About DevGAMM 2017 Minsk
How wise hedgehogs visited their first game conference
DevGAMM — is one of the most significant conferences for game development industry professionals in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Oleg Pridiuk, the evangelist of the Defold game engine developed by King, invited us. Recently we released our first game — Pocket Weights (Google Play, AppStore), got some valuable experience and Oleg suggested to tell about it to the game development community. After a quick thought, we agreed and started to prepare the speech.
We wanted to tell not only about Defold, its pros, cons but also about the process of developing and releasing the first game and how we built our team.
Almost all Wise Hedgehog members went to DevGAMM because not only I and Sandra, as speakers, were interested and wanted to attend. Right after we arrived in Minsk and checked in the rented apartments, we went to the official pre-party to pick up our badges and start networking. Unfortunately, we came pretty late but immediately got into the atmosphere of DevGAMM! We made the first new contacts, watched great music performances and had some free beer.
There’s so much at DevGAMM: Company stands, Game Showcase, several tracks of sessions in multiple halls, Pitch&Match (business meetings), Career Wall, Quest, Speed Game Dating and much more. So there was plenty to see, to listen to, to play to meet and talk.
One of the most entertaining events of the first day for us was the DevGAMM Quest: you need to visit stands of specific companies and do some challenges. Most tasks were to take a photo and post it to social networks with specific hashtags, but there were more tricky challenges as well. Those who passed everything, take part in the raffle and get the prizes from the sponsors. The prizes varied from mugs to iPhone X! In my opinion, the quest is an excellent way of promotion because you don’t just do the task but also talk to the company representatives.
Besides to passing the quest we also visited a lot of interesting sessions, met with people from different companies and won a bunch of prizes in lotteries. We got so many free T-shirts, so we started to joke that we came to Minsk for free clothes.
The official DevGAMM party was fantastic! Big nightclub, great music — the cover band “Minsk sea” was really on fire! The downside was that it was a bit too noisy to talk.
«We made a game not with Unity, and we liked it»
Our session was on the second day of DevGAMM. We were pretty nervous: it was the first public speech for Sandra, and I’m still nervous every time even that I have good experience in public performances. We spoke about picking the engine for our first game and why we settled with Defold. We told about its pros and cons, covered the team building and work on the first team project. According to what we heard, the audience liked our session. We’re waiting for the official video to be released and will post it on the blog and add a shortened transcription.
There were surprisingly many Defold community members at DevGAMM. It was a great experience to finally meet them in person because previously we just chatted in our “suspiciously friendly” Slack channel. Hope to see you again next time!
Our appreciation
Thanks a lot to the DevGAMM organizers team for the great event! I visited several IT-conferences and this one was the most inspirational and bright. We’re revisiting DevGAMM for sure!
Love all the Defold folks, you all are so nice, it was a great pleasure to meet you! And the special thanks goes to Oleg Pridiuk for the invitation and all Defold goodies you gave us. We hope that we didn’t disappoint you and the game engine we love so much.
Thanks go to taxi drivers Vitaly and Mikhail (“uncle Misha”) who drove us all these days. Uncle Misha is also a fantastic guide, and he entertained us with stories about all the amenities we drove across.
What’s next?
We got a tremendous positive energy bump at DevGAMM, learned a lot from the sessions and understood how to make our games better. We even came up with a bunch of ideas for improving Pocket Weights. “Physics-based puzzle in 2017? You’re brave guys!” Yes, hedgehogs are brave! We’re getting back to work and plan to release something new next year!
