Disc Drivin’. You push discs around a track, and it’s awesome. I’m starting a little round robin tournament. Check the details.

Leading the way in indie awesomeness, Noel Llopis – @snappytouch – has rounded up a group of developers (including yours truly) to sponsor the 360iDev Game Jam in Austin next week. We’ve been talking a lot about how to take it up a notch. There was a lot of interest expressed, so we decided it was important to open it up to developers around the world, not just 360iDev conference attendees.

I’m working on a website (full site coming soon) for the game jam that will allow anyone who wants to participate in the game jam to post their progress and get seen, as well as comment on and support other devs as it all goes down. When the site goes live you’ll be able to register for an account and create a post for your project for all the world to see.

If you need some inspiration, or just want to get psyched, check out these posts:

• 7 simple but proven game mechanics to prepare you for the 360idev Game Jam by @36peas
• Game Idea Generator by @OwenGoss

Here’s the rest of the awesome sponsors:

I’ve said it many times before, my trip to 360iDev in April was a catalyst for an explosion of game dev activity for We Heart Games. Previously I was a lone game designer, hiring programmers to make my iPhone game. I got invited to speak about the process I used to make the game at 360iDev. Let’s break down the things that have happened since then:

• I got to meet and build tangible relationships with a boatload of awesome devs (Twitter is great, but nothing beats meeting people in person). 360iDev has a unique atmosphere of friendliness and approachability.
• I got to rock the game jam with 360iDev mini-superstar Owen Goss, to make a prototype of Atomz in 7.5 hours.
  
• I helped Owen out with his LandFormer icon. (Go get it, it’s free to try) This icon was also featured on the cover of this month’s MacWorld magazine! Woo!
  
• Dan Byers of Manic Gaming liked the work I did on Atomz and asked if I’d be interested in doing the graphics to finish his own game jam prototype and get it ready for launch. Star Fighter X2 for iPad hit the App Store August 31st. I did all the graphics for the game (except the asteroids) and made their website as well. Here’s my original post with some of the graphics I made, as well as a cool time-lapse video showing the making of the 3d ship model.
  
• Tom Hoag of Cluebucket also noticed the game jam art, and asked me to help him out with some themes for his iPad game, Short Path.
  
• Ken Carpenter of Mind Juice Media asked me to take some Charmed vector graphics and turn them into nice high res 3d models that could be animated (image links to a QT video).
  
• Matt Martel of Mundue asked me to do a couple of themes for reMovem 2, and there are 3 more in the pipeline.
  
• I’ve helped Kirby Turner of White Peak with an update to Labor Mate, and have some new themes for Hey Peanut coming.
• I’m now working on a proposal for another project that would involve making art for an entire game, but I can’t talk about it yet. But if you go to 360iDev in Austin, you might catch a glimpse of it!

In related news, I was also approached by Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch to submit artwork for Casey’s Contraptions, but the timing didn’t work out for me — and Miguel’s stuff just plain looked better! I’ve also go an “on the side” project of my own going (slowly, as on-the-side projects go), with another dev that I met at 360iDev.

And as they say, work leads to more work. In the coming months I expect I’ll be shifting more and more of my attention away from web and print design and towards game design. And that feels pretty fantastic.

I can say with absolute certainty that none of these things would have happened if I hadn’t gone to 360iDev. These are all people I met at the conference for the first time. If you’re on the fence about going, and you’re able to, you should really go. It’s well worth it.

UPDATE: Don’t just take my word for it. Noel (SnappyTouch, Flower Garden) and Rod (cocos2d Book, Payload) have since posted on this very same topic.

Note: I just saw in Twitter that you can get 15% off using @mmartel’s discount code: martelRocks. Thanks Kirby! Check out the schedule and register on their site: 360idev.com

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with 360 Conferences in any way; I get no compensation for writing a post like this, and nobody asked me to write it. Unfortunately I’m unable to make it to Austin, but I’m hoping to do another one next year.

We ♥ Shirts! I’ve opened up a t-shirt shop with three designs; more are coming. Click the image to get your shop on.

Make these faces for the camera: “An evil genius hatching a plot”, “Swallowing a goldfish”, “Looking directly at the sun”, “Pretending to like a gift you don’t like”, and “Holding a bomb”. Then a friend makes the same faces, and everyone else in the room votes on which ones are the funniest! Includes over 1,000 unexpected and hilarious expressions.

You can download it on iTunes here.