Develop Conference: Brighton

Posted by on Jul 13, 2012 in News | No Comments

Develop Conference HeaderGreenfly Studios hit Brighton this week to attend the annual Develop Conference, hosted at the Hilton. Following a highly eventful train trip (the train hit a cow, how often does THAT happen!), it was off to the seaside for the legendary fish and chips, ice-cream and the pier.

Heading into the event, the Develop Conference had been clearly increasing their focus on indie developers with the return of the Indie Dev Day and preceded by an additional half-day event focused on press and marketing. Brian Baglow’s closing presentation on ‘Indie PR’ and actively promoting your games clearly resonated within the room making it the standout talk of the conference for the indie delegates. If you weren’t fortunate enough to be there, an earlier talk is available online.

Another strongly received presentation came from James Marsden with a rundown of how FuturLab sought to use alternate, and very clever, means of marketing their games. The idea of issuing out several different wallpapers to individual gaming websites and upon collecting all 16 backgrounds, the combined image would indicate Velocity’s launch date is a stroke of genius. The use of empathy within trailers is another route FuturLab took with the ‘One More Time!’ video that clearly shows just how addicting Coconut Dodge is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4wDwD9fyO0

Of course, the Develop Conference is so much more than just the conference, it is also a chance to network with the UK’s finest developers (as well as a few Americans). We were invited to the UKIE sponsored showing of Indie Game: The Movie, the Indie Meetup, an event that saw over 150 indie developers packed into a small pub on the seafront, and Simon Roth’s traditional birthday shin-ding. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with our fellow GameDevNorth organisers as well as making lots of new connections with journalists, triple AAA and indie developers.

Although we didn’t arrange any talks for Brighton, we will be speaking at Develop Conference: Liverpool later on this year (November) as well as attending the bi-monthly GameDevNorth where we’ll be arranging the upcoming 48hr game jam sponsored by Unity.