Develop’s completed, its end credits being the Gameindustry.biz party, a chance for the game industry to drink away Eurogamer’s millions. Writing for the site certainly doesn’t get you anywhere near them…

That’s a picture of me, Jamil Moledina (Mr GDC) and Ste Curran towards the, er, end of the evening. The photographer asked us to look like we were having a fun time.

That is how we look when we’re having a fun time.

Highlights of the event included Jonathan Blow, developer of next week’s gentle, thoughtful Xbox Live Arcade release, Braid, complaining to us about how eye gouging is banned in Ultimate Fighting Championship; having a tipsy Nate Wells (2K’s art director and the designer of the Bioshock Big Daddy) request I ‘take out’ Ken Levine (something to do with aiding Nate’s career progression), and of course sharing a hotel room with David McCarthy. Violence seemed to be the week’s theme, one way or another.

Lowlights included losing to Eurogamer (read, obsessive compulsive arcade game release date-remeberer Kristan Reed, without whom their collective would have certainly lost) in the Guardian Games Quiz; missing out on an early morning swim around Brighton’s ruined pier with Charles Cecil and forgetting what the tethered girl in Donkey Kong was called (Pauline, obv).

Develop’s a great event, with a lovely atmosphere and a good range of different, insightful and interesting talks. Some of the sessions I was writing up have already gone live on Gamasutra, so take a look at what was being said if you’re interested:

Jonathan Blow on when game mechanics and game stories clash

Sony Japan partner Tatsuya Suzuki on How Sony Turned Science Into Games With Echochrome

Little Big Planet’s Alex Evans The Power Of Constraints

The boisterous and entertaining Paul Barnett on his Lessons Learned From Warhammer Online.

My talk with Ste went well, although it was at least 15 minutes too long. Our notes, which we wrote out in full, came in a just over 12, 000 words, so we were probably trying to cover too much ground. That said, if asked to do it again, it’ll be a case of choosing what to cut out rather than rewriting anything, which is a good thing.

We addressed the session, entitled ‘Secrets, Exclusives and Lies’, primarily to developers, explaining to them the process that their games go through from first announcement to review score in the press and offering advice on how they can help to make the story about their game a good and interesting one.

In the end though, at least half of the audience was comprised of journalists, presumably wanting to check our workings, so that emphasis was maybe a little off.

As David McCarthy said to me later that night, there are about 20 people in the world who would have had a complete nerd-out had they attended the talk: no less than five generations of Edge staff were represented in the audience so, for fans of the magazine, it was something of an alumni event.

Anyway, I had a really nice time and got to spend time catching up with old friends and making lots of new ones. The most interesting things about games are rarely the games themselves but rather the people and the stories that surround them and grow from them.

The past two days were all about stories: how games are made and how they go on to find glory or disaster; where they come from and where they are headed; what they say about humans and what they say to humans.

Our talk ended with a quotation sent in from (and I’m sure he won’t mind me attributing here, because it’s awesome), PC Gamer’s Tim Edwards. It sums up what Develop was about for me:

“Stop thinking that the review is the be all and end all of videogame writing. It’s not. There is more for us to write about. About games and what they mean. About the people who make them. About how games make us feel, about how they might improve, about how we grew up with them, and how our kids are growing up with them now. They’re incredible slices of pure pleasure, and all we talk about is what score they get/will get. Developers that understand this, and can provide us with quotes/copy/ideas that we can get excited about are gods, frankly.”

Indeed.