IGDA Exhibiting Event

Focused on exhibiting at events like GDC and Dare to be Digital and advice we received while attending the IGDA exhibiting event in Glasgow, UK.

Stephen McCallum, Blogger

June 23, 2016

3 Min Read

So today I wanted to talk about exhibiting at gaming events.

Yesterday Late Panda attended the IGDA monthly meetup at the MEGAbytes cafe in Glasgow. This event’s theme was Exhibiting with guest speakers Andrew and Craig from We Throw Switches, Steven Taarland from Insert Imagination as well as Tag Games and Anthony Gowland from Ant Workshop. They each shared their experience from the event from an organiser perspective and from an exhibitor’s.

During the event Andrew and Craig spoke about event organisation, how they make sure that games that reflect well off each other are more likely to be put together. This means that louder more action packed games are unlikely to be next to a quieter peaceful experience requiring immersion. They also spoke about how the event organisers chose possible exhibitors, with a mix of recommendations from other trusted game companies or direct email from the company itself requesting to exhibit and from them actively seeking out new and innovating talent.

Anthony and Steven spoke about attended several events and how the exhibitor must understand what they are likely to get from whatever event they are attending. Some events might be best for testing such as Dare to be Digital, others are to build business to business connections such as GDC (Games Developer Conference). Steven spoke about his game To-Tum and how events like Dare to be Digital allowed his company to either find bugs or gain advice on how to improve the experience. While Anthony spoke about his game Binaries and how the advice gained during these events changed the project and improved it over time.

After the event we attended another Bert Wednesdays event with some of the developers at the IGDA event. This gave me the opportunity to chat directly with Andrew and Craig from We Throw Switches about their event organisation and Late Panda’s history with exhibiting. We discussed our attendance at this year's GDC in San Francisco and that it was our first ever event, to which the response was “baptism by fire” which I believe is very appropriate given the scale of the event.

The IGDA exhibiting event helped us greatly as we will be exhibiting at Resonate from July 29th - 31st at the Glasgow SECC. The advice that we gained from this event will greatly increase the quality of our stand as well as how we present our game and company at the event.