happyponyland.net ∋ IRDC 2011

Ruin in Visby Space Invader in Visby

On April 29th - May 2nd, 2011, I went to Visby (on Gotland, the largest island in Sweden) with some friends for the annual (well, somewhat) International Roguelike Developers Conference. Most of us met up on a friday at the central station in Stockholm, had lunch, then travelled by ferry to Gotland (unfortunately on two separate ferries).

The actual conference started on saturday. We had two days full of talk about roguelikes and games in general, some in-depth analysis of selected 7DRLs, sightseeing, good food, a couple of Munchkin games, lots of fun.

IRDC 2011 group photo
Developers in attendance: Ido Yehieli, Jeff Lait, Tom Ford, Jimmy Åberg, Filip Dreger, Ulf Åström (me). Also present were a couple of people from the university that came to listen, let's hope they found it interesting.

Tom Ford giving presentation
Tom discussing design problems for handheld devices; control models, resolution, saving/restoring, etc.

Ido giving presentation
Ido demonstrating Detribus, a collaborative 7DRL.

Jeff and Jakob at a restaurant
Jeff and Jakob Berglund, our host at Gotland University. Many thanks to Jakob for letting us have the conference there. Note: Jeffs watch is actually capable of running a roguelike, controlled with morse code. (seriously, WTF?)

Roguedevs
Going for a walk around the old city wall. Also included: my finger.

Munchkin game in progress
Playing some munchkin on the ferry. If you've never played Munchkin, this quote sums up the spirit of the game:

Jimmy: Will you help me defeat this monster?
Ido: No, I don't want to help you.
Jimmy: I'll curse you if you don't help me!

The regular Visby

Outside the city wall, Visby looks like... just any other Swedish town.