YEAR 3 - BA3b - EGX Rezzed, UKIE Conference

I went to EGX Rezzed and The UKIE Student conference recently, saw some talks and spoke to some developers. In fact I spent almost the whole day at EGX just chatting to other developers and exchanging contact info.

One developer specifically that I spoke to; the Artist for upcoming mobile game, Inops, which has a similar silhouetted ground style to my game. I spoke to him about how he uses a screenshot of the level as a template to draw over in photoshop to create the details in the ground rather than what I've been doing which is to place tiny tiles of pixels on top of my geometry. It's a technique I'm going to seriously consider as the multiple tiles does slow the game down a bit.

I also spoke to Alex Johansson, who was working 'Vaccination', a co-op game where one player has to use a physical wooden syringe to poke drugs into an infected person whilst another person tells them where to poke. We talked about getting yourself known in the industry and starting out part time until you make enough money to go full time.

At UKIE, the three talks that stood out to me the most were:
- Jess Hiders talk about marketing. The main points I took away from it were to regularly post on twitter, which is something I try to do and intend to do more. Use hashtags related to the field #gamedev # indiedev (but not too many) and about what to include on business cards, Name, Twitter, Job Role, linkedin, email, website. I intend to make some sometime soon once the theme of my game is set.

- Fabien Vercuiel's talk about UI/UX design. The main takeaway was that you have to be both technical and creative as UI designers often do a lot of programming and effects too. I should get good at working in a range of styles and making icons. He also told me afterwards about what fonts might be good for my game. He also critiqued my UI and pretty much confirmed that I should switch to diegetic UI.

- Luke Williams' talk about game design. I like his design pipeline. He says to find the most fun thing about the game as soon as possible and to create the game around that core fun thing, which is a philosophy I've been trying to stick to since watching Tom Francis' videos a few years ago. Luke Williams also goes on to say however that difficulty is good because it insensitivises attempts at mastery but it's important that despite this, the game is still silly and enjoyable regardless of skill to draw in new players. This got me thinking about my current game and how I might need to rework some things to make it easier for new players to not kill themselves as my game is currently quite difficult already.