Last Friday the loose rabble that is the UK indie game dev scene had something new; its own conference for developers. It was setup by the chaps at Pixel Lab with help from Channel 4 and a few others and let a group of about 80 indie developers and related allsorts talk at each other and socialise a bit. It being held in the UK, the day went something like this:
There was probably two loose overall themes arising from the day across a range of the speakers:
- Can I make indie games and make enough to live on? How is that done?
- Making games can fun, can take a lot less time than you think and anyone can do it.
There were also a couple of interesting, counter to the prevailing wind, moments that stuck out for me:
- Indie games shouldn’t look so nostalgic so often. There is room for visual innovation as well as gameplay innovation.
- You should build as much of your game as possible to get better at making games. The best film makers built their own cameras so indies should become overly reliant on 3rd party, do-it-all game engines, like Unity or Unreal.
It was great to see so many people interested in and passionate about indie games and why they wanted to be indie. I really hope that the UK indie community can build on an event like this and have more interesting things like it in the future.
Other people’s write ups (I’ll add more if I find them):
Robotic Shed 
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