How do you find the right publisher for your game? And how do you prepare a pitch that will convince them to work with you?
In this talk, Sonali will outline everything you need to prepare for a successful pitch, share insights on the key metrics publishers look for, and give you details on the materials and prototype you’ll want to present.
Indie games are rarely funded from a single source. By the end of a project, you will likely have funding from over 4-5 different places.
What are these different funding sources? How do they differ? And when you have to consider upwards of five different funding sources, how do you build a funding strategy?
This talk will outline where money can come from, what to consider when building a strategy, and when in the timeline of your project you should be going for different kinds of funding.
One thing that there’s been no shortage of is advice! Thanks to the kindness of the games community; so many professionals have been sharing their wisdom but how do you translate advice into action?
This talk features advice that I got from publishers, platform holders, investors and other developers and how I was able to translate that advice into my pitch deck. By using data that you can easily find, experience from other developers and even working in some creativity there’s many ways that you can adapt your pitch for whomever your audience is (even if they’ve pivoted their strategy)
It often gets said its not what you know but who you know. However it’s a lot easier to know people if you’re in the same place. You can easily get through the cracks; get those in person intros, grab that last minute uber seat to an exclusive party. But how do you sit next to the publisher of your dreams if there are no dinners? How do you meet new people? This talk goes through the ways of meeting new people online.
Finally there’ll also be talk on the ways in which you can put together a budget and how to account for a pandemic. There will of course be numerous resources pointed out throughout this talk as well as advice from professional producers and this talk will focus on how to get that advice into action.
An introduction to venture capital funding for the interactive entertainment industry.
It will address how VC funding works, which types of companies it typically works for, and what VCs look for in potential investments.
This panel will feature the heads of the Federal and State Screen/Industry Agencies to discuss their game vision for 2021 and beyond.
Panel:
Ron Curry, Moderator, CEO of IGEA
Caroline Pitcher, CEO of Film Victoria
Kate Croser, CEO at South Australian Film Corporation
Alex Sangston, Executive Manager of Screen Tasmania
Willie Rowe, CEO of Screenwest
Monica Penders, CEO of Screen Canberra
Kylie Munnich, CEO of Screen Queensland
Dr Christen Cornell, Research Fellow and Manager of Research Partnerships at the Australia Council for the Arts
Join this panel of experienced industry veterans as they discuss what goes into building the best pitch for your game, whether it be for grant applications, publishers or funding bodies.
Jens Schroeder:
Jens works as IGEA's Director of Industry and Member Relations.
He joined IGEA in 2019 after working as a lecturer for game design, manager of the SAE Sydney campus, Head of Academic Studies for Digital Media at Laureate Australia as well as Associate Dean (Design Vertical) for Torrens University.
Combining his experience in games, business, academia, management and leadership, Jens is responsible for representing and growing the IGEA’s development members by providing them a voice to government and industry, act as the interface between the Australian video game development industry and IGEA and work close with state, territory and commonwealth departments and agencies to the benefit of the industry.
Jens is also active in the development space; he is involved in a gamification project that aims to engage students of low socioeconomic status with tertiary education.
Liam Routt:
Liam Routt is the Manager of the Games programs at Film Victoria. He came to the agency after working in technical, design and production roles at large and small games companies in Victoria both before and after the GFC. At the funding agency, and in all things, Liam is driven to help others to achieve their goals.
While he is proud of the games which have been created in the state during his time at Film Victoria, it is the conversations they have with prospective applicants, whether experienced or new to the industry, that motivate him from week to week.
Meredith Hall:
Currently working at Film Victoria, Meredith supports the games industry locally and internationally, working on strategy, forward-planning, research, growth areas and more through programs and direct engagement with the sector.
She is an experienced marketer, producer and business developer. Meredith is the cofounder of Accessibility Unlocked, Communications Director & Lead Producer on HoloVista and a frequent public speaker and advocate. She was named one of 50 under 50 in InGames 2019 Gender Equality in Games list.
Jon Cartwright:
Jon Cartwright started making games back in the UK in the 80’s, getting titles published while he was still at school.
He’s worked for Big Red Software, Eidos plc and Blitz Games making titles for MGM, Fox Studios, Warner Bros., Nickelodeon, THQ, and SCi.
Jon moved to Brisbane in 2004 and joined THQ Studio Australia as Director of Production, managing IP and titles with Dreamworks, Games Workshop, Nickelodeon, and M Night Shymalan.
He has run R&D for technology outside the games industry and worked KIXEYE Australia in the free to play space, making MMORTS VEGA Conflict.
More recently Jon worked as Commercial Director at Prideful Sloth, helping them launch Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles initially on PS4 and PC, and followed by Switch and Xbox, and negotiated publishing deals in Japan, Korea, and China, along with full retail releases for PS4 and Switch in the US, Europe, and ANZ regions.
After securing a new publishing deal for Prideful Sloth at the beginning of 2019 Jon has been working independently, consulting with a number of clients helping them budget, schedule, pitch and close publishing and distribution for their indie games.
Liam Esler:
Liam Esler is an experienced games entrepreneur, writer, and producer from Melbourne Australia. He has worked as a producer and writer with some of the biggest brands in gaming, including Beamdog, Obsidian Entertainment, PikPok, Surprise Attack Games, and many others.
In addition to game development, Liam worked at the Game Developers’ Association of Australia for 3 years running Australia’s premiere games conference, GCAP, and was co-founder of GX Australia, a diversity-focused gaming convention that ran 2016 and 2017. He is currently the Managing Director of Summerfall Studios.
We are seeing the renaissance of the Australian games industry. New studios are opening, existing ones are expanding, and Australian games are topping charts all around the world. Even the Federal government is talking about us!
But if we look a little deeper, there are some troubling signs. The four largest studios are owned by overseas companies. The breakout hits of the last few years were all published by overseas publishers. The rapid expansion risks diluting our talent pool.
It feels like our industry is at a tipping point. This is a moment of great opportunity, but also great risk. Have we learned from the mistakes of the past? Or are we doomed to repeat them?
I find this moment to be both exhilarating, and terrifying! Like it or not, the large publishers are returning, and that raises the bar for all of us. So how can we compete? What opportunities are there for studios that want to scale and grow, to build a billion dollar brand that is Australian owned?
I will attempt to answer these questions and more, by taking stock of where we are, what opportunities we have in our immediate future, and what plans we can make for the long term to create a robust, resilient, and diverse industry.
Join Rae Johnston as she interviews Australia's own Siobhan Reddy, Studio Director at Media Molecule, the visionary team behind Little Big Planet, Tearaway and Dreams.
Katrina Irawati Graham talks about the power of bystanders to create grassroots cultural change and shift the discussions around gendered violence in the games industry.
In this talk, Rena will cover her experience as a game developer and an illustrator in Indonesia. She will share the process behind her works When The Past Was Around and She and The Light Bearer.
Breaking down how she takes stories and cultural details from her beloved country and translate it into video games.
Grace will be covering her journey in game development, from starting a network entirely from scratch to finding a way to develop games sustainably without sacrificing what’s important about her work.
This talk will cover the process of making the Frog Detective series, her consulting work, and her adventures in the business side of game development.
What makes morally challenging games engaging?
What skills are involved in making moral choices in games? And what exactly is the point of "moral meters"?
In this talk, We will present the findings of a 10-year multi-disciplinary research project investigating moral decision-making in videogames and the lessons they can provide for designing morally engaging gameplay.
Presented by: Dr Malcolm Ryan, Paul Formosa & Dr Dan Staines
Do developers want players to look for clues and feel smart before that all-important-thing happens in the game? Do they want to reward players for figuring something out before the game reveals it to them? Do they want players talking about the game online and theorizing about that super secret mystery?
Getting players engaged with finding and figuring out hints is more than just having them hear an ambient noise over there or finding a lore book dropped here. The more invested players are in the game and the more engaged their imaginations, the more likely they are to search for the clues—or revelatory trail of breadcrumbs—the team leaves for them.
Attendees will discover tools for building player engagement, which includes designing more believable characters players will get invested in (whether they love or hate those characters) and using the game’s narrative design to drop hints about those characters’ circumstances. In effect, the relationship between the investment in the characters and these hints become a language narrative designers devise to help players hunt and piece together “What happens next?” before the game reveals the answers.
This talk focuses on why players identify or empathize with characters and how that makes them more invested, and gives techniques for creating “messy,” more authentic characters and designing multi-faceted storytelling in-game that will encourage players to find answers to the game’s mysteries.
Screenwriters are used to writing dialogue for actors. Comic writers will just see their words on the page. And the game writer? The game writer can do both...
This talk is a gentle reminder that written and spoken languages are different. That you'll have to change your perspective when you switch from one way of writing to the other. That different words have different meanings. And that language will be understood differently when read vs when spoken.
Multiple examples from games and other media show will inspire the audience to think about the function and effect of their in-game dialogue. Did you realise that some grammar constructions work better on paper than spoken? And that some jokes work in audio, but not as written words? Start thinking about dialogue writing in a different way, and learn to make your choice on whether to use voiced or non-voiced dialogue early in the process.
In 64 Ways of Being, Melbourne is transformed into a playable city via a free-to-play app launching in 2020. People and place are connected at multiple locations across the city through augmented reality encounters that capture different ways of being. These experiences re-imagine Melbourne's identity as expressed through its creative, linguistic, cultural, social and urban diversity.
The game is made by a collective developing urban play encounters that reconnect people with the city as a lived experience. Blending public art, live art and game design our collaboration brings together artist gamemaker Dr Troy Innocent, live arts group one step at a time like this, and game developer Millipede working with the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio to realise Playable City Melbourne.
This talk provides practical advice on the challenges and opportunities presented during the production of an ambitious AR game that engages with creative cultures, project partners and audiences outside the traditional mobile gaming space.
Topics covered range from technical tips on situating AR in diverse urban environments, working with theatre and performance artists, engaging in meaningful cultural consultation with First Peoples, wrangling divergent stakeholders, and marketing strategies for an experience people haven't had yet.
Mini Motorways is a relaxing game about building roads to support a growing city. The game is a follow up to Mini Metro, and after 9 months of prototyping and 9 months of production, was a launch title on Apple Arcade. These three things: creating a successor to an indie hit, being a new platform’s launch title, and a very short production timeline, meant that the road to success was a bumpy one. In this talk, Tana Tanoi from Dinosaur Polo Club will go through the challenges faced during the development of Mini Motorways, covering topics like how Apple Arcade’s requirements shaped the game’s development, how quick tools were developed for a small team on a time budget, and the process of defining a brand through prototyping and iterating.
Creating an engaging experience for your players is hard, and not knowing who your players are makes this even harder. A model will be presented for Designers and Producers to simplify and clarify player behaviour, removing ambiguity to create concrete features with players' personas in mind.
This will give you the ability to cognitively organise the players' minds, allowing you to provide mechanics and interaction methods to enrich the players' experience. We will look at what player personas are and they role they play in existing games, how they have been applied in the past, and how you can craft personas for your own game experience.
Scrum is a team-oriented framework that relies heavily on building team synergies, trust, and communication.
This presentation is a deep dive into the Scrum Rituals - why they are done, what the team needs to get out of them, and some best practice techniques to help do them well in the games environment.
Making games is hard! Making games with multiple teams spread across the world is... also hard.
Now try making games with large teams spread across the world AND fostering harmonious working relationships to make your products and your people sing.
Working as Product Manager and Development Manager in WG Sydney on co-development of a new AAA title, Ally & Stefano have learned a lot about what works (and what doesn't work) to create a happy and humming production environment.
In this session, they will share their top findings on planning methodologies, agreements and continuous team improvement to help game developers plan for the bigger picture.
Have you ever wondered what a producer does? What about human resources, recruitment, or operations? Some days I do too, and I am a producer.
Studio support roles are incredibly varied, and sometimes it can be hard to keep up. Join me to find out more about what we do and how we do it. You’ll leave with some new tips and tricks for multitasking in your work (and life).
Technical development and design go hand in hand. This talk goes into detail about how to work with UE4’s default systems to create technology that enables scalable content development in a way that will keep your design team happy.
Unreal Engine is a vastly powerful tool that can be used to make incredible high-fidelity games. However, the engine has some fundamental workflow challenges. Binary assets, merge conflicts and refactor debt plague advanced development projects.
At RocketWerkz we've developed a system similar to the Gameplay Ability System that has alleviated many of these issues. Using datatables, run-time generated components, JSON and more we’ve prepared for huge amounts of content while still playing nice with our backend.
As well showing how the tech works to solve collaboration problems, we’ll show examples of how great design workflow leads to happier developers and why it's the tech team’s job to empower creative decisions.
Critical to capturing business opportunities and strategy is the ability to identify and manage risk.
Risk comes from uncertainty - The more clarity you can glean about the context in which you operate and the inherent components of your studio's objectives, the more control you will have over your likelihood of success.
We will go through some useful hands-on tools that will frame your risk appetite and application to the best success of your strategy:
- Defining your objectives
- The power of financial data
- Identifying events and causes
- Treating and managing risk on an ongoing basis
This talk will cover a practical approach to managing your own risk framework, understanding your financial position, exploring your business context, emerging risks in the current climate, and why you should always think of the worst thing that could happen.
So you’ve got your great game developed and it’s ready for launch. Now’s the time to get started with marketing, right?
This is a common mistake that most indie game developers make.
While it is fine to start assembling your marketing plans once your game is ready, it’s also rather too late. By the time you get your plans deployed, you’ve wasted time that you could’ve been selling your game.
Here’s the cold hard truth: The vast majority of indie games fail - but that’s at least in part because the vast majority of indie developers consider marketing as an afterthought, rather than as part of the game development project itself right from the start.
Join me in this 50-min session to uncover how you can avoid repeating the common mistake that others have made, and discover the one essential ingredient to a successful marketing plan for your game launch that will get you connecting with your potential gamers right from the start.
I will also share with you practical tips on how you can adopt this tried-and-tested framework that can be repeated - not only for each new game launch but also for existing games.
Growing a community online can seem harder and harder these days. There are countless other publishers and developers, each with their own social media pages, all trying to do the same thing. In this environment, it can be difficult to stand out and "compete" for an audience.
This presentation will cover some of the ways that may help you break through the global video game industry landscape and build a community online, through the lens of our Bethesda Australia & New Zealand social media pages.
This presentation will look at how to protect your game IP when working with third parties. You will learn how to effectively monetise your IP, while protecting your studio and your rights when dealing with practitioners on other continents, or in other industries.
Whether you are looking to port your game to a new platform, wanting to work with a publisher based in Europe or Asia, or looking to explore the potential of your game IP in other media or industries, this presentation has you covered.