Utah Indie Games Night - April 2017

We had another wonderful Utah Indie Games Night this past Thursday Night. This time it was held at Broadview University. They are a new host for our event, but they've been our local host for the Global Games Jam for many years, so we felt right at home. We had just under 30 people there so it was an average attended event, but it went much longer than normal, so there was certainly a lot of excitement and conversation going on.

We started the event with a presentation from the Deli Interactive guys, Nick Lives and Jordan Farr who gave and awesome postmortem for their successful game "We Need to Go Deeper". It was Farr and away a Lively discussion about some of the things they tried and whether that was successful for them or not. 😉 They mentioned their game started out as an overly complex B-movie themed robot game, but it quickly evolved to the multiplayer submarine game it is now. They mentioned the Jules Verne theme has been a big plus for them in it's appeal and in describing the game to others. They also had to switch engines from GameMaker to Unity as they soon discovered that GameMaker's networking code wasn't cutting the mustard. Unfortunately this added years of extra time to the development of the game. One of the big take aways from their presentation was to make connections everywhere you can during the development of the game, from YouTubers, to dev contacts, as you never know how those contacts can help push your game further, but those doors can open and help you move your game towards success. Also those connections can help foster and build a community around your game, so by the time you launch your game you have some built-in fans that will help push your game for you. Another takeaway they mentioned is to not take yourself too seriously, both with your engagement with your community and your normal development. Games are meant to be fun, both to make and play, so keep it that way. Lastly, they mentioned that release day is not a party day. You make likely have bugs that come to light once people start playing your game a lot. They had a ton of things they had to fix that first week, so be prepared for the floodgates upon release.

You can view their presentation slides here.
You can watch their presentation here.

After the presentation we had our demos. I didn't get a chance to play anyone's games (except for one) this time as I was busy demoing my own VR game, Lord of Fire & Ice. The one game I played was a bullet hell prototype on a mobile phone by Chris. The touch controls worked very well and should also work well with a game pad controller. The other games that I'm aware of that were show are "Summoners Fate", "Toad on Fire", "Crashnaughts", and "Synthesis". I probably missed some others though. As for my own game, I got some good feedback on it, and be making some appropriate changes. Also I will be adding a gesture system to it, to add some more variety as well as give you that feeling that "you're a wizard or an element bender like in Avatar".

As usual there was so much going on that it was hard to be a part of it all. I'm grateful for everyone that came and made the evening awesome!

Viva la Indie!

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