Report from DevGAMM Minsk 2019
Finally, we got around to writing a report about our trip to Minsk at DevGAMM Minsk 2019!
We have not managed to write a full report about two last Devgamms, but we will catch up!
This time the delegation from our city of Saratov turned out to be not small - 11 people - Yohoho Games, UNIDAY and SquareDino.
And we lived together by this big company in one apartment! Everything was comfortable, thank you very much to the hostess!
So,we went to a pre-party immediately from the airport, where we met old friends, talked, drank free beer, and took their badges! We made some money for further financing our projects in the casino! (Just a joke)Â
The main goal of our team was to exchange experience, gain new knowledge and get feedback on our unannounced project. Spoiler: it all worked out!
The next day, we have already planned all the lectures we want to attend and all the activities we want to get (everything went wrong as usual), we came to the conference.
The scale, as every year, is striking. This year, conferention was visited by 2300+ people, which broke the attendance record again! But this time the organization was much better: there was Wi-Fi available for everyone, not only Business tickets, which was very nice, there was delicious coffee from AppLovin, there was a lot of delicious food for a snack, and it was enough!
We went to surf the event after drinking the Gods drink and eating. There were not many memorable games, but a few especially stood out, some then noted at the Awards (awarding games).
Especially memorable were:
TOHU - 2D point-clicker is with a very nice visual and drawing style (took 2 awards);
Nightmare Lands - top-down action is created with cartoon style, where you control 4 characters at once. Their stand especially took our attention by soft slugs toys!
Rubber - simulator tires! Very cool idea and very simple, sticky.
Wake the Dragon is the most amazing game that everyone will remember! Top-down shooter inspired by Hotline Miami and Max Payne! The developer makes it by himself, the gameplay and visuals are great! We recommend for everyone!
Under Black Flag - RPG is about pirates, the idea is very cool, very controversial performance, there are few interesting chips yet. The developers are making their first project, but the plans are very ambitious-40 hours of plot, a lot of mechanics. In the demo of this, nothing is visible yet, everything is very at the initial stage. We wish them luck!
Puzzle Quest is puzzle mobile game in the setting of the Cyber Post-Apocalypse. We could not single out the project of our friends from Uniday. The guys have recently started development, this is their first own project.
After all these activities we went to listen to lectures. Lecture from Pixonic on parsing PSD for UI/UX and facilitate the work of the coder in Unity3D was especially memorable. That was very inspirational topic, but many people had a question which sounded after the lecture if they would put this plugin in the access? The answer was no, still no! Then, unfortunately , I lost a bit the sense of the lecture.
The first day ended on this, business tickets went to the official party, we went to their parties, we gathered in a hookah where we were discussing our emotions and information received for the day.
On the second day of the conference there were round tables meetings, Game Roast and Game Awards.
Round tables are getting better every year, this time useful topics were for us in particular.
On Game Roast this year couldn’t set its game, because the organizers decided ambush show and change rules a bit). It was only a small announcement arrangements shortly before conference. The reason of this was kind of hacking all their socials and replacing the logo. And organizers couldn’t understand what happened. Â
This eventually turned into a takeover of Game Roast by developers under the auspices of D. W. O. (Developers World Order). A good turn in the history of Game Lynch and Game Roast. According to the rules of Game Roast, the losing participant drinks a cocktail mixed by other participants. In this the main ingredient were sprats! It was a great show, moments were not enough acting, but what we want from the developers) In the end, the developers won and the rules of Game Roast changed now forever, which is very cool. Instead of 5 minutes for roasting the judges and 1 minute for developers to protect their projects, now everyone has 3 minutes. Thank you for the show to all participants and Alex Nichiporchik for the organization!
Then the DevGAMM Awards happened. This time there had no cool chip, as in previous years had. There were simple videos with representations of nominees and awarding winners there were significant people from the industry. The innovation this time was the nomination for Hyper-Casual games. There were only 3 nominees, which clearly can not be attributed to the best Hyper-Casual games, it will be interesting to see what will be shown at the next conference.
We drank beer, discussed what happened during the conference, made a couple of useful acquaintanced at Bye-Bye Mingle, which is held after the Awards.
This was the end of the conference for us. Thank to all the organizers for such a warm conference and the experience we gained. We will be happy to leave you again!
With love, Yohoho Games!