A quick trip to the Waterford Institute of Technology
Waterford, Ireland
Karl Sandison at the Waterford Institute of Technology got in touch about a workshop and some consulting, and fortunately I was able to squeeze in a one-day visit between Animex and going off to Skövde, Sweden to teach for a week. It was my first visit to Waterford since I went as a tourist back in 1999. There wasn't time to be a tourist this time around, because I only had a single day there and went back to England the same evening, but I did give a lecture, a short game design workshop, and did a little consulting with the faculty about their curriculum. I got a chance to chat with some of the students about their game development projects, and I was quite impressed with the thoroughness and professionalism of their work. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to come back someday.
Animex again -- plus the Darlington Railway Museum!
Middlesbrough, England
How could you not love a conference that puts you up in an incredibly posh hotel and gives you a driver to go wherever you want? I gave the opening keynote at Animex Game, the first two days of the week-long Animex Festival. My lecture was "A New Vision for Interactive Stories," which went over well. I also gave a half-day game design workshop to a very well-prepared and attentive crowd of students. Evenings were spent having dinner with various game developers, and I was delighted to make the acquaintance of Thomas Arundel of Introversion Software (
Defcon and
Darwinia), and Philip Co from Valve, who was mobbed by students everywhere he went. My thanks, as ever, go to Gabby Kent for inviting me. Animex is a huge amount of work for her every year, and she takes great care of all the speakers.
I also had an extra day there, which I used to visit the
railroad museum at nearby Darlington. This area of Britain is rich in railroad history, as the first-ever passenger-carrying train operated here in 1825. I looked around the museum for a while and got to stand in the cabs of a couple of locomotives. One of them was ordinarily closed to the public, but once the staff knew I was genuinely interested, they were happy to let me go behind the scenes. After that I wandered over to the workshop where a brand-new steam locomotive, the Tornado, is
being built to an old design. People were welding and machining and hoisting and generally doing all sorts of cool stuff with machinery that I wish I knew how to do. I was completely free to wander around, ask questions of the engineers, and take all the pictures I wanted. In the shot below you can see one of the engineers installing a shaft into the frame of the locomotive. The boiler, which is not yet installed, is visible behind him at the left edge of the frame.
Why build a steam locomotive in 2007? If you have to ask, you're not going to get it.
