Balthazar Auger

Seeing as the conditions at the IGF pavilion weren’t optimal for poesysteme-ing, I decided to go towards the “performance” approach and have every visitor collaborate to create and maintain a poesysteme every day. The game only got rebooted when the game crashed and at the end of the day.

People could add one or several words and see how they would trounce or get trounced by the other words that were there already there, adding their contribution to the gene pool. Before they left, I asked them if they wanted to adopt a word, based on a “Love at first sight” algorithm. Upon seeing a word they liked, they were asked to write a quick sentence depicting what the word meant.

Their collaborative efforts result in this dictionary of the absurd.

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Okay, this awesome. A while ago, Matt Peckham asked me if he could feature Poesysteme in a PC World article about indie games, and I told him that yeah, he could. A week later, he does.

PC World - Great Downloads: Award-Winning Indie Games

You Rock, man! Thanks!

I attended the Awards Show, and I have to say that it’s the most awesome thing I ever attended in my whole friggin’ life!

Poesysteme was nominated, next to great games like Crayon Physics Deluxe (Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner, go Petri!) and Synaesthete (Student Showcase winner). Having met Petri and the Digipen guys, as well as Nils (the author of Rückblende) and the P.B. Winterbottom crew, I can assure you that they are all great guys and that you should play their games and give them many bags full of money, sweet money. The room was packed with the coolest people of all, and I know Sid Meier, Gabe Newell and Ralph Baer now know my game exists. ROCK ON!

I was planning to do a daily writeup of the GDC but I guess I’ll have to accept the fact that a regular day at the Expo is too taxing. Usually when I get back to my hotel I just want to crash and burn. Cool-headed impressions from the confort of my home it will be, then!

Also, the expo? Sheer. Madness.

Okay, sorry I haven’t been able to pay more attention to this blog, it’s just that I’m putting in a bit of overtime on M.A.Z.E. to compensate the week I’ll be spending at GDC, which is also taking me time to get ready for.

I’m sure GDC will provide me with good stories to tell, and I’m also sure I’ll be unable to update this until I come back.

If you are attending GDC, I’d be glad to meet you! I should be stuck at the IGF Booth during the expo (Wed. to Fri.) to demo Poesysteme, and I think I won’t miss the IGDA party either (Tuesday, I think).

So, until then, then!

As a sort of before-after experiment, I wanted to see if there were going to be significant differences in terms of coverage before and after the GDC for Poesysteme. My hypothesis is YES, but we’ll see.

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Okay, this is getting scary!

I was already going to the GDC, thanks to a previous prize, but now i’ll have the opportunity to show the game in an official way.

Really, I am out of words for this…

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Pendant que nous tenions le stand de l’école aux e-magiciens (jetez d’ailleurs un petit coup d’oeil au palmarès…) Marie Lechner, une sympathique journaliste d‘ecrans.fr est venue tailler la bavette et tester nos jeux.

Voici le résultat.

Sympa non?

In the mailbox today, excellent news! (for me)

Cher Balthazar,

J’ai le plaisir de vous confirmer que vous avez été retenu par le jury du concours SACD - GDC pour partir à la GDC qui a lieu du 18 au 22 février, à San Francisco, Californie, USA.

Tout d’abord, bravo pour votre jeu “Poesysteme” qui a fortement impressionné le jury SACD qui s’est tenu lundi 5 novembre à Paris.

Want to know what it means exactly? More after the jump.

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I’m proud to announce that Poesysteme  is an official IGF 2008 Student Competition Entrant.

No, actually, it’s true! Look here . Neat huh?

But then, look at the competition… Very good games all around! What a blessing/curse!

Oh well, we’ll see on “Monday, December 17th” according to the e-mail.