The 2014 edition of the Nasscom Game Developers Conference or NGDC 2014 took place at the Westin in Pune this year from the 13th to the 15th of November. Compared to NGDC 2013, there were a lot more stalls this year as well as a substantial increase in the number of participants. The conference took place over 3 days this time, with the 13th being mostly for workshops for developers.
The inauguration took place on the 14th and was followed by a Keynote by Bob Bates on the Creative Process. There were many stalls showcasing student projects from schools and colleges across the country and we played quite a few innovative games. Also on show were the participants for the Bring Your Own Game (BYOG) award category.
The primary focus of most of the talks was on mobile and browser games with monetisation tactics for free to play games.There were quite a few talks about Art in games as well. Shailesh Prabhu and Apoorva joshi gave an interesting ‘zombie’ postmortem of their yet to be launched iOS puzzle title Socioball that innovatively leverages Twitter for sharing game levels. Arvind Raja Yadav also gave a postmortem of Unrest and showed off his next project ‘Late to the Party’ which is a cold war era spy RPG that learns form some of the mistakes of Unrest. He also announced that his earlier game ‘Will fight for Food’ had been greenlit and would start selling on the Steam store soon.
Some of the other prominent speakers at the event were Josué Monchan, Sho Sato, Karin Ryding, Ariel Belinco and Angelo Lobo. We also spotted some cosplayers dressed as Gordon Freeman and Chell. There was also a happening party in the evening of the 14th.
The Nasscom Game Forum or NGF Awards ceremony concluded the events of the 14th. Winners included Squ, Decimated, Woordict, Unrest, Dynetzzle Extended, Hues, Real Cricket ’14, Petite, Dadi Vs Jellies, Asura and Saggitarius. Squ was notable for being the only board game. Verdant and Amalgamate won the BYOG awards.
The 15th began with everyone recovering from the previous night’s hangover with some strong caffine therapy. The highlight of the day was probably Rami Ismail’s talk on PR which was quite illuminating and an apt conclusion to the event.
You can check out some pics from the event below. Pardon the poor quality of our phone cameras but we planned to live tweet and poor mobile network coverage threw a spanner in the works. Until next year, iLL out.
