It’s hard to tell sometimes if anyone out there actually cares, if anyone is noticing your work. Sure, social media gives you a number to gauge how many followers you’ve got and you get some indication of how many of those followers are more into following you based on post interaction. But the percentage of interacting followers compared to the total follower count is almost miniscule, especially on Twitter. So it makes it really hard to truly gauge your outreach. How many potential new followers are you reaching? How many in the industry are you reaching? What do they think of your work? Sometimes it can feel like a black hole. But then sometimes you get that little glimmer of light…
About a month ago I was going through my usual Twitter notifications when I came across a post inviting me to showcase my games at the Intel Buzz Workshop in London on June 2nd.
Being used to getting a lot of spam from opportunists trying to cash in on indie developers I thought it was a scam at first. Nevertheless I looked into it and it turned out to be legit! Straight from the website:
“Back for it’s fifth edition, the Intel® Buzz Workshop returns to London to host yet another one-of-a-kind conference.
With gaming industry news and game development as its core themes, you will be spoilt for choice attending mentoring sessions with leading game industry experts, inspirational talks, and panel debates covering the width and breadth of all things gaming, interactive tech demonstrations, and live coding workshops!
Don’t miss out on the last session of the day, the Developer Showcase, where you will have the opportunity to demo your game or be the first to play newly developed games before anyone else.”
Furthermore, I was one of many developers asked to attend including Lucas Pope, creator of Papers Please. I’m not sure if Lucas is attending but to be considered in the same selection as a developer as successful as Lucas Pope is awesome!
Now that I was sure it was a legit request, and after that rush of nervous adrenaline you get at times like this, I responded to find out more details. My main concern was in the cost to travel to London. It’s not a major expense especially if going by train, however I treat game development expenditure entirely separately to all my other expenditure, and any money out of the game development pot has an immediate impact to funding any games I am creating. Thanks to that good old imposter syndrome I felt a bit cheeky asking but thought I would anyway; I would be really happy to attend however could they cover the cost of expenses? Genuinely I was expecting an “As if! We don’t even want you to come now since you had the audacity to ask!” kind of response, but what I got was along the lines of “We don’t have a large pot for expenses but I’ll ask my manager and see what we can arrange.” I couldn’t believe it! The result was that they are paying for my return train journey to attend the event and food is provided also, so there is going to be no impact to the Chronik Spartan game development pot. I guess it goes to show that if you don’t ask you don’t get!
So I’m all prepped and the event is tomorrow. I’ll be getting the train at 6am and getting back home at 11pm. It’s going to be a long day but I can’t wait! The event will be an awesome opportunity to connect with some great people in the gaming industry, I’ll get to push myself by presenting a pitch for GLO on stage and I’ll get to squeeze in a few extra hours of Gym Empire development on the train.
It’s another step on the ladder of my game development career and one I wouldn’t believe if you told me this time last year. It’s one step at a time, but one of the nicest things to come out of this for me is the reassurance that I am seen as a genuine developer. That industry professionals have come across my work and social media and liked what they saw. That people out there actually care.
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