A more indie-friendly Casuality

[Ronkes]

In February 2007, the second European edition of the Casuality conference will be held in Amsterdam. Last time I had great fun at the conference, but I felt that more attention could have been paid to small indie game developers. I asked the organisation if something can be done about that this time around. They told me there is some room to make the conference better aimed towards small developers like you and me.

What would you like added to the current program for Casuality Europe 2007 to make it more appealing to you?

You can find the current program at http://amsterdam.casualconnect.org/content.html. I think there is already some interesting stuff there for indie developer - especially the session on guerilla marketing on day 1 and the programming track on day 3 - but it could be even better. Please, post any ideas you have an I'll discuss them with the organisation.

[Karima]

I enjoyed Casuality Amsterdam 2006, but there is room for improvement ;-)

The conference felt more like the 'Casual Game Portals' conference.
Portals are a very important part of the industry, but there are other factors as well.

Except for the excellent speech by Jason Kapalka from Popcap and a postmortem talk, there wasn't much about game design. So what I would like to see is more on game design.

Some other interesting topics:
- market research with limited resources (how to do it if you can't just pay for a couple of focus groups)
- business strategy for small companies
- what to outsource, what to do yourself
- the budgets for casual games are growing fast, how can small developers stay competitive
- more technical talk for all the programmers

A lot of indie game developers sell from their on web pages. There are some interesting topic just waiting to be explored:
- Is it clever to do this or is it too much hassle
- How to find visitors for your website
- If you are selling from your own web page you have complete control about the buying incentives. At conferences about shareware there are always some lectures how to create nag screens with a good conversion rate. I gave such a lecture myself last year and shared how we managed to increase the conversion rate of a game by 75% just by changing the nag screen. I would love to learn from others how they increased their conversion rate (apart from improving the game).

Generally speaking, the topics discussed at the shareware conferences such as the SIC are very interesting for small game developement businesses. Here are some very interesting topics copied straight from the schedule of the SIC 2006.

- Learning From Experience - From Programmer to Business Person
- The Conversion Process
- Advertising, Pay-per-click
- Press - Getting More Ink
- Marketing Begins from Within Your Product
- How to make Money from the 90%+ of Users who don’t pay for Shareware
- Techniques for Closing the Sale
- Designing the User Experience: User Centered Design and the Software Development Cycle
- Practical Interface Guidelines: Things they did not teach us in programming class
- Develop for Windows Vista


Even though the conference was in Amsterdam, it was very US centered. But people who paid for the expensive flight were usually working for big companies. I would also love to speak with people working for small companies from all over Europe. How do I find these people at the conference other than by chance?

Networking opportunities in general could also be improved. The two parties at the evening both had very loud music so it was very hard to speak with someone.

[Ronkes]

Hello Sandra, thanks for your detailed reply. Are you planning on attending Casuality in 2007? It would be great to see you again. Also, have you looked at the program? I'd like to hear your opinion.

I agree that the focus of Casuality seems to be the portals; that's why I brought it up. :-) You list very interesting topics. Personally, I think that it would be most interesting if some of these topics were discussed by indie developers and not be people attached to the portals or to larger development studios.

I don't know how much room there is to add new topics and speaker, but is there someone here who would like to give a talk? I could check with the organisation to find out what's involved to make that happen.

With regards to the networking opportunities: we could easily set this up ourselves. Maybe a group of us can have dinner together or something, so that we can all socialise. This way, everyone who is interested (and in the neighbourhood) can come, even if they're not attending the conference. If there is interest in this, I can make arrangements.

[Karima]

Hi William, I just took a look at the sessions and there are some which are interesting:
- Programming and Software Engineering - For those who use a debugger
- the one with Nick Fortungo about game design
- and everything from the guys from Reflexive.

The guerilla marketing session could be interesting, but it might be that it focuses more on casual games for younger people (mobile phone games). I've the hunch that our customers are not the customers you typically reach with funny online videos on youtube.

The schedule seems better than last year but there are still a lot of sessions which don't got that me excited. We haven't decided yet if we go.

Unfortunately I'm not a regular on this forum, so I don't know enough people here to suggest someone. You could ask some sucessfull casual indie game developers what the most important thing was they learned last year and if they would be willing to speak about that. Then just pick the two most interesting proposals.
Speaking about that - it would be interesting to know which companies/programmers are the most sucessfull indie developers in the market.

[Skinflint]

- and everything from the guys from Reflexive.

Thanks Sandra. :) I'll be sure to make the stuff Ernie and I talk about on Friday extra interesting just in case you are there. I'm firmly rooted in development, and I like actual facts about what actually happened in development more than "history" that spin-doctors want everyone to believe. If you can make it, I promise what I have to say wont sound like a Reflexive pitch...

I agree that the roster looks much more interesting than last year. That being said, I too would like to hear more stuff from smaller developers and put some more focus on actually making casual games...the actual development of them is a topic that does not get nearly enough discussion. I think Sandra had some excellent points.

However, I realize how difficult that can be to put something together that is relevant, especially if the topic has to do with issues focusing on the smaller game developer (even though there are LOTS more of them than larger ones). It's the larger companies that have an easier time justifying the money and manpower to send people to Amsterdam, even if it is "local" to many in Europe...

[Ronkes]

Is money a big problem for people? Are some of you not attending Casuality because of the travel expenses and/or admission fee?

[papillon]

I've never particularly thought about attending conferences... but while I'm a lot less broke than I used to be and Amsterdam isn't that far, the registration fee is a big number for a curious first-timer.

[amaranth]

I've never particularly thought about attending conferences... but while I'm a lot less broke than I used to be and Amsterdam isn't that far, the registration fee is a big number for a curious first-timer.

I highly suggest you go. I went to the Casuality conference in Seattle and I am so thankful that I did. I got a lot out of it.