Four sunny summer days were well spent indoors at Assembly09. I was promoting a game concept & prototyping competition, meeting friends and following compos. There was high number of fast and extreme music entries, some nice fast graphics entries and - as expected - some amazing entries to 64 and demo compos. Some of my favorites (any category) were Proof of Concept, Frameranger and irrelephant. Check out all Assembly Compo entries from Assembly TV.
For those who don't know: Assembly is one of the biggest demo scene & gaming events in Europe. Assembly Summer gathered ~6000 participants out of which 500 are girls! Awesome - Go girls! Assembly is about participating in compos (in music, graphics, programming demos etc.), hanging around with friends, playing games (lots of WoW and and CS players around), chatting, staying at the Arena 24/7 for 4 days and eating lots of junk food. It must be overwhelming experience for
the youngest participants which were not much more than 10 year olds. It was also nice to see some people staying overnight with their small babies. That was kinda cool - Go Next Gen!Besides gaming and compos there was ArtTech seminar running on various topics. I followed indie sessions. Cactus gave a good preso [the same (?) as at GDC09], Blueberry Garden show didn't give that much new ideas and Petri Purho was such a Prince Charming as always. He were basically going
through a set of really funny and cool indie games. My favorite was the "get that f**ing raccoon out of the gears!" game (EnviroBear), turning levels thingie (Punishment) and Cactus stuff (Psychosomnium) of course. If not groundbreaking new ideas, at least we got good laugh by watching Petri playing.Paf Concept & prototype competition will be running until the end of August09 and the results will be out by the end of September. Assembly compos were dominated by men but I truly wish to see entries from girls to this concept competition. All in all -- it is all about good new ideas!
