I made a video of the whole trip. It's very fragmentary, mostly shaky shots of the ground and sweeps across random architecture. Skip to 8:45 if you're only interested in the IRDC.
On May 31st - June 4th 2012, I went to London and the International Roguelike Developers Conference. I arrived on Thursday but the conference didn't start until Saturday.
I'm a really lame tourist and don't like crowds, so I spent most of Friday wandering Regents Park and visiting the London Zoo. I wanted to see the pygmy hippos but they were nowhere to be found. They had some big fish though.
Darren Grey did a fine job hosting the event. There was a small pre-meetup on Friday night with six developers including myself. It took almost an hour to find my way from the Kensal Rise station, but I got to the pub eventually.
(For the record, I wasn't lost - I knew exactly where I was - I just didn't know where I was supposed to go.)
IRDC this year drew around 25 people (some came and went over the days and made it hard to keep an exact count). Confirming the international status, there were at least 8 nationalities represented. Some identified purely as players while others were well known names from the newsgroup and IRC channel. We also saw several 7DRLs and a couple of experimental prototypes.
It was also nice to see people involved with Nethack and DCSS, as each of these games have a large player base and developer community, but usually little overlap with the "new and emerging" roguelike scene.
I gave a small talk about my alternative melee system (damage sequences) introduced in TSL 0.38. It was well received and I got feedback for further development. Overall I got many ideas for where I want to take TSL, but we will see how much time permits.
| Far left: | Ulf Åström (me) |
| Top row: | Craig Turner, Björn Ritzl, Clare Boothby, Aaron Steed, David Damerell (pinkbeast), Andreas Dorn, Tom Ford (flend), Ruari O'Sullivan (randomnine) |
| Middle row: | Daniel Slaney, Jeff Lait, ???, Nicolas Casalini (DarkGod), ???, Alan Zuconni, Johanna Ploog (jpeg) |
| Bottom row: | Patric Mueller (bhaak), Ido Yehieli (tametick), Darren Grey, Filip Dreger, Simon Donnelly (SRD), Thomas Whetnall, Paul Jeffries, Andrew Swan |
Note: in the original photo, there was some random guy in the background (next to Craigs shoulder) that I have digitally removed. If you miss this mysterious stranger, here he is:
The conference room AC seemed to have gone haywire and decided on a cozy 15 degrees. In the end everyone had put their jackets on and jumped around to keep warm. I guess we forgot to bring our rings of cold resistance...
I was too tired to stick around for dinner, so I just had some yoghurt when heading back to the hostel. I stayed near Earls Court. The fire alarm went off at 5 AM on Monday (I was the only one that got out - in case, you know, there was an actual fire). It's becoming something of a tradition; when I was in London 15 years earlier with my parents we also had a fire alarm the last night.
There was a place near Earls Court advertising "swedish massage". Being swedish, I have never heard of such a thing and I wasn't curious enough to ask for one. According to Wikipedia: The term "Swedish" massage is actually only recognized in English, Québécois or Dutch speaking countries. Elsewhere the style is referred to as "classic massage".
I also had a close encounter with the Google Maps car. It didn't see me, but it did see Jeff.