Industry Day 2019

On 13th July, we held our second annual Industry Day; an event which aims to bridge the gap between education and development industries of games development and become a nurturing ground for Singapore-based talents to springboard their career in the industry.

The Industry Day was supported by Eliphant Pte Ltd, the organizers behind GameStart, and Impixel, an innovation space that aims to incubate and support the local games & tech industry. Close to 200 attendees (an increase of more than 60% from last year’s inaugural event)  showed up, including a Malaysian delegation of approximately 40 attendees from Camou Academy of Media Arts, Chicken Feet Studio (a studio the academy is incubating) and Glow Production.

The Industry Day had many veteran game creators share their experiences,  trials and tribulations, as well as giving valuable, diverse advice to the attendees.

Jonathan Blow, Game Designer and Programmer, shared his insights into the industry into independent development and showed early prototypes of his critically acclaimed games Braid & The Witness. 

Nickole Li, Senior Game Designer & Systems Designer who worked on renowned titles such as Ghost Recon Phantoms, Battlefront II, and Battlefield V, shared more about her game development journey and how she made her career decisions by her favourite phrase, "luck hacking"; a life philosophy which helps industry hopefuls view their career strategies from a different perspective. She also touches on exploring the word "games" and what that means to us.

Kim Tay Naylor, Art Director and co-founder of LandShark Games, talked about how their studio survived 9 years of indie game development. She particularly spoke of the realities of failure, a much-needed conversation in the indie space. The story of its effect on their morale yet being able to bounce back with their hit title, Zen Koi & Zen Koi 2, truly shows the faith and resilience of the studio.

Low Chin Hong, ex-co-founder at Inzen Studio, share insights into the current global games market, and broke down the dos and don’ts on monetizing mobile games, especially in the fast-growing China market. His presentation had clear, tangible information on what studios should think of when tackling monetisation for this particular market in China, even touching briefly on ethical concerns of addiction.

Teo Kah Hui, Global Localization Manager at Keywords Studios, gave a quick education on the many roles and positions in the industry, and how each of them is essential in pushing your game into the market; many of the roles addressed are positions not often discussed in game design schools i.e. data science, QA testing, UX/UI design, audio & localisation. This allows students to realise that there's more to careers in the games industry other than the usual art, programming & design streams.

Alwyn Lee, CEO and Co-Founder of Daylight Studios, shared more on DaylightX, an accelerator program that provides mentorship form early-stage game development to commercialisation. The goal of setting up DaylightX is to promote a culture of collaboration with talents and indies to deliver wholesome quality digital content for the global market.

Apart from presentations, the Industry Day also had a student showcase segment - students from various polytechnics and institutions set up shop at the venue to display their game, getting valuable feedback from both attendees and speakers. This showcase provides students with an opportunity to practice manning a booth for their game as well as pitching to the audience. With the support from Eliphant, the winner of the showcase will get a sponsored booth at Gamestart Asia this year.


Our closing speech has a few key points:


1. Games creation involves more than just development - journalists, academics, teachers are also welcome to our community and in fact, add a much-needed perspective.



2. Our industry has tons going on, with about 20-25 games being published each year & events happening every month. For those curious as to whether our industry is growing, our database speaks for itself.



3. Our industry does not exist in a silo - apart from reaching out to different community leaders globally for mutual knowledge exchange and support, it's also important for the local community to meet & mingle with game creators outside of Singapore.



4. On that note, we are extremely appreciative of everyone who came down for the event on a Saturday, especially visitors from Malaysia, many of whom had just attended a major KL event organised by our friends from IGDA Malaysia the day before.



Overall, we hope that our audience has thoroughly enjoyed the whole event from the presentations to the showcase & networking. Also a huge thanks to the volunteers and attendees who helped clean up the event and finish the food - as our event and organisation is completely non-profit, we are grateful for all the help we can get!

Live stream of the talks can be found here:
https://youtu.be/cBRFZlDatLQ (1st half)
https://youtu.be/zBYHZTa0vO4 (2nd half)