iFest took place over the weekend right here in Melbourne, and although we didn’t have a Game Beholder team there per se, I was able to attend with our awesome team, Raptus Games.
Many of Melbourne’s best indie developers attended, and that real sense of developer camaraderie permeated the day. Developers had a chat to each other about games, throwing critique and constructive comments to each other’s work, and the public were able to come in from the street to try out some of Melbourne’s best indie work for free.
Hosted by local educational institution AIE, the day actually boasted a pretty amazing line up of speakers, including EA’s founder Trip Hawkins, various developers and marketing strategists and developers and the public were able to catch Micro Forte and AIE founder John De Margheriti wondering around the exhibition talking to the crowd.
It was a great chance for people to get involved in the local indie scene, and a fantastic encouragement for people to learn how to get into indie game development.
Highlights:
Raptus Games
Kumobius
Millipede Creative
The AIE incubator teams
Soundplay Interactive
Wanderlands
(sorry for the other great indie devs that were there!)
Speaker Highlights:
While the address by Trip Hawkins was quite interesting and it’s always a great way to learn from someone so successful in the industry, I think he didn’t understand the situation many indie developers were at. His approach to monetizing your game unfortunately fell onto deaf ears for the most part, with many developers still in the production phase of their work while also being restricted by the tight budgets that come with indie development.
Andrew Goulding presented to us a very frank and honest revelation in his journey through the creation of “Jolly Rover” and his experience in distributing the game across many different platforms. He gave attendees his great opinion on Steam and how helpful they were in publishing, as opposed to other sale platforms.
Brawsome Website
The successful marketing agency for indie developers, Surprise Attack (Chris Wright and Christina Chen) presented a riveting speech on some basic marketing trends on the App Store for iOS developers, with the key message being that you have to have a “free-to-play” business model to really compete with the big fish.
Surprise Attack website
Not a huge follow up on the event, and for that we’re sorry! But hopefully you’ll get an idea of the amazing events we have in place to support independent game developers here in Melbourne and come down to see what they are capable of!
- Editor
