A couple of months ago at Full Indie I recorded a bunch of indies saying funny/cliché things for fun.

This is the resulting video (contains a couple of f-bombs just in case you are offended by that sort of thing).

Enjoy!

Got any more classic indie clichés? Please post in the comments.

image by mrtopp

The three main conferences I go to each year are GDC (San Francisco), Casual Connect (Seattle), PAX Dev + PAX (Seattle).

Someone on a forum I frequent asked what the benefits are, and so I thought I’d list what I specifically find useful about them. Your mileage may vary:

Press/Publishers/Distributors

- Meeting press so you can build personal relationship (Friend of mine gets taken to dinner by well-known press. They always write up his news.)
- Showing game demos to press (Another friend of mine came to GDC the first time this year and got tons of press mentions including a GameSpot video.)
- Meeting new publishers/distributors.
- Strengthening relationships with existing publishers/distributors so they remember you when you ask them to feature your games.
- Initiating or making deals.
- Getting your brand out there. (I wear a Grey Alien Games T-shirt and obviously have lots of business cards)

Other Devs

- Interesting educational/motivational talks with useful takeaways.
- Helps keep your finger on the pulse with regards to what’s happening in the industry as a whole and within your niche.
- Discussing business/marketing strategies and sales figures with other indies who are willing to share.
- Meeting new indies (and people you’ve only spoken to online) and strengthening relationships with indies. Apart from the fact that hanging with indies is enjoyable to me, sometimes it can result in future alliances, or key bits of useful info, or introductions to people etc.
- Checking out the IGF games in one place and meeting the devs. Plus getting a feel for what sort of game wins awards.

Misc Cool Stuff

- Getting motivated to get on with your work when you get back.
- Helping you to decide on new directions to take your business in and give you new ideas about what to do with your old IP.
- A break from your normal routine, and in my case, better weather than at home too!
- Being in another country/city.
- Parties, free food/booze, music.
- Hanging with Notch (or insert game dev celebrity of your choice)

There’s probably more but that’s a good start.

What reasons have I missed that you go to conferences for?

Recently there’s been a meme going round that shows how people’s jobs aren’t what other people think they are and how they are boring or suck. So I thought I’d do my own version about being indie!

Because my picture viewer plugin bugs out when you zoom in, you might want to try this link instead. If you want to spread it, please use this yfrog link instead to save on my bandwidth, thanks!

Another point I’m making with the image that is less obvious is that I’m honest with myself about what my work is and most of my friends are indies, so they know what being indie is like. Also my family has seen me doing indie stuff for years and so has a pretty good idea of what I do. I like to be open about what I do because constructing facades takes too much energy and they are likely to break one day anyway.

Of course, maybe the reality of being indie is not quite as the image implies 100% of the time (like when I’m doing tax returns) But hell, it is awesome quite a lot of the time, and that’s good enough for me!