Thusday

The second day of the Independent Games Summit was packed with interesting panels: 2D Boy’s Kyle Gabler and Polytron’s Phil Fish talked about The Art of Independent Game Promotion, or how to market your game without spending any money. This talk was a good follow-up on the Monday-keynote focusing again on non-development topics.

Kellee Santiago from thatgamecompany did an insightful presentation on How Do You Manage Small Indie Teams, a topic that I believe is greatly under-appreciated by a lot of small indies.

In his talk Beyond Single Player Jason Rohrer questioned why independent developers are largely painting themselves into the single-player corner instead of exploring multi-player based interaction that is so common in board games.

Hothead Games had the most well-designed of all slides, but the only thing I can remember is that they are porting Braid to the Mac, which made me a very happy.

In Making Web Games: The Indie Experience Pixeljam Games discussed their goal to make original Flash games without the needs for ads. How? Make the player care about your game. This notion should be commonsense, but Flash games are still largely seen as commodities.

The day ended with Eskil Steenberg’s mind-blowing presentation on the open-source tools he wrote to develop the MMOPG Love completely on his own.