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Sorry for the delay everyone I’ve been totally slacking off but I’m going to try and get all of these summaries of the sessions from the Austin Indie Game Conference written up quickly for you. Also if there are any errors in here I apologize and blame my memory giving out over the holidays

On Thursday morning the Gamecock heads were supposed to give a keynote but they couldn’t make it and VP Steve Escalante gave the presentation instead. Gamasutra already has a great write up on this keynote so I’ll just direct you there and give you my thoughts that may complement theirs.

Gamecocks Thursday Keynote

Steve says you must make sure that you are ready to do game development. Also you have to think about the other teams that you’re competing against to win those publisher dollars. Right now the opportunity to create original intellectual property and be successful with it is greater than ever as consumers are getting tired of the crappily done movie licenses and rehashed sequels, lots of players want fresh new games. Furthermore the digital space removes a lot of the barriers to entry that used to exist, with digital distribution a game can become successful even without breaking into the major retail channels. They feel that digital distribution portals like steam can sell 25% as much as retail which could turn a nice profit when you consider the portion of the game price that the retailer takes and the manufacturing cost of packaging materials.

The Gamecock group doesn’t believe that the giant budgets that exist now for major games are needed. By working smarter a game of equal quality can be created for a fraction of the cost. Included in this is outsourcing of some of the development work which lowers the budget and makes it more presentable. On the upper end Gears of War launched for $10 million so any more that that is certainly not necessary.

Steve also gave an example of the sorts of projects Gamecock is working with. He mentions that Dementium Ward for the Nintendo DS was made by 3 guys in only a few months and it went on to get very good reviews. They are also publishing Pirates Vs Ninjas for the Xbox Live Arcade which is being made by 3 guys and costs less than million to make.

The keynote also gave some great tips for people trying to get in with a publisher (or at least if you want to be published by Gamecock as they’re a bit different than most publishers). First you want to consider does your game appeal to a majority of gamers and can thus compete in the market. Also do you think your game will sell well enough to be in the top 20% of games that generate 80% of revenues. Another important thing is a good vertical slice (a playable demo) that you can show the publisher when you talk to them to help them get excited, this isn’t necessary always but can help tremendously. He also mentioned, however, that you should be looking to make the game you want to make and not the one you think will make the most money. Furthermore you should consider monetization methods during predevelopment if you plan on doing something fancy like ad supported gameplay or micropayments since revenue models can be extremely hard to switch near or after game launch if it turns out they won’t work.

Last week the Independent Game Conference was held in Austin, Texas. Last year I attended the same event and was able to get a lot out of some of the sessions so since I’m in Austin I made sure to attend the event this year as well. Once again several of the sessions were very informative and over the next week or so I’ll be transcribing my notes about them.

Sessions were held in two tracks, business and technology. I attended sessions of both tracks and will write my impressions on them soon. There was also a very interesting keynote by Richard Garriott on game design and research. The coolest part of the conference, however, was the game festival night where attendees can show off the games they’ve worked on and everyone can check it out. I was helping show Starport but I also checked out lots of cool games which I’ll probably be talking about here as well.

I attended the event last year as well, before I started this site, and I believe somewhere I have my notes from then so I’ll try to find them and write about some of those sessions as well because there were also some very good sessions last year. So stay tuned in the coming week or two I’ll post about the talks that were given and some of the games shown, I’ll update this post with links to them as I write them as well.

Mike McShaffry a game industry vet has started a new blog to discuss things he’s learned through the years in the industry. Not much there to see yet but he does have one particular article on pitching your game that is very good. It details all the steps needed in a successful pitch and what questions and materials you need to be prepared with. It’s mainly focused on AAA games looking for 7 figure budgets but any indie who ever has to do a pitch for various reasons, whether getting some funding or finding a publisher, would do well to read it.

Matt Sakey has written a great article for the IGDA on the use of Lean methodologies for game development.

“Waste” in development could be rework, unused assets, reversed design decisions, creative clashes, you name it. Largely it would be the product of poor planning, which, I’m sorry to say, does lead right back to the “business needs more proven process models” argument.

Lean methodologies are used in production industries to reduce waste in the process and ultimately make better products for cheaper. I think this is a vitally important concept for indie game developers operating on small budgets and this article is certainly worth a read.