A long due report, but here it is one of our biggest meet ever! A total of 70+ of game developers, hobbyists, students, educators and etc attended the last meet of 2011. There were pizza and drinks around courtesy of DeNA Japan, who sponsors the ‘favourite meal’ for hungry game developers : )
The session started with talk from DeNA Japan, with Jaime Ocampo and Toshihiko Suyama representing the largest social gaming network in Japan. Jaime started with an overview casual mobile games industry, giving very compact and concise points backed by statistical data followed by introduction of Mobage, their social gaming platform.
After that we have Iris Lim, talking about a personal experience working at Boomzap, one of South East Asia largest indie developers, under a topic entitled “Virtual Office of 40-man Studio”. She covers on the communication methods used to adapt to the virtual office setup and also covers the production methodology which includes topics like greyboxing, quick & dirty prototyping, daily builds and etc. A lot of questions were thrown by the audience as the concept of virtual office is quite ‘new’ for game development which requires heavy team communication to happen all the time.
Last but not least, we have Mick Solomons, an industry veteran who founded 5 Minute Siesta in Malaysia with an indie setup after having shipped 20+ games in 10 years, and through a lot of crunch. He talked about “How Games For Niche Market Can Keep Your Indie Dream Alive” with the focus of his experience shipping an Australian football game called Specky : Mark of the Year on AppStore. He shared on how did he came about developing the game, marketing strategies and shared tip for development of niche games.
After the talks, we had a very energetic networking session at Mindvalley, the ever-gracious venue sponsors, where old friends met, namecards traded and a lot of discussion going on. Then some of us continue the networking session at Chinoz, Bangsar Shopping Centre.
Videos for the talks will follow up soon, so for the time being, take a look at the photos of the events at our Facebook page.
