Developers in attendance:
Ido Yehieli, Jeff Lait, Tom Ford, Jimmy Åberg, Filip Dreger, Ulf Åström (me).
On April 29th - May 2nd, 2011, I went to Visby (on Gotland, the largest island in Sweden) with some friends for the annual (well, somewhat) International Roguelike Developers Conference. Most of us met up on friday at the central station in Stockholm to have lunch, then travelled by ferry to Gotland. Unfortunately the group split up over two separate ferries.
The actual conference started on saturday. We had two full days of discussions about roguelikes and games in general, some in-depth analysis of selected 7DRLs, sightseeing, good food and a couple of Munchkin games. Some people from the university also came to listen, let's hope they found it interesting.
Talks were given on various topics. Here is Tom Ford discussing design problems for handheld devices; control models, resolution, saving/restoring, etc.
Ido Yehieli demonstrating Detribus, a collaborative 7DRL. This game later evolved into Cardinal Quest (and its sequel, Cardinal Quest II).
Jeff Lait and Jakob Berglund, our host at Gotland University. Many thanks to Jakob for letting us have the conference there.
Note: Jeffs watch is actually capable of running a roguelike, controlled with morse code. (seriously, WTF?)
Going for a walk around the old city wall.
Also included: my finger.
Playing some Munchkin on the ferry. It's quite silly and fun to play with people that share the same cultural context (fantasy tropes). This quote sums up the spirit of the game:
Jimmy: Will you help me defeat this monster?
Ido: No, I don't want to help you.
Jimmy: I'll curse you if you don't help me!
In this session we maliciously tried to kill off one of the players and spent all our good cards buffing and counter-debuffing a Potted Plant, until we realised this monster was, basically, harmless.
Outside the city wall, Visby looks like... just any other Swedish town.
