PAX East

After weeks of devoting every minute of spare time to Rustbot development, it feels extremely strange to have spent the last three days with it completely absent from my life (well, not completely, if you count throwing out business cards in a vain feeble attempt to garner attention to this blog).

Needless to say, I spent this past weekend fully submersed in the vast awesomeness that is PAX East, and I have to say that the best aspect of this year's PAX was that the experience was the polar opposite of last year's. Last year, my friends and I waited in numerous lines for plenty of different panels, and spent the remainder of the time in the PC Freeplay room, bashing each other in Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2.

This year, however, I spent only about 40 minutes in PC Freeplay, and only attended 3 panels. So what else did I do? Well I toured the expo floor a little more extensively (and met some great local indie developers* - yay networking!) but primarily, my time was spent in the tabletop freeplay area. We played some Magic: The Gathering (one of my friends went 5/6 in tournies), some Settlers of Catan, some DnD, a new game we picked up called Ascension (super easy to learn and lots of fun), another game called Forbidden Island (evil but tons of fun), and some Battletech.

Did I mention that the Chessex booth was drool-worthy? Naturally I had to get a couple more sets of dice, as well as a nerd-tacular keychain (three bronze talons gripping a black/blue marbled d8).

Also, it turns out I quite embarrassingly mistook a gentleman named Jonathon Myers (of Reactive Games) for Bill Amend and only learned of my error after having asked for and received a photo. As it turns out, I had no idea what Bill Amend actually looks like (from later googling him), so I have precisely *no* idea how I got it in my head that Jon was Bill. In retrospect I think he looks more like Adam Savage, which is (in my mind, at least) a pride-inducing compliment.

Anyways, without a need to further crunch my time for Rustbot, I'm not going to be updating as frequently specifically because I won't be working on the game as frequently. I'm going to do some real-world things, like hang out with my friends and oh-I-don't-know play games rather than make them. I'm getting into a Battletech / Mechwarrior funk (free Mechwarrior 4 download!) and will likely spend some time in that.

So for now, adieu and stay tuned for more interesting Rustbot updates!

*OH and I met Tim Schafer!! (swooooooon)