2009 GDC Austin Adds Indie Games Summit, Calls For Submissions

Author: by Staff

Organizers of this September's GDC Austin have announced a call for submissions for the first-ever Independent Games Summit there, also revealing the Advisory Board and topics to be discussed at the two-day Summit. Initial information about the September 15th-16th Summit is available on the GDC Austin website, with organizers noting that the Indie Games Summit will include "discussions surrounding business models and methods, promotion and marketing, deep game design techniques and inspirational case studies." The Advisory Board for the Summit, which will be announcing its first speakers in the next few weeks, include local Austin-area independent developers Adam Saltsman (Paper Moon, Cave Story WiiWare contributor) and Brandon Boyer (editor of indie-friendly BoingBoing-affiliated game site Offworld.com). In addition, the three main Advisory Board members of GDC San Francisco's yearly Independent Games Summit, Flashbang Studios' Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink (Minotaur China Shop) and IGF Chairman Simon Carless, are also helping to oversee the event. The San Francisco version of the IGS -- held alongside the Independent Games Festival -- has hosted some of the most notable names in indie gaming over the previous years, from World Of Goo's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler through Flower's Jenova Chen, Braid's Jonathan Blow, and many more. As the GDC Austin Indie Games Summit call for submissions page explains, organizers are looking for the following topics, spanning both smaller one and two-person indies and somewhat larger independent console and PC game developers: - Indie Business: "How to make money, manage teams, and run a company without going insane." - Promotion & Marketing: "How to get noticed when the "Marketing Department" = you." - Design and Philosophy: "Deep dive into design techniques, for example: constraints, rapid prototyping, tools." - Case Studies and Postmortems: "Inspirational talks that demonstrate what worked, what didn’t, what surprised you and made you wiser." The submission deadline for presentation abstracts for the 2009 Indie Games Summit at Austin GDC is June 3rd at midnight PST, and more information is available on the official GDC Austin IGS website.