Field Notes: The Media School Travel Blog

I first attended the Game Developers Conference in 2018 thanks to that year’s Unity and GDC Student Scholarship. As an officer of the student organization Hoosier Games, I took the experiences I had and lessons learned from industry professionals and drafted the first outline for Gamedev@IU, which replaced Hoosier Games the following fall.

This March, I returned to GDC thanks to the IU game design program’s Level Up Award Scholarship. This time, I also participated in the 2019 Indie Train Jam, making new connections and further expanding my horizons.

This post will capture some of my personal feelings following this second trip to San Francisco. Hopefully it will be useful to others who are interested in entering the games industry.

The dream of making games

Like many others, I’ve long dreamed of becoming an independent game developer. I’ve generally believed I had a good shot given my technical and artistic backgrounds in computer science and graphic design, and my experience creating art projects, games and other interactive content over the past few years.

The first GDC session I attended this year threw a hitch into this plan. The inspiration for the title of this post, “So You’re Ready to Pitch to a Publisher (You’re Not)” was a talk by Bekah Saltsman, CEO of independent games publisher and developer Finji. Beyond advice specific to pitch preparation, I left the session with three key takeaways:

• The games industry is a collection of businesses selling interactive media experiences as products, businesses that partner with others for the distribution and promotion of these products. It’s an industry like any other, with all the good and bad that entails.
• Knowing how to navigate the business side of this world — whether it’s pitching ideas, networking or leveraging social media — is not simply a handy skill to have on your team in certain situations, but a fundamental component of what it takes to make game development a viable and sustainable career option.
• There are a whole lot of people that want to make games or content for games, or otherwise be involved in the production process of something they hold close to their hearts.

Living in Indiana, it’s easy to be isolated — to feel that things are much smaller or more mysterious than they really are due to the lack of constant activity and the relatively small number of perspectives compared to areas with high concentrations of game developers. Going to Train Jam and the GDC was, for me, a useful reminder that there are thousands of people with the same hopes and dreams as me, each with their own unique history of struggles and ambitions. It’s a reminder that’s simultaneously inspiring — the idea that I am not alone and any obstacles must be surmountable in the end — and deeply humbling — I am just a tiny, insignificant piece of an incredibly massive contraption.

So what’s the result?

My immediate reaction to this realization was a drop in my confidence in my ability to achieve my goals, professionally and creatively, as an independent developer. After leaving Saltsman’s talk, it was as if I had just become aware of another world that was previously invisible to me — that what I knew about being a successful creator was only half the story.

Paradoxically, however, my new awareness of the importance of business development and my lack of understanding thereof has also made me more confident in my ability to achieve my goals. Not knowing, or knowing and doing nothing, would undoubtedly hinder my long-term success and sustainability.

Learning that I am just a piece of the puzzle I want to construct is a first step to overcoming that challenge. Whether it’s by personal development through mentorship in areas I previously didn’t know about or in the ability to more intelligently find collaborators whose skill sets actually complement my own, I feel that I have demystified at least a part of what I need to do to succeed.