Back home from work at 23:30 (that’s 11:30pm for you americans)… hm, yeah, it must be that time of the year. I’m not travelling to E3 this time, and I can’t say that I’m terribly sad about that. I mean, it’s always cool to get some hands-on experience with new stuff, and see old friends sweating behind closed doors in the epic fight against sensory overload. But the media coverage for E3 has grown so comprehensive, that I would expect to come back and the people here had seen things I hadn’t even heard of on the showfloor. This year Microsoft will kindly provide even more material via XBox Live! Doesn’t get more convenient than that.

For developers, during the weeks leading to E3, it always becomes tough to balance keeping your steady progress in the internals of gameplay, logic, optimizations, etc. with the need for including as much flashy, memorable and NOISY stuff, as well the appearance of polish wherever your project is still underdeveloped. But making the effort to work to those details is worth it if you have a reasonable plan that took the event into account. It’s never perfect, and the aftermath of wrapping up an E3 demo is usually filled with unwinding pieces of code and content that you hacked during the last days.

So, to any colleagues burning the midnight oil these days, best of luck and have a great show!