devGAMM report!

We just got back from Hamburg, devGAMM was awesome and we had lots of fun. This time we took an airplane instead of renting a van, so we didn’t have to drive for 24 hours straight, what a bust! 😛

The airplane had free Wifi, what kind of sorcery is that!? First time I travel with such a thing.

We rented a car as soon as we got to Hamburg and drove to the place we got on airbnb. The pre-party started at 18:00, so we had a couple of free hours to relax. I used that time to walk in a random direction and explore the city. Hamburg is beautiful, I specially liked all the green areas and how bikes are so popular over there, and what about all those bakeries? They were everywhere! And filled with lots of cakes and great-looking food.

Later that afternoon we went to pick our badges, drink some free german beer and meet cool devs. I had already spoken with some of them over e-mail, but it was pretty fun to spend a few hours just chatting and getting to know them a bit better. We had woken really early in the morning to catch the plane, so we got back around 22:00 to get some sleep, which was even easier thanks to the free beer 😛

Thursday! First day of the event. I spent the morning attending some talks, I’d like to point out the one with Mike Rose about “How well do games sell in 2023” and the one about prototyping with a dev who worked on “This war of mine”. I had to miss Ditto on his “How can you make your game look good and unique without actually knowing anything about animation?“, which looks promising as hell, but I had to be somewhere else. He told me he is going to repeat the talk and record it, so it might be available online in one-two months.

We had some time to showcase the game in the main hub, which was just another excuse to keep meeting developers and chatting with them. I liked how this area was pretty intimate and friendly. Each developer had about 3 hours to showcase their game, but there were plenty of free tables for those of us who were willing to keep doing the showcase for a couple of extra hours.

On Friday we attended the award ceremony as “Missing Translation” had three nominations. The “Game Lynch” was the weirdest thing I have ever done at an event, but also the coolest and most fun. There are 5 experts, each of them picks a game and lynchs it on stage for 5 minutes in front of the whole crowd. The developer has just a minute to defend the game and then the crowd votes the winner, the loser must drink a disgusting mix of cheap alchohol (among other things) on stage. You act kinda angry but it’s all part of the show. Wolf from THREAKS was lynching my game and I was suuuuuuper nervous, but everything went fine. The crowd laughed when I stood up and went closer to Wolf, like if I was going to punch him or something like that haha.

It was great to be at devGAMM, met many cool indie devs, got to know more about the indie scene in other countries, attended some really interesting talks and even came back with a new award. We’ll do our best to be at the next one 😀