Spike_the_space_cowboy is our man in Oz this week - reporting from Melbourne: The first day of AGDC opened with keynotes from John Brumby - the Victorian Tresurer. John spent 1 hour telling the assembled AGDC delegates that Melbourne is committed to be the "Hollywood" for game developers in Australia. The official name for this plan was called "Game Plan: The Next Level". This speech ended with the official opening of AGDC 2001.

Bruce Shelley from Ensemble Studios was the first presenter for AGDC. He talked about game design and gave a few hints on how to make a successful game. He drew from his 20 years of game design experience. There were alot of useful hints from Bruce, but none of which could not be found from www.gamasutra.com. The conference re-convened after a short break, with 4 categories of presentations running simultanously in different lecture theatres. The categories were Business Development, General Design, Platform Specific and Art and Development. Bruno Bonnell, CEO of Infogrames, closed todays official presentations with an hour long speech. The highlight of his speech was that Infogrames will be investing 50 million AUD in developing games in Melbourne during the 2002 calender year. His speech was followed by Sony's cocktail party. Everyone loves Sony, especially when beer, alcohol and drinks are free. The highlight of the day was a power failure in Melbourne CBD. Naturally it occured during the many presentations. And predictably, power returned only to fail again, forcing the days last set of presentations to be presented under emergency lights and with hand gestures from the presenters. Alias/Wavefront's presentation had to be cancelled for the day. And I was so looking forward to it!

Networking, networking and more networking summed up the first day of AGDC. I expect tomorrow to be a more interesting day as companies will be showcasing their projects on booths/stalls.