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.

Posted by Staff at 12:27 PM | Permalink

The organizers of Game Developers Conference Austin have started accepting submissions for the upcoming four-day trade show, to be held this September.

Proposals to present lectures, roundtables and full-day tutorials will be accepted for review by the GDC Austin advisory boards through Friday, May 8th.

Presented by Think Services, organizers of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, GDC Austin is a four-day event taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas from September 15 to 18, 2009.

GDC Austin focuses on connected games including online games, virtual worlds, and social networking. Submissions should address the most pressing development challenges for connected games related to business and marketing, design, social networking and community, services, production, and programming.

Continue reading "GDC Austin 2009 Calls For Session Submissions" »

Posted by Staff at 11:59 AM | Permalink