I just got back from Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, CA.  Overall I felt like it was a great conference, lots of interesting little tidbits coming from interesting places.

There are a few things that I really took away from the conference:

+  There are a lot of social network games based in Flash.  Usually this is a no-brainer but this year it was really obvious, tonnes of people from Facebook-integrated companies.  Crazy.

+  Developers are still way awesome.  I met a lot of developers at the conference and they are great people.  Flash developers are really special.  And it’s interesting finally meeting someone you’ve been interacting with for years but never had a chance to speak to in-person.  They make great games but they are even greater people, so thumbs up.

+  Regardless of the incredible volume of Flash Games being produced, people are still innovating and doing amazing things in Flash.  Watching Sean Cooper’s Boxhead demo with 500 zombies and full framerate on screen was something special.

+  I find it refreshing to hear stories of developers pushing themselves through failure and persisting to get an amazing game out that does successfully for them.  We all have failures in game design and production, but people openly discussing how they approached their problems is really enlightening.  Tim Fowers, author of Now Boarding, created an amazing distribution model by offering a free copy of the game to anyone who could get a friend to buy a copy.  Obviously, friends would tell all their friends and suddenly hundreds of eyes had access to the game… simple things like that are crazy smart.

+  FGS had great talks from game developers, but there was still a lot of talk about money.  This year was definitely better given the talks from several developers and new panelists, and I applaud Mochi for the improvement over last year.  That said, we still have a few remaining holes in the art, sound, and game design panels.  Some of these topics were covered briefly in single-developer presentations (which were really neat) but I would love there to be more multi-dev panels on approaches to game development and what developers do during the game development process.  The two track (development/distribution and financials) conference model really helped this year though, I’m glad that happened.

Overall, fun 24 hours.  Also, pictures soon to follow.  Thanks to Tass, Dan, Joey, Greg, Alison, Con, Jared and HI, Mike, Emily, Nick, Tyler and all the other awesome cool people I had time to talk to, you guys are neat.