Supa Nova Day 2

Well Supanova has wrapped and what a weekend it was.

I didn’t get much of a chance to check out the non-gaming side of things, but I did see some cool comics and toys during my brief walk around the expo.

One of the highlights of the day was attending Tommy Tallarico’s talk. I assumed it was going to be all about Video Games Live but he actually talked about so much other cool gaming stuff - including his thoughts on the next generation of games hardware. It was a really inspiring talk and he took time out to encourage people wanting to get into the games industry with some great advice. I was impressed with how approachable he was for a guy with such an awesome gaming pedigree.

The other highlights of the day included the concept art talk by Milenko Tjunik, Milenko is one of the concept artists on Destroy All Humans! 2 and he spoke about his art influences and gave some good advice to aspiring artists.

QANTM and Griffith University both gave advice on how to get into games, with Griffith focusing on games animation.

Lach Creagh, the other DAH! 2 concept artist and lead animator gave a great talk on animating for games. He showed off lots of examples of character animation and had heaps of useful animation tips. In fact I learned so much in the 30 minutes he spoke that it should have been compulsory attendance for designers and programmers.

I hosted the “All About Game Design” panel and along with the audience got to ask a series of designers some hard-hitting questions. The panel consisted of Craig Duturbure from THQ, Arash Mohebbi from Pandemic Studios, Penny Sweetser from Creative Assembly and Joseph Hewitt from Auran. Each of these designers has worked on a variety of games on different platforms and in different genres.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with the 2^nd Game Trivia Quiz. Again, the game developers just won the day despite their atrocious skills in Mario Kart on the N64. But the five audience members did an awesome job in answering some tough questions and kicked ass in Mario Kart.

And finally, we concluded the day with the prize draws. The passport competition winner scored 21 games and other collectable swag, and the Art Competition winners each won a pack of cool games.

Each Queensland games company did an awesome job contributing to the prize packs with loads of Xbox, PS2, PC and Nintendo DS games up for grabs - so a big thanks to THQ, Pandemic, Auran, Krome, Halfbrick, Creative Assembly, Fuzzy Eyes and Dimsdale and Kreozot (sorry if I missed anyone).

Oh, and a big thanks to all the people who took time out of their weekend to man the Pandemic stand - Christie, Mick, Andy, Shane, Kirsten, Kieran, Ben, Peter, Mark and Rob - great work.

Hopefully next year will be just as good.