Seattle Indies looks back at the first half of 2019
The first half of 2019 is over and it has been a busy, fun and productive six months for Seattle Indies. We launched some new groups and events and welcomed the return of some old favorites.
The year got off to a great start with our biggest turnout for a Global Game Jam yet, 175 developers packed into Pacific Science Center for 48 hours over the weekend of January 25–27 where we joined up with AIE and IGDA to make 39 games around the theme of “What home means to you.” Pacific Science Center has become the home for a lot of great Seattle Indies events over the past few years so it was a fitting theme that resonated with participants, organizers and mentors alike. We saw some fun and memorable entries but the community choice went to the charming hand drawn artwork and David Attenborough styled narration of Nesting Season where you play as a mother penguin building and defending her nest. Our site was even visited by a journalist from Forbes who wrote a lovely piece about the goings on at Pacific Science Center. We’re already looking forward to GGJ 2020 back at PacSci and the upcoming GGJ Next in a few weeks where we’ll be helping kids between the ages of 12–17 work on game projects.
January also saw the return of the Seattle Indies Spotlight, featuring our newest Board Member, VP Ty Taylor. We added a video element for this one that you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVgDIw-Hvm4 Ty gave an in-depth interview discussing his career in game development, going from working for Microsoft to a full-time successful indie developer making his own games and now branching out into the publishing business as well, helping other indie devs get their games launched on multiple platforms.
Another old favorite that made a come back in January is the East Side Meet & Drink at our new venue Hop House in Redmond. It is a more relaxed event than your typical networking meetup where 20–30 devs from the East Side get together on the first Tuesday of every month to talk about everything that’s on their mind in the world of game development. The event is open to everyone and we have been seeing a good mix of indie and AAA devs come out every month. If you live over on the East Side we hope to see you there.
In February we braved the snow to come back to Pacific Science Center for our quarterly Show & Tell and GGJ Showcase event. We had about twenty developers come out to show games from the jam and WIP games from the Seattle Indies community, the snow came back and cut the event a little short but we’re happy to have PacSci as the host for the Show & Tells.
February saw a new addition to the Seattle Indies family, Diversity Collective +, an inclusive community in Seattle with a mission to support diversity and discuss issues and solutions for minority figures in gaming and VR/AR/XR. They host quarterly events with different formats at each, designed to lend support and guidance based on the needs of the community. This has included panels, round table discussions, mentoring, portfolio reviews, Q&A, interview practice, game jams, and mixers. Diversity Collective + was founded by 5 female volunteer organizers from the Seattle Indies, AIE, and Seattle VR communities and seeks to create safe spaces to connect with people that have similar experiences and knowledge to share.
In February the Board Members and Volunteers of Seattle Indies front and center for one of our annual Town Hall meetings, where we announced Ty Taylor as our latest addition to the Board as our new VP, the departure of founding Board Member Constance Chen and provided updates on the operation of the non-profit and plans for 2019. Our volunteer organizers provided updates on the events they help run and we fielded questions from our members. These are a great way to get informed about what is going on at Seattle Indies and how you can get involved if you are interested. We also announced that Seattle Indies is now the fiscal sponsor for the Seattle Serious and Social Impact Games Meetup and are excited to have them as a part of our community.
In March many of our members and organizers made the trek down to San Francisco for Game Developers Conference (GDC) as they often do. This year was special though as Seattle Indies ran our first session at GDC, a roundtable for community organizers that we co-hosted with our friends from Bit Bridge Indies in Pittsburgh, PA. The session was a real success with over 80 organizers from all over the world coming together to talk about their successes and struggles in running and organizing their local indie developer meetups and communities. We followed up the roundtable with a social gathering at a nearby brew pub and started an online community to keep in touch and learn from and support each other. Wintermoor Tactics Club was at the Indie Megabooth, giving attendees a chance to check out a game from one of our members.
Following GDC we welcomed a group of developers and dignitaries from Australia who visited Seattle and our various game studios for a week on a government funded trip to form bonds with people from the industry in Seattle. We put on a second social at Optimism and had a great turnout despite a lot of us being tired from a long week at GDC. The Aussie devs really enjoyed meeting and talking with everyone and hope to return some day or see us all make a trip to their part of the world.
May was one of the busiest months we’ve had in years, kicking off with iFest at the Seattle Center Armory on May 4th. Hosted by AIE, iFest is a day long free event where AIE students and local indie developers get to show their games to iFest attendees and people enjoying their days at the Armory. Attendees got to vote on their favorite games out of the 40 on display at the show and Keyboard Kommander took home top honors followed by Spirefall and Cosmechanics.
Next up was the second annual Games For Our Future Game Jam where developers from Seattle Indies team up with climate science researchers from UW to make games based on climate change issues to help make complex research more accessible to the game playing public and raise awareness for these issues. Inspired by the Green New Deal, this year’s theme was Creating a Green Tomorrow and we had 70+ jammers spend another weekend at Pacific Science Center making 13 games inspired by talks and help from the research mentors who joined us from UW’s EarthLab. Judge’s Choice and best gameplay went to Two Degrees, the Community Choice award went to Icebears Care, Best Aesthetics was awarded to Rising Tides which you can read more about here and watch a playthrough video of here, the On Theme award was given to Climate Utopia which you can read an in-depth recap of their development process at the jam, and the Best Use of Research award went to Seed Our Future. We really have enjoyed this partnership with UW and PacSci and have some big plans for this concept in 2020 that we’re looking forward to announce. We followed this up with our Spring Show & Tell and Game Jam Showcase where PacSci attendees once again got to play the games made at the jam, some games created by UW Bothell students also related to climate change issues and some WIP games from Seattle Indies members. Overall about 40 games were available to play and a good time was had by all.
Seattle Indies had a big presence at PG/PC Connects Seattle, showing 8 games, giving talks, participating in the Big Indie Pitch both as pitchers and judges for the event and serving as mentors in the CGX Mentor lounge. It was a fun filled two days full of networking, demoing and of course partying with our friends from PocketGamer. This was the first time they ran the event here and we hope they were impressed enough to make it a regular stop on their world tour of events.
Next we teamed up with IGDA Seattle to present Slay The Spire — A Retrospective at Copious in Ballard. The event featured a post mortem of the hit game Slay the Spire by Mega Crit Games studio co-founder Anthony Giovanetti that you can watch on the IGDA Seattle YouTube channel.
Finally we closed out May by taking four Seattle Indies games to Renton City Retro for the weekend of the 25th & 26th, the devs behind Roundguard, Deleveled, Create Tech and Save the Date spent the weekend at the Renton Pavilion Events Center letting attendees play their demos and give feedback. Renton City Retro is a fun celebration of retro games featuring tournaments, talks and vendors dedicated to all things retro gaming and the devs in attendance really enjoyed watching everyone play their games.
May also saw the highly anticipated announcement that submissions for SIX 2019 were open, we had an incredible response with over 70 submissions this year and are in the process of having members of the Seattle Indies community judge them to narrow the field down to the 25 best games we’ll be showing on Sunday September 1, 2019 at Motif. We’ve already got some great sponsors lined up to help make SIX one of the best ever this year and are still on the lookout for more. Game submissions and jury volunteering deadlines have passed but you can still volunteer to help us at SIX if you are interested.
In June we went to Seattle Retro Gaming Expo and hosted a series of lightning talks about the secrets of game development from various members of Seattle Indies. They were fun and informative and attendees all seemed to learn something valuable from the talks about taking game jam games to full release, dealing with an unsuccessful kickstarter and making games for social impact.
Our long running regular events had some milestones this half as well. The venerable Game Club that recently had its five year anniversary started the year with Gris and played some more interesting games like, Not Tonight, Subsurface Circular, The Fall, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine and Shards of Infinity. Next month we’re playing and discussing the ultra popular Celeste, join us for an in-depth discussion of the games we play and their design successes and shortcomings. Look for some new video content coming from Game Club on our Facebook and YouTube pages too.
It’s no stretch to say that the Seattle Indies monthly socials have absolutely exploded in popularity over the years. From its humble beginnings in 17-Bit’s offices, to completely outgrowing Raygun Lounge, now taking over nearly all of Optimism’s giant warehouse brewery by the end of the night. Each month, our socials get over 150 attendees, doubling in size since this time last year, and still growing. In just a few short hours a month, the number of new connections made is immeasurable, with attendees making friends, finding partners for their games and job opportunities, or talking to representatives of Valve, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Amazon who regularly attend the meetups.
Creative individuals have been gathering every week to collaborate on their games at Indie Support Group. Due to popular demand we recently increased our hours and are now running from 1pm to 7:30 PM. The Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) in the Armory at Seattle Center has been a great venue for this event with everything the developers need to be productive.
Seattle Queer Indie Devs, otherwise known as SQUID, continues to meet monthly downtown. The group mission is to build community and strengthen collaboration, discussion, unity, and co-working habits among queer game creators in the Seattle area. We welcome all LGBTQ+ games creators! If you’re queer and hungry for intentional community-building, come by and meet us!
In the next half of 2019 we’re looking forward to SIX, the next Seattle Indies Game Jam, and the Holiday Party along with all of our recurring events. None of this would be possible without all of our wonderful volunteers, organizers and supporters, if you would like to get involved you can become a Patreon supporter at https://www.patreon.com/SeattleIndies, volunteer at a meetup or event or propose a new one by emailing us at contact@seattleindies.org.
If you are a full time employee at Microsoft you can give to Seattle Indies through Benevity and Microsoft will match your donations and they will compensate Seattle Indies for any time you volunteer with us, see your benefits coordinator at Microsoft for more information. Find more ways to get involved at https://www.seattleindies.org/get-involved/
For more information you can follow us on Twitter @Seattleindies, our events are listed on Meetup https://www.meetup.com/SeattleIndies/ and we have a Discord discord.gg/join-seattle-indies. Find us on Facebook and Instagram at facebook.com/groups/SeattleIndies
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