From picking which game to make and building communities all the way through to presenting your games in digital stores... all the best stuff has already been done. So here's 25 ideas nicked from observing thousands of indie game launches.

Takeaway:

• How to build audiences for your game
• How to create great, sharable assets that explain your game
• When to start marketing your game

The Unity Asset Store is a great resource for developers, but it can also be a surprisingly profitable secondary revenue stream for small Indies. John Campbell shares his experience of developing for the Store. During the development of a game we all create tools, systems and assets for our own needs, but often these are valuable to others and can enjoy a second life on the Asset Store providing not just additional income but also secondary benefits to your studio. Learn the publishing process end-to-end, starting with identifying potentially successful assets, creating and refining them for best success, release and store presentation, and post-release growth and curation. Also practical advice on user experience, documentation and how to efficiently manage your community and support requests. Triangular Pixels has been publishing to the Asset Store for four years. We started as an experiment but have steadily grown our store presence to where it’s an important part of our business. We include knowledge gained from our successful (and unsuccessful) assets, what we did right and what went wrong, and how we’ve integrated our learnings into our day-to-day development of our game projects. We also cover the risks (and perceived risks) with publishing on the Asset Store and how to evaluate their impact on you, how to mitigate those that are relevant and which perceived risks you don’t need to worry about.

Takeaway:

• Learn how to evaluate your assets to identify potentials.
• How to build a distinctive brand and stand out on the Asset store.
• Learn about converting internal assets into successful store assets.
• Tips to improve your user experience to match the expectations of Unity users.
• Efficiently build your community and handle support and feature requests.
• Specific advice for programmers creating asset store tools.

Guy Cocker is a games journalist of 15 years' experience including editing GameSpot UK and Stuff Magazine. He has helped video game publishers including Electronic Arts, Activision and Sony by consulting on their in-development products and giving insights on how they are viewed by journalists and the media at large. This session will reveal some of the common issues faced by developers/publishers when communicating with journalists, insights on the prejudices and pressures journalists bring to the reviewing process, and specific methods the games industry can use to make sure their games are well received by the press.

Takeaway:

• How to positively influence the experience a journalist has with your game
• How to communicate effectively with journalists/influencers who may not have you on their radar
• Overcome some of the common mistakes that publishers/developers make when attempting to get coverage of their games

Part of a team responsible for securing multiple high-profile projects, Natalie discusses her methods for designing, creating and delivering successful pitches and presentations. Whether you’re pitching your own game to a publisher or trying to secure work-for-hire, a thorough and well-reasoned approach can make or break your project. The lecture will include practical advice on how to approach and create high quality documents, as well as talking about common pitfalls and easy-wins, with content ranging from high-level objective-setting, document design rules, presentation delivery and applying a product design methodology. The lecture focuses on objective-based design as a tool for creating contract-winning work.

Takeaway:

Objective-based design 

• How to define your pitch goals, your audience, and their needs
• How to design and present high-quality pitch documents
• How to avoid common pitfalls and eliminate risk

Every game starts as an idea, but not every idea will make a good game. So, how do you test your idea? And how do you test it fast? This talk will reveal the prototyping process at Bossa Studios, taking game jams ideas like Pigeon Simulator and I Am Fish through to prototypes in the hands of players worldwide. We will explain methods to achieve more with a small team and where to focus your energy so you can get the right feedback from your audience.

 

Takeway:

• How to rapidly turn your ideas into releasable prototypes.
• How to prototype more efficiently, spend your time where it matters.
• How to build prototypes for optimal audience feedback.

Releasing your first game on Steam can be a daunting prospect when you're a solo developer or a small indie team. What happens when you release a small game on Steam? What can you expect from Steam in terms of impressions and visibility? How does that affect sales? In this talk, Brian Shingles will attempt to answer those questions as he shares details and stats from his experience with releasing three small games on Steam through his microstudio, Bad Logic Studios. Brian will discuss the mistakes that were made and the lessons that were learned along the way, as well as offer advice and strategies for small indie studios looking to release their own games on Steam.

Takeaway:

At the end of this session you will

• Know what baseline level of visibility to expect on Steam and potential ways to increase it 
• Understand some of the common mistakes made when releasing on Steam and how to avoid them
• Possess strategies that can be adapted to your game/studio to increase your chances of having a more successful launch on Steam