My First GDC & Year As An Indie

Every last working day of the current month I publish a report reflecting on the previous month. These reflections exist to demonstrate my progress, share my experiences and help transfer what I learn to others.

The Past Month

Finishing my first year as a full-time indie, participating in Train Jam 2019, attending my first GDC, connecting with other community organizers from around the world and starting a new project.

My First Game Developers Conference

GDC was huge, I never seen so many game developers in one place before! It was both exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time.

The trip was very exhausting, especially coming in from across the world (20hrs going, 25hrs coming back x.x) but was very much worth it.

I don’t see the value of going every year even if I could afford to, but I would certainly benefit from attending at least every 2-3 years.

While there, I took the Storytelling Fundamentals in A Day workshop by ex-telltale narrative designer Evan Skolnick which left me feeling confident in writing stories for my own games.

I’m obviously no expert, but the level of knowledge presented in this 1-day workshop is so far above anything we have access to here in Bahrain I decided to “redo” the workshop for my local community.

I won’t be as good as the real deal but it would still be better than what we currently have (which is close to nothing).

Other than talks and workshops, I’ve attended the Community Organizers roundtable and met other organizers that would like to learn from and share with each other tips and tricks into managing our local communities.

I’ve also met a few indies that would like to collaborate in the future.

So, from the list of 5 things I wished to accomplish in GDC19, I managed to achieve 3 of them, not too shabby but not all I hoped for either.

However, I can get in contact with publishers online and I have a person in mind that would be awesome as a mentor, I’ll get in touch with him and hopefully will take me in.

What’s Next: ?

There’s quite a bit I wish to do and currently in the process of reevaluating my plan of action, so I don’t have a “next step” just yet.

This ends this month’s report, hope you enjoyed and if you have any feedback please comment below 🙂 .