I was at the indie developers conference with the strange title ‘World of Love’ , presenting an invited paper on ‘Running an MMO part-time, single-handedly’. I wasn’t really sure if this would be of interest to people, but it turned out to definitely be so. I guess it has been the dream of most games developers at some point or another to create their own MMO… and it’s also a ‘known fact’ that creating one on your own is impossible.
As a conference it was very unlike the academic conferences that I have been attending since the mid-1990s. At ‘World of Love’ there were about 10 presenters and 200+ audience members; at academic conferences you’d expect nearly every attendee to be involved with a presentation on some level. This was nice because it meant lots of people wanted to talk to me afterwards and were interested in what I had to say.
The other speakers were quite mixed.. some presented well, with interesting insights into their game development process, while others didn’t really have much to say and came across (IMO) somewhat unprofessionally.
My ‘take home’ messages from Tak Fung and others.. keep experimenting; don’t get tunnel vision about focusing on one game at a time; and never let it become a chore because that sucks the life out of it all.
All in all, a very positive and supportive experience, so I guess ‘World of Love’ makes some sense as a title after all.