How to Get Ahead in Berlin’s Indie Game Scene

This post is by Chuck Smith, founder and CEO of Ludisto

For a great many people, making games is a dream, a passion. But for those who choose to pursue their dreams, what really goes into this process? Obviously you need a developer, but you also need a project manager, graphic and sound artists, a musician, marketer, trailer producer… Needless to say, it’s not an easy industry to get into, and creators must wear many hats to put their visions into bytes ready for the public. The indie scene makes it possible for anyone to get involved.

There are many reasons one might choose to become an indie game maker: as a fun side project, to gain experience in a creative endeavor, or, yes, to form a company and make money. Fortunately Berlin offers a wide variety of game making events to cater to each of these desires. This all comes together every April when the world flocks to the annual International Games Week Berlin.

The Best of the City’s Game Scene

During this week you can check out events ranging from the professional game conference, Quo Vadis, to the more artsy A MAZE. / Berlin. On the side, you can find experiences from a film festival of Polish game trailers in an Alexanderplatz cinema to actors retelling classic stories of video games in their own modern style in the Computerspielemuseum. During this week, the best of the Berlin game scene comes together to put on an amazing show as well as a platform for game industry professionals and hobbyists to meet and share experiences and ideas.

Especially if you’re based outside of Berlin, this week gives you an excellent chance to taste what the game scene has to offer here. Be sure to learn from the experiences of others, and sometimes hearing about their failures can be even more useful than the successes. If you need to expand your team (or join a team), this is the perfect opportunity to meet talented people working in Europe and beyond. If you’re considering founding a game company in Germany, don’t repeat the same mistakes others have made! On the other hand, since every game is different, find out how other companies are making money, so you can get ideas for how to expand your business.

If you’re in it for the art, try to look for the inspiration behind the games and find games which inspire you. Talk with these artists and discover how they started working together and how they turned their ideas into reality. Events like A MAZE. are great spaces for helping game designers not only hear new concepts, but also to discuss and refine their own ideas with other game makers with whatever technology you choose to express yourself.

Berlin Game Scene

Even outside International Games Week, the city is full of other interesting game-related events. Every month, creatives come together at the Berlin Mini Game Jam where they form teams to create a game in just eight hours. Since commercial ambitions are put aside, many take the opportunity to leave the world of traditional gaming equipment and foray into alternative ways to play such as Oculus Rift (VR glasses), Microsoft Kinect (3D camera) or even make their own game controllers. Needless to say, participating in such events really gets your creative juices flowing.

Other important events are the Game Creators Hangout and Talk & Play. The Game Creators Hangout meets in Meltdown, one of two e-sports bars in Berlin. There amateurs and pros alike meet over beer to discuss their experiences, exchange ideas and meet like-minded people. Talk & Play is a hybrid event, which begins with lectures from game making experts and ends with the chairs being shoved aside to make space for anyone to show off and demo any game to get feedback from like-minded strangers.

The success of these events inspired Lorenzo Pilia and Sjors Houkes to create Join, an event based entirely around local multiplayer games in a format very similar to Talk & Play. Local multiplayer means games which are played by two or more players in the same physical space (like a room or an outdoor field). In the first part of the day, game makers gave lectures about their experiences with local multiplayer and then afterwards everyone who had a booth was able to share their game and get feedback from others, but this time on an international scale.

Besides these events, there are also many meet ups to keep people connected. There are get togethers for Unity (a 3D game engine), Virtual Reality, Gamification, Kinect, and more. This helps people find others with the same niche interest. All of these events provide an extensive infrastructure for anyone creating a game to find people and information they need to help their project succeed.

If this sounds like too much, a new site, www.berlingamescene.com was launched this month to aggregate all the information and dates about this scene here. No matter whether you want to start a game studio, design graphics or even attend a retro 8-bit concert, you can find your interest there.

An Example From a Small Indie Studio

At Ludisto, we have greatly benefited from all these events. Join gave us a hard deadline to have our local multiplayer iPad board game, What the Shell, ready to present to the public. Letting random people try the game gave us amazing insights on the most urgent changes we needed to make. Through this, we were also able to meet Martin Pittenauer, the lead developer of the iOS version of Carcassonne, which I personally consider the gold standard in iOS board games. Along with this, Kevin Gaeel Bradshaw tweeted about our game, which we were later able to use as a testimonial in our app description.

Besides this, Talk & Play as well as the opening of the Game Science Center let me get additional playtesting feedback as well as some promo pictures of people having fun playing our game to post to our social media channels. Berlin’s Computerspielemuseum staff also personally helped me with playtesting. On the contest front, we’ve recently submitted What the Shell for the Deutsche Computerspielepreis and A MAZE. awards, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed on that front.

All in all, we at Ludisto are very happy to be based in Berlin and enjoy the advantages the community offers us here. I still think this is the best place in the world if you want to start a gaming community or are interested in experimental, artistic gaming experiences.