Game Republic has returned from the Reboot Develop Blue conference, which took place from 14th – 16th April in Croatia. The conference itself is very different to many others – it takes place at the Sheraton hotel in Mlini near Dubrovnik on the edge of a beautiful bay with sparkling blue sea and spectacular views (see main photo above), and it doesn’t have a meeting system, with delegates encouraged to “go with the flow” and have serendipitous meetings during the event, or in the B2B area, or take part in some of the leisure activities provided such as a football tournament, figure painting, a full-on rave in the garage below the hotel, or fishing trip (if you pay for the VIP ticket).
There are of course presentations, and we saw some excellent talks including a keynote from Director of Games at Google and industry legend (created the Amiga 1000 and worked on arcade games such as Sinistar) RJ Mical who has most recently being working with AI, and says that it is terrible at creativity without any human interaction guiding it. There was also a stellar talk from Kate Edwards (Geogrify / SetJetters) about her fascinating work with culturalisation for Microsoft and other companies, plus developer Ste Curran, who as well as releasing games and running the Maraoke singing party event, always does an excellent rundown of the 100 things that are “killing the games industry” including some ironic, some funny, some serious, such as AI, Triple I and Frustrum Culling.
Other talk highlights included Strategies for Indie Devs: How to Succeed with Xbox by James Lewis, Director of the ID@Xbox Developer Acceleration Program (with all the tips in the photo below this feature), a publishing panel headed up by Callum Underwood from UwuBiz (who spoke at our GR event in York in January) with Raw Fury, Focus and others, a fireside chat between Charles Cecil (Revolution Software) and Ste Curran where they invited the audience to come up with a new game IP, and a super warts-and-all talk from Andrew Willans, Studio Design Director at Sumo Newcastle entitled Flow State: Player and Developer Experiences, about the development of their futuristic Running Man-inspired race game DeathSprint 66.
As well as speakers from Sumo and Revolution, among the hundreds of delegates were Game Republic members including Huey Games, BeamXR, ECI Games, Cooperative Innovations, Airship Interactive, Exient, and Curve Games. Reboot Develop Blue is a very different conference, something that celebrates its unique vibe and highly recommended if you fancy a less expensive and hectic business alternative to GDC or Gamescom.
