I’m at the 2013 Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. This will be my second year attending the conference (recently, at least) and I’m very much looking forward to the events opening tomorrow.
The Independent Games Festival and Game Developer Choice Awards ceremony is presented tomorrow night and I’m happy to see FTL: Faster Than Light on both the Choice Awards and IGF nominee lists. I hope it wins the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, and at least one of the Choice categories it’s in.
I had a light day today, but on Monday my favorite panel was ‘Obsessive-Compulsive Development: A Postmortem of the Development of Retro/Grade’ with Matt Gilgenbach from 24 Caret Games. When I began developing last year I was determined to have fun and maintain a healthy balance with my day job and personal life. This presentation was a reminder of the consequences of not doing this, and reminders are good in this respect.
I also enjoyed a Kickstarter statistics panel by Thomas Bidaux. He presented the numbers well — video games enjoy a 30% project success rate — but I felt he didn’t emphasize that some projects should fail and the importance of asking for a realistic amount needed to both produce the project and keep the developers happy. For example, it’s easy to succeed if the amount asked is too low (ex $1), and I think ‘winning’ at Kickstarter shouldn’t be the first goal of the campaign design, it should be the project itself.