DEVELOP CONFERENCE 2014

So Develop has come to the end & we had such an amazing time at the conference and met some great people. 

The funny thing about Develop is that it has a completely different atmosphere than most other events we’ve attended this year. It’s definitely more focused towards game development (who would’ve guessed right?!) & it was great to be able to showcase our game to people that make games for a living. Some interesting conversations came from just talking about the design, audio and art of Ether which was really refreshing.

We were also part of the Indie Showcase at this years Develop surrounded by some really cool games. There was a big range between the titles from really interesting experimental titles to the more polished bigger tgames. From touchscreen to controller to mouse to VR. There really was something for everyone which was really great to see. We were also lucky enough to be nominated as a Finalist for a Develop award. Unfortunately we couldn’t afford to attend the actual ceremony but we were up for the Narrative award among ‘Beyond’and ‘Brothers’ so there was never really a hope there! It was great to be nominated all the same & It’s something we’re really proud of so thank you Develop for nominating us!

A couple of amazing things also happened this week and I can’t get over how awesome even the biggest of devs can be. 

Epic Games had a big Unreal Engine lounge where they brought the gang over from NC to Brighton to start the revolution of converting all the Unity users over to the Unreal Engine 4. They also brought a bunch of over sized bean bag chairs which acted as their candy to steer tired developers into their clutches (clever move!). We feel really proud to be part of the Unreal engine family. Nowhere else can you casually chat to the vice-president of a company about your game and the games industry. Mark Rein is truly awesome and he’s great at getting you pumped about using Unreal Tech. It made me want to go home and load up UE4 to work on Ether some more! The cool thing was that I saw Mark 2 years ago at Develop 2012 before we had fully started working on Ether One. We had our picture taken together so I had to get another one with him. It’s now my mission to get a picture with Mark every time WPG ships a game!! Look out Mark!

The impact a crunch can have on people. Still smiling though! 

We also got to meet our Unreal teaching heroes, Zak Parish & James Golding. They’re the awesome guys behind the Unreal Engine tutorial videos and without them we wouldn’t have known how to make Ether! If anyone wants to get into learning the tech and is unsure where to start, the Unreal Engine YouTube channel is the place to go. We got loads of handy tips from them about how to make the transition from UDK to UE4 and they also wanted to know what would make our lives easier with development. They took notes and were genuinely interested in our game. It’s incredible to see that even though they make massive AAA titles themselves they also want to know how they can help other smaller devs. 

James with Shu!

One of them most unexpected events of the week had to be Shuhei Yoshida playing Ether One! We saw him from the corner of our eyes and had to get our picture taken with him. He asked about our game and where we were showing it then asked “can I play it?”. He proceeded to sit and play Ether One for 20 minutes! It was an honour for us to see him spending time on our game and not just playing it for 2 minutes. Hopefully he’ll be able to play Ether One in full on his PS4 soon enough 😉

His name will be imortalised in Ether One!

And this is how awesome the Sony developer relations guys are… We actually hung out with them and played some Towerfall! Of course we won most games but we had to let Guy win one or two 😉 Just like Epic, Sony’s first and foremost interest is games. They love playing games and checking out new and interesting things. They’re really excited to help out the smaller devs in whatever way they can if they believe in what they’re creating. The personal approach is really great to see and it’s nice to be able to have a conversation rather than just looking at figures and spreadsheets. We’re really excited to start working with them to get Ether One out to more people!

Disclaimer – Guy actually won quite a lot! They mustn’t do any work in the office! 🙂

All in all it was a really successful event. We met up lots of cool developers doing awesome things. It was good to meet the Among the Sleep developers in person and to also catch up with the Dream devs. If you’re interested in Ether One you should definitely check out both their games out – they’re great devs/games! 

We’re really looking forward to Develop Conf next year but now it’s time to get back to work on optimisations and getting Ether One into UE4! Not much work done on that front this week as you can imagine but full production can continue now that Develop is out of the way.

Thank you to Develop Conference and everyone that was there to make it such an awesome event. We’ll see you all next year!