The first day of SXSW is now behind us (The FUHA crew). We considered doing a lot of things today and didn’t get even half of it done. We woke up to bad weather that got worse on our arrival at the Austin Convention Center. It was only due to our limited foresight to pack umbrellas (with the unfortunate exception of producer Jairo Razo) that we didn’t spend the early afternoon in wet misery.

However, there were a few things that I could’ve gone without that I took back to the car. Among those objects were a copy of Moby Dick I’m supposed to read over Spring Break, my laptop charger, a bike lock, and a magazine (just in case I got bored). That may not seem like much to lighten one’s load, but the psychological effect of their absence convinced me that I could manage with what remained in the backpack (laptop, notebook, folder, pens, trail mix provided by my spectacular girlfriend, and a microphone). Towards the end of the day though that started to seem pretty excessive, considering I’d only taken out the laptop twice to update the FUHA Facebook page.

I digress though, so onto how SXSW is so far. The activity at the Austin Convention Center was fantastic. Most everyone was nice despite the congestion (I was reassured by one rude fellow attendee that it would not always be the case). Registration went by much more quickly than I thought it would and we almost lost Jairo along the way.

Then what should have been non-stop panels got cut short by our great enemy, food. We stopped at a pizzeria for a slice and then made our way over to the Palm Center for SXSW Screenburn Arcade. Although not a large game developer expo the exhibitors there were really great about showing us their latest work. The folks from Drawastickman.com amused us with their HTML5 game that allows you to draw a stickman hero and a vast array of equipment for him to conquer obstacles. Once we were through there we headed behind the Palm Center to the Lawndale Center’s Canon Screening Room for Indie Game: The Movie. As we exited what was an excellent documentary (review up tomorrow) we realized how exhausted we were and decided to call it a wrap on Day 1. We’ll give it a better go tomorrow so stay tuned for that and remember that our Youtube Channel FUHAvision will be providing coverage of the entire conference.

—Andre Habet, FUHA’s nice guy extraordinaire

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