Time will tell whether my Restaurant Game project will be a success from a technical standpoint, but it appears the concept itself has some critics. I entered GameCareerGuide.com's Restaurant Game Design Challenge, and lost. Not even an honorable mention! Geez -- what's a guy gotta do?!
(Thanks to Ben Sawyer for alerting me to this competition).
[Forwarded from an e-mail from an AIIDE organizer:]
AIIDE '09 is a great opportunity to share your game AI triumphs and tribulations with a mixed audience of industry folks and academic researchers. Once again this year, individuals with game industry experience to share can propose an AIIDE presentation in the form of a brief abstract; a full length paper is not required.
Unlike GDC and similar conferences, AIIDE is attended not only by industry people but by a large contingent of academic AI experts with a strong interest in game AI. Professors and students attend AIIDE in order to learn what is going on in the world of game industry AI programming in the hopes of making their research more relevant and genuinely useful to game programmers. In return, the academic audience offers the industry programmer a broad and detailed knowledge of the latest developments in academic AI. They are potential collaborators in the near term and valuable contacts long term should your future career path take you into academia yourself as a graduate student or instructor.
Please consider proposing an AIIDE presentation! Case studies of recent industry projects, new techniques you have helped pioneer, or talks describing critical issues stemming from technical constraints or game design challenges are all welcome (as are any related topics which come to mind, of course!)
[See http://www.aiide2009.org/ for details -- PT]
It looks like our engineering skills will soon be rendered obsolete ...
I for one welcome our new talking parrot overlords.