Just to reassure everyone: GameLoop 2012 is happening in Cambridge, MA in August, and invitations have been sent out to the first round of folks (people who attended last year, or people who bugged us about attending). We’ll be opening it up to the general public soon.

GameLoop Boston 2011 is almost upon us!  For now you need a password to register for the event. You can get it from a friend who’s attending, or you can contact the organizers.

Darius and I paid close attention to the criticisms we received about GameLoop 2009.  So we have a few improvments we’re making to the format.  A big thank-you to everyone that took the time to tell us what they didn’t like about things!

The majority of the feedback boiled down to the format not promoting a deep-dive on interesting topics at an expert level.  All of these changes are here to help address that issue.

New Schedule

One criticism we heard a lot was that 45 minute sessions were just enough time to get to the interesting stuff – and then everyone had to roll to the next talk.  So this year, the schedule will be 1 hour for each discussion, followed by a 15 minute break.  We’ll make sure to put the schedule up on the whiteboards in each room so people aren’t thrown by the weird timing.

First Half / Second Half Schedules

This year, we”ll only put up talks for the first half of the day in the morning.  During lunch, we’ll open up afternoon schedule.

This change comes from the criticism that when a cool talk resulted from what of the morning sessions, there ended up being no room to have that discussion later in the day.

Expert Level Talks

Also in service to in-depth discussions, we’re asking people to label their talks as either “Intro” or “Expert” on the Big Board.  This will let everyone understand the kind of talk they’re walking into, and adjust their expectations accordingly.  Keep in mind, anyone should go to a talk they’re interested in – but if it’s an Expert talk, we’re going to ask that people hang onto intro-level questions they have until after the talk is done.  This might be a great chance for a discussion over beers at Cambridge Brewing Company that night!

This improvement also leads right into…

Empowered Moderators

Another criticism we received was that it was easy for talks to easily become divided between people trying to talk about stuff at a more in-depth level, versus people talking about the basics.  So, paired with labeling talks, we’ll also be adding official moderators.

In past years, most talks were de factor moderated by the person that put them up on the board – we’re just making that practice official.  The person that suggests a talk will put their name on the board as well (so, we’ll have the subject, the moderator, and the level), and they’re on the hook to keep their talk on track.  This just boils down to dragging things back onto course if they start heading into territory outside the scope of the talk.

Chat Rooms

Finally, we’re going to add some “Chat Rooms” – these are spaces scattered around the NERD center where people can continue discussions, do ad-hoc discussions, or just hang out.  This way, if there’s a crazy in-depth talk you want to do with just two other people, you can head to one of these spaces.  We’ll also have an area of the board up to list these discussions so others can find you as needed.

We’re looking forward to trying all this stuff out – and we want your feedback on it all!  Like any good unConference, we’re all about making this thing serve the needs of its participants.

And finally, one more time –  GameLoop is on August 28th at Microsoft’s NERD Center – it’s $40 for the day and includes lunch, a t-shirt, and maybe even breakfast if we can swing it.  Sign up now!

Boston GameLoop 2010, our third-annual all-day game development unconference will take place on Saturday, August 28th in Cambridge, MA.  It’s a self-organizing game conference, and it goes something like this:

• 9am-10am: People show up and spend an hour getting to know each other’s shared interests
• 10am-11am: We informally vote on proposed sessions and put those up on the big board
• 11am: the conference begins!

There are rooms for people to meet in, and a big board with a schedule grid to coordinate it all. Last year’s GameLoop was a huge success: we had about 90 attendees from about 35 companies, including local companies like Irrational Games, Harmonix, and Rockstar New England as well as developers from places like Bethesda Softworks, EA Mythic, and Vicarious Visions.

The signal-to-noise ratio at a conference like GameLoop is pretty astounding. What I like best about it is that it’s just developers talking about stuff they want to talk about. It’s a refreshing change of pace if you’re starting to feel like the big conferences are the same people saying the same things every year. We’ve had sessions about procedural animation, ethics in rulesets, distributed version control, iPhone shaders, illusionary gameplay, prototyping, and many others. Some sessions are incredibly small and focused, just three really passionate people who don’t know each other discussing a topic they care about. Other sessions can be more like standard conference lectures or roundtables. You can see the whole 2009 schedule along with some audio and notes from the sessions.

Registration for the event is $40.  We provide breakfast, lunch, and a T-shirt (if we can find a sponsor!). After the conference groups of people head to dinner to hang out.

IF YOU LIVE OUTSIDE OF BOSTON: Scott and I are more than happy to try and set you up with crash space while you’re here for GameLoop. Just let us know if you’d like that and we’ll see if we can arrange it. We can also recommend nearby hotels.

To register, go here: http://gameloop.eventbrite.com. We accept PayPal and major credit cards, as well as cash at the door (but you still need to register).

We hope you can make it!  We also hope you’ll pass the word on to other industry types that you know, maybe even send a note to your company’s internal boards or lists.

In a few days we’ll have the new Boston GameLoop website up. You can still view the old wiki here, and you can register for Boston GameLoop 2010 here. Thanks for your patience!