Seattle Indies

Seattle Indies will be at GDC. Hope to see you there!

Seattle shows up! This week Seattle Indies welcomed a delegation of games industry professionals from Europe and the UK for a two day whirlwind tour to meet and greet the local game development community. On short notice and in the teeth of last minute preparation for GDC we managed to pull off two successful networking lunches, a very last minute tour of the Xbox Game Studios offices in Redmond and meeting with many excellent people from the Xbox team, a visit to the top of the Columbia Tower, a stop at the Washington State Department of Commerce, a meeting with some of the AWS for Games team and a tour of the Spheres, and capped it off with a classic comeback victory by the Seattle Kraken! Thanks to everyone who joined us, rearranged their schedules, and hosted us over the past two days, all of the delegates had a great time and are super appreciative of the warm welcome they received. Thanks to Dan Licari for being the engine driving this whole thing and making sure the delegates all made it here safely, Olga Sheverieva for bringing so many of her contacts out to the events and working some magic to get us the Xbox tour and meeting, Jennifer Yi for co-sponsoring and coordinating the lunch in Bellevue, Theresa Pudenz ?? GDC and Nimble Workforce for co-sponsoring the lunch in Bellevue, Clint Woon for rolling out the red carpet for us at Studio D, Zaheer Kapadia ?? DICE for the meeting at Amazon and the tour of the spheres, Shannon Roach Halberstadt for the briefing on the state of the games industry in WA State, Markie Du Bry Waggoner and her team at Hilton Motif Seattle for making accommodations easy for our guests and for hosting our lunch on Friday, and Fortunato Vega for welcoming us at his event. This is the first of many planned international trade missions, with one planned from Seattle to the UK and Malta in late April. If you are interested in joining that trip please reach out to me here or send me an email. Feel free to reach out to the delegates to stay in touch. Dean Day, Mark Cochrane, Adrian Fenix, Johannes Brauckmann, Daniel Poludyonny, Roman Ivanik. Many of them will be at GDC next week for further meetings. And now to pack and get ready for GDC myself, see you all soon!

This Saturday we have a special guest from thatgamecompany joining us at Indie Support Group to give a practice version of a talk about UI design. Indie Support Group meets every Saturday from 1-7 pm at AIE Seattle in the Seattle Center Armory. Bring your laptop to co-work and connect with your fellow devs. https://lnkd.in/gKUwkU_4

The Northside Social is tonight from 6-9pm at the Watershed Pub & Kitchen in Northgate. It's time to get together and swap stories. Put down your keyboards and brave the outdoors. Let's meet for some food, a drink, and some good conversation! meetup.com/seattleindies

Seattle Indies will be returning to WA State Gaming Expo this year and we have space to showcase 8-10 games in our booth. Our devs had a blast presenting at the inaugural event last year and we expect it to be even bigger this year. It takes place at the WA State Fairgrounds in Puyallup, WA. The event is coming right up at the end of the month from March 28-30th so we'll have a short turnaround time for signups and coordination. Sign-ups are open until midnight Saturday the 15th at 10am and confirmations should go out on Saturday so you can start planning travel and logistics. Sign up to showcase here https://lnkd.in/gkA-h5aj More info about the event is here: https://wagamingexpo.com/

I am excited to announce that Unity has come on board to co-sponsor the Local Game Community Organizers mixer at GDC! Unity joins Seattle Indies and Bit Bridge LLC in presenting this event to bring together organizers, developers, publishers, platform holders, and all that are interested in connecting with their local game dev communities. These communities are vital in building professional networks, skills, finding investors, hiring, and providing opportunities to showcase games for feedback from the public. Drink tickets and light snacks will be provided while they last. Can't wait to see you all there! Special thanks to Esteban Enrique Maldonado Cabán and his team at Unity for continuing to support community efforts like this.

Make your day even more productive with a global games industry networking session on Friday March 14th from 12:30-2:30pm at Frolik Kitchen + Cocktails at Hilton Motif Seattle. Join us as welcome a delegation of game developers and entrepreneurs coming in from the UK and Europe to exchange ideas and discover opportunities with local indie, AA, and AAA game studios as well as publishers, service providers, and investors. We are welcoming visitors from Malta, UK, Finland, Ukraine, Iceland, and Spain to show them that Seattle is the best place in the US to make games and do business with the games industry, we look forward to seeing you there. Each party will be responsible for their own tabs at lunch.

If you are heading to GDC next week and want a chance to meet, learn from, and connect with local game community organizers around the world then we would love to see you on Friday from 11:30-12:30 in 312 South Hall for the Local Game Community Organizers Roundtable. This year the event will be hosted by Michael Lee, Daniel Lin, Sandra Castro Pinzón ?? GDC, and Nickie Maxine. I will be there to help facilitate the discussion as well and I hope to see you there. https://lnkd.in/gaS8xtv9 The best part is that it is open to all pass levels. GDC does not record/post roundtables on the vault.

Today we celebrate International Women's Day with a feature story about Alice Bottino and her game Hyper Beat that was written shortly after her game was featured at Seattle Indies Expo 2024.