I'm back this week from an incredible time at Develop Conference 2012 in Brighton, where I was speaking last Thursday. While the weather didn't exactly hold up there was plenty of warmth from the games industry community and I made a lot of new friends from all sides of the industry.
Particular stand-out talks included Brian Baglow's closing talk from the Indie Marketing Day, highlighting what indie developers should be doing to promote their games but aren't. This earlier talk from him, along similar lines, is a must watch if you weren't there! I was also thoroughly impressed by Fat Pebble's unique plasticene design shown in their talk about their upcoming game Clay Jam, and the creativity and ambition shown by FuturLab in their press and media operations.
Marketing and PR was a key issue on the Indie track this year, and with good reason. It's the hardest part of an indie's operations, in my opinion, and certainly something I've put a lot of time and effort into. So to see such inspiring and thought-provoking discussion was extremely valuable. Other highlights included Benni Hill's talk about running White Paper Games, and Rob Davis (Playniac)'s talk on how they followed up the launch of International Racing Squirrels for Channel 4 - all very insighful.
My own talk went down very well indeed. Several delegates commented that they found it inspiring and useful - something that I am, to be perfectly honest, chuffed to bits about! I plan to produce a video based on my talk on Indie Exposure, but do take a look at my blog series if it's a subject you would like to know more about.
Finally, I made some fantastic new connections and was glad to meet up with games journalists, other indie studios, and many more fascinating faces from the industry. I'd definitely recommend going to the next one, event for the networking alone. Develop Liverpool will be in November this year, and the conference will return to Brighton next summer. I hope to see you there!
The slides from my talk can be downloaded from here
