8am - One of the nice things about the conference being in SF this year is the close proximity of the hotels to the conference center. This meant that instead of waiting for the shuttle this morning (and showing up late to the first presentation that I had penciled in as happened last year) we simply walked over and showed up plenty early.

9am - Spiderman 2 on the Nintendo DS. It's no secret that I love my DS. Though there are currently few titles available for the handheld I've been picking up a lot of GBA games and have enjoyed each one. I haven't had a handheld since the Atari Lynx, and it surprises me how much I really enjoy the freedom of handheld games. They are easy to pick-up and put down, which is one of the things that I laud about Indie games. Spiderman was made in just 4 months, and I would say the sales definitely reflect that fact. While not having money is often stated as a reason for Indies being innovative, not taking the proper time to do the game seems to always lead to a less than spectacular game. Another real interesting thing was the tech demo that was shown. It was quite pretty and upon them mentioning that it took just 3 days, it drove home how much good talent there is making mainstream titles as the demo looked better than many indie games ever look.

10h30 am - J Allard. This was the first keynote session and though I rarely sit through any of them in their entirety I always try to at least catch some of the presentation. This year everyone was on edge as Microsoft was giving out badges and stamping hands on the way in, in addition to giving out a free year to Xbox live. At the very end everyone learned what the excitement was about as Microsoft teamed with Samsung to give away 1000 HD TVs. They showed the new game Forza on the screen with 3 cars racing. In the crowd there were 3 different colors of badges, if the color of the badge matched the color of the winning car, you won a TV. While yours truly struck out, Bryce, who is also here coving the IGF for Game Tunnel, won himself a new TV. Pretty sweet!

The next generation Xbox was not shown as was rumored, but J did take the opportunity to speak at length about XNA, the platform that was introduced last year to simply cross-platform development (between the PC/Xbox). The focus of the presentation was on HD of course, and the work and vision it would take to move into the future.

12 noon - The game developer's challenge. This was one of the best sessions of the conference last year with Will Wright spinning a web of innovative genius. The idea is to take a difficult topic, this year is 'The Emily Dickinson License,' and turn it into a game.  Will Wright was fabulous as usual, showing an incredible concept game that mixed those annoying virtual pets, the even more annoying Microsoft paperclip, and the ever friendly girl gone crazy.  The end result of your playing would be to either have a girl who was obsessed with your or suicidal and perhaps would delete herself.  The girl of course was Emily Dickenson, and you got to know her better as she shared her poetry and musings with you all taken from things she had actually written either through poem or though letters.  Pretty cool!

1 pm - Lunch - Wraps this year...nothing too cool, and I couldn't get my USB card-reader to work, which was quite unfortunate.

2h30 - Since there wasn't an Indie Round-Table on the schedule this year Greg Micek, Dan MacDonald and I did our own.  It took about 25 minutes to get it going, and the audience we ended up with wasn't what we'd expected.  We had thought we'd have more people taking a newbie look at being an indie developer, but instead we got a wonderful group of already experienced indie developers.  The conversation turned more towards continuing to make it as an indie developer and my last comment about Indies working together to create a co-op site that showed off the more mainstream-sequel indie games (i.e. the non-puzzle titles) lead to a discussion with a few people that went on for quite some time after we broke up as a group.

4pm - I'd intended to get online and upload some stories and pictures at 4pm, but due to my problematic dazzle card reader, my photos were unattainable.  Instead I spent the time chatting with Wade Tinney from Large Animal games.  It was a great time as we actually got to sit for awhile.  This year's layout of the IGF, in lines instead of being in circles made things much easier for people to check games out though there are still several improvements that could be made.

5 pm - A quick chat with Jeff Tunnel of Garage Games about indie gaming and getting more press to Indie games and then onto the the expo floor booth crawl, with drinks, food, drinks and um drinks. Nothing like a bunch of drinking developers and exhibitors pining for their attention.  The Chinese was alright, but mostly I was left wondering where we would get dinner...and when...

5h30pm - IGF Awards.  Thanks to the nice people at the GDC we got a VIP pass and got to enter before the general crowds came in.  It was a good chance to sit and catch up on writing...while getting more frustrated with my stupid USB card-reader.  Hopefully I'll at least be able to take some more pictures...even if they won't be shown for awhile.  Time to sit and wait for the awards to be announced.
The award winners are:
Open
Sound - Steer Madness
Visual Arts - Alien Hominid
Technical Excellence - Alien Hominid
Game Design - Gish
Audience Award - Alien Hominid
Overall - Gish (and Edmund's proposal to the Gish girl)

Project Goldmaster - FlashBang presents to: Digital Builders: Protothea developers...

Web/Downloadable
Sound - Global Defense Network
Visual Arts - Wik & the Fable of Souls
Technical Excellence - RocketBowl
Game Design - Wik & the Fable of Souls
Audience Award - n
Overall -  Wik & the Fable of Souls