Freakend 2015

The Freakend 2015 took place during the past 6th,7th,8th of March in San Agustín de Guadalix (Madrid, Spain). What's the freakend you might be wondering. It is basically an event where some people from the industry in Spain gather, talk about videogames, drink and eat pizza. Don't let the name confuse you, in spanish the word freak is used instead of geek, so imagine an event called geekend about videogames and there you go.

This has been the 4th one if I am not mistaken and my 2nd one. Also this has been the first year that the Freakend Android was celebrated, but that's another story. After the good experience of the last year I wanted to repeat again. I don't live in Madrid right now and this kind of events allow me to keep in touch with some old friends (it was good to meet arturogdg and chrisghead after all these years and also Diegobez and flipper83) and follow the status of some companies and the games they are doing.

Besides drinking and eating there are a series of very interesting talks along the whole weekend. On this event there were not only programmers, but also game designers, artists, producers, musicians... with such a mix it is hard that every speak was interesting for everyone, but we had the schedule from the beggining, so in case you were not interested in one of them you could always get along with people outside the main room. I actually attended all of them (I couldn't pay too much attention during saturday morning because I was finishing my own one)

In case you missed them, here are some links to the videos on youtube:
- Hernán y Mirella – GamesYouHear

- Rafael Muñoz – Testing automatico en videojuegos

- Javier Cantón – “Como guardar 6 floats en 32bits”

- Gonzalo de Santos – Desarrollo homebrew en nintendo 3DS: (it's-a me!!)

- Nacho Lasheras – Anatomia de GUI:

- Cesar Monterde – Tutoriales:

- Kike – Postmortem de Heart & Slash:

I wanted to talk about the 3ds scene. Because I had already done an introduction here in Seville on February (see my previous post), this time I wanted to talk a bit about the exploit itself. How does some people gain control of a machine that from start has been secured to avoid launching any unsigned program? Also I introduced the current state of the 3DS homebrew scene. Besides the video here are the slides in bot spanish and english

3DS Homebrew (Spanish)
3DS Homebrew (English) 

I'd like to thank again Diegobez who was in charge this year and who did a great job, and flipper83 the creator of the event for insisting me during so many years on attending the event. And for teaching me that just being on a desk doing some stuff is not enought. You need to go out, meet some people, get some feedback, let others know you, etc. The freakend is a perfect opportunity for all this. See you next year!

PS: here are some links to other blogs covering the event (in spanish)
http://visualstudioex3.com/blog/gamedev/eventos/resumen-del-freakend-2015/
http://www.otogami.com/blog/freakend-2015/
http://geeks.ms/blogs/aperez/archive/2015/03/10/evento-freakend-2015.aspx

http://blog.kartones.net/post/Freakend-2015-and-my-Gameboy-Powerpoint-like-ROM