do it? Well, basically they run it like an open source project (though they didn’t describe it using those actual words).

There are no project managers – everybody is a maker and the team collaborate to make collective decisions.

They use a broadly Agile process – frequent releases, short meetings, constantly moving goals reflecting what they learn from the process and product feedback after each release. They’re using the Agile manifesto – the spirit of Agile, not a rigid set of instructions.

There are no ‘rules’ about project processes – except that they are using TDD, version control (even for artists), and continuous integration to keep the gremlins away.

I won’t lie, for me the best thing was that it called BS on the idea that game development is somehow special and different and that practices such as TDD, mocking, CI and so on don’t apply to games.

I grew up around jazz musicians and still do work with NYJO, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra where crazy talented people get their first taste of life as a professional musician. They get to improvise and shine and do all kinds of mind-blowing stuff, and they also spend a ton of time practicing scales and arpeggios. Good practices set you free – they don’t constrain (unless you’re doing them wrong).

I heard a few discontented murmurings – people felt they had been misled about the session content. But the title says it all. The audience might have hoped it would be about something cool and awesome and magical that they’d never seen before, a silver bullet or rainbow-crapping-unicorns. But it’s not. It’s about mocking your service layer, giving your teams respect and autonomy but also responsibility to follow practices that avoid software-lock, and not cutting corners.

Wooga – I love you.

THE TALE OF A TRAVELLING SALESMAN AND HIS FOUR COLOURS. – JOA EBERT

You may or may not already know this, but I used to be one of those people on TV. As a result I have shared space, done interviews and generally hung about with a lot of properly famous people. I generally don’t get star struck.

I am star struck by Joa. I was even standing next to him while I was talking to John (FOTB organiser), and I was too shy to thank him for his work on Signals, or even say hello.

Anyway – Joa is part math genius and part comedian. “Every morning the same disaster, how should I put on my clothes?” – followed up with one of the most brilliantly clear illustrations of a practical application of graph theory.

His session was just pure joy for me – no doubt partly because he feels joy himself when he implements beautiful solutions. It reminded me of the recent neuroscience data that has shown that ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ feel very similar to our brains.

I came away wanting to graph the world. And specifically it gave me insight into a couple of Robotlegs 2 problems we’re tackling, and how these might translate into a graph problem that has probably had papers written about it in other fields.

I’m a math geek so in terms of pure mathematical theory there was little I hadn’t met before, but there was something in the way Joa conceptualised and illustrated it that felt very fresh.

Here’s to whatever FOTB reappears as in 2012.

About the Author

I'm an actionscript programmer living and working in a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales, UK. I used to be a TV reporter, but my inner (and often outer) geek won. I also write stuff. Most recently Head First 2D Geometry.

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