This is part 1 of my 2 part feature on the second day of SCAD’s GDX. It was a pretty busy day, including the keynote and four panels. Hit the jump for my report on the keynote and the first two panels.

The Keynote featured Eric Zimmerman from Gamelab. Eric provided a ton of independent developer business tips. Including an actual cash flow diagram of where the money comes from, what you do with it, and when you get profit. He emphasized the need to not forget to allocate funding for your overhead costs. On top of that he brought up the art of the Hustle:

-Know what you’re hustling
-Know who your company hustler is
-Hustle to context
-Be an honest hustler

Overall it was a good opening to the day.

Next up was Asante Bradford’s panel. For those unfamiliar with Asante’s job, see my Day 1 post. Today he went on a little more about the larger game companies that have set up shop here, such as CCP Games and CDC Games. He also talked about the importance of having Turner be behind gaming in Georgia with their GameTap push. Someone from GameTap was actually in the audience and mentioned that they have now opened GameTap Indies. A program where you can submit original games
and possibly get them published through GameTap. Kind of a big deal for Georgians to be able to take part in this model.

For my second panel of the day I went to hear Marcus Matthews speak. Marcus is the co-founder of Blue-Heat Games, a company that primarily focuses on mobile gaming but is about to venture into Nintendo DS and Wii titles. Blue-Heat is actually the only Nintendo approved Georgia Developer. Marcus talked a bit about the expanding possibilities for game developers to move on to other platforms as a way of starting out, noting that with mobile titles you’re able to maintain more of your creativity than you would if you were working on a 200 man title. He spoke about audio’s current downfall in mobile gaming as well. Being that sometimes mobile games need to be under 64k. That’s for Art, Graphics, Code, and Audio. Meaning audio will tend to be general midi. With phones getting better and better and handling physical limitations vs. memory size hopefully we will see an improvement in the audio properties of mobile gaming.

Continue to [Part Two]

posted by Juan Baez III on 04.12.08 @ 1:34 am

Related Posts