Full Circle

(Game designer/developer Ben talks about GDLX)

Last weekend found the good ship Bullion docking at the inaugural GDLX: Game Dev London Expo.

Game Dev London is a rapidly-growing developer community, with one of its key administrators being our very own ex-crewmate Stuart DeVille. Stuart pretty much re-invented the look and feel of Bullion's enemies, including giving us our first boss battle, and it was a real blow when changing life circumstances meant he had to step down from the team. So GDLX was a great chance for us to catch up with him. It also gave us a chance to put Bullion in front of a whole new audience: instead of the families and retro-gamers we were used to from the Play Expo shows, most of the people attending GDLX were connected to game development in some way.

The show was held at the Samsung KX hub: described as an "innovation space", the main area comprised of a sizeable auditorium for the various talks that were scheduled through the day, surrounded by various stands that would normally used to showcase Samsung devices and technology. Which meant that rather than the plain table we were used to, we ended up setting up on a desk that looked more like someone's home office, complete with house plants! But it was a decent enough space, so we cracked out the roller banners, the stickers, the treasure chest - everything we usually have on the stand - and settled in. And then things started getting slightly surreal...

If only the boss could see what really went on in the home office!

We had plenty of players during the day. But we also had people asking us about how to market their games. About how to position themselves to break into the industry. Pitching their skills to us. Even asking whether Leda Entertainment was offering internships. And suddenly it began to dawn on us that we'd come full circle: back in 2013 at Leda Entertainment's first show, we'd watched with no small amount of envy from behind our barely-decorated table stand as the team opposite us, with their banners and big monitors and other highly visible promotion material had attracted a continual flow of players. And now, here we were - while most of the other teams had crammed themselves together in a relatively small space which left little room for any kind of promotional display, we had our posters and pirate hats and give-away stickers and pirate gold chocolate... it was a bizarre Vader-meets-Obi-Wan kind of moment, especially given the people-oriented ethos of the Bullion team!

A great day of networking while watching other developers fighting each other...

But this also turned into a delightful opportunity. Game development is a hard industry to break into, especially straight out of education, and we've heard many tales of broken dreams over the years. So to a number of the would-be developers who came to talk to us about internship or job opportunities, our part-time team approach and the idea of building a skillset that would widen their employment prospects while at the same time improving their abilities as game developers seemed to come as something of a revelation.

With a little luck, we may see a number of other "grassroots" game studios springing up in the coming years.