Hasta La Motion!

NGDC concluded its second day with the main string of events and talks coming to an end. With the NGF awards already concluded and its contemporary, Unite India, having wrapped up a day ago, the day at HICC, Hyderabad was completely dedicated to the audience of NGDC.

The expo area was dotted with arguably the highest number of networking sessions among the three days, as everyone was making good use of the last few hours of the event.

With limited number of sessions in the day-two line up, people flocked the keynote session by KING’s Lawrence Valenti. He began his talk with an image of the Titanic, which tragically struck an iceberg and sank in its maiden voyage. His point being, hypothetically, if the ship had altered its route by even a few degrees, the disaster could have been avoided. Connecting the same with the gaming industry, he urged people to use the correct knowledge and tools at their disposal to avoid any sort of disaster which may befall them. The studio art director of KING’s San Francisco base further mentioned the key performance indicators (KPI) for mobile gaming namely engagement, player retention and monetisation which he loosely abbreviated into Play-Stay-Pay.

He further stressed multiple times on knowing the correct audience for a title, resorting to survey and more survey to get to know what the audience actually wants. Analytics, he said are crucial going forward as numbers never lie. App Store art optimisation and building upon player experiences are the key to push forward, according to him.

Speaking to AnimationXpress Valenti said, “Historically, India as a country has been associated with many famed titles, however as most of them have been outsourced work, the industry laid dormant for a while. Now things are changing, localisation has become a key and the heavy smartphone penetration is opening gateways for more local content to flourish.”

Lucid Labs’ Chirag Chopra conducted a session which aimed at debunking some of the myths about becoming an indie developer in the country. Speaking to us he said, “The talk tried to debunk some of the myths around the indie game development scene in India covering topics such as college degree, financial planning, scope of games and much more. The studio has been showcasing their upcoming title Possession which was also selected as the top five contenders for the upcoming game at the NGF awards.

With the exhibition area acting as the meeting ground for the enthusiasts, everyone seemed pretty fulfilled about the event. We spoke to some of the members from Mindfisher Games, a Bangladesh-based studio which was attending its first NGDC. The members were quite content with the response they received for their game Mukti Camp. However, they also stated that they have faced a few issues like the unavailability of WiFi at the venue and problems getting a sim card, rendering them crippled without internet. Some of them wanted to attend sessions but could not leave the booth as the sessions ran in different halls at the same time of the expo.

Speaking to some other attendees brought somewhat similar feedbacks. NGDC was running around three sessions simultaneously and hence the issues. However, given a two-day conference (for talks and sessions), it would be hard to segregate the talks individually.

The overall reaction however was pretty good. The networking and showcasing opportunities that NGDC provided the attendees seem to be good enough for them to make them return for the next edition!

The post ‘Will look forward to the next edition,’ say attendees as NGDC concludes its ninth edition appeared first on AnimationXpress.