Tim Schafer playtests Storyteller

The past week, an ambitious game development conference happened here in Argentina, where we invited a few developers from afar to give talks and mingle with the local creators.

I was in charge of picking the guests and convince them to fly all the way to my hometown, Buenos Aires. I chose based on how useful their insights would be to the local industry, which is mostly small independent studios, as well as bringing to Argentina a piece of the amazement and enlightening I felt when I attended San Francisco's GDC for the first time.

We had Zach Gage (Spell Tower, Ridiculous Fishing) talking about the mobile space and lifestyle choices, Ron Carmel (World of Goo) about what he believes is essential to the commercial success of an independent game, Robin Hunicke (Journey, now Funomena) gave a two day Game Design workshop, Nathan Vella (Swords & Sworcery, Super Time Force, Below) talked about independent game promotion, Gonzalo Frasca covered the link between learning and videogames, Andres Bordeu (Zeno Clash, Rock of Ages) presented the challenges of making a big 3D game in Chile with only 15 people and Lee Petty (Brutal Legend, Broken Age) exposed his process for art direction. There were several presentations from local developers as well!

Lee Petty is on the left. The one on the right is grinning creepily at something...

Love and Money with Ron Carmel.

Wait, are you sure this is a game?

Everything went extraordinarily well and it was a pleasure working with so many professional people that ensured that all the details were taking care of all the time. Our guests gave amazing and insightful talks and got the chance to meet part of our warm and colorful local community of game makers.

Now because of a mix of time and place, old school graphical adventure games are very close to the heart of argentines, and even non-gamers played games like Full Throttle, Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango. So we decided to invite Tim Schafer, one of the heroes of the genre, and he graciously accepted to talk about his creative process during his whole career.

Seizing the opportunity, I got him to playtest the latest version of Storyteller. I think he was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the idea behind the game works, and he got the hang of it immediately.

Tim Schafer is playing Storyteller in BEER mode.

It's highly likely this event will happen again next year, even bigger than this one. I really hope it does because it made an impression on everybody.

Also, this post's title is blatant.