So for those who don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter, I was at the LAUNCH Studio Showcase. It took place at the Innovation Birmingham Campus, near Aston University, and it had indie game developers from around the Midlands. It was the first time I attended one of these indie game developer meetups, aside from expos and the Windows Game Ambassador meetups, and such would be a good opportunity to meet some other indie developers, as well as a chance to show off my work.

So after taking the long walk from New Street to Aston University to the Innovation Campus, I got to talk with a few devs, including Joel Hoskin, the programmer of the upcoming game Godsweeper by Adam Russell, and Spacehopper Studios who were showing off their iOS, Android and (soon to be released) Ouya title, Delta-V, which is a really cool side scrolling racer that, like many of the games shown, are worth checking out.

The main part of the conference were the several talks of the main indie game studios, talking about their upcoming games. These include the Bumpkin Brothers, Wewana Play, Nicholas Lister, Birmingham City University’s Gamer Camp and Sync Interactive! All of which have really cool games in the works like When Ian Fell In the Machine, Imp Paired, King Cook and many others!

The last part of the day, aside from talking to more people that would lead to more link spamming, was showing off my games. I brought my windows phone and netbook (two items I highly recommend anyone to bring to a game conference) to show off BOOM: Fireworks Defence Unit and the upcoming Secret of Escape. Despite my concern of the work in progress (especially since I was using a Windows 8 build), the people I showed the game to were really liked what they saw!

Next time I have something in the works to show, I need to get a proper table booked. I felt kind of bad placing my netbook on random tables, including tables that other game developers booked to show their games, but it didn’t appear to bother people, so it wasn’t too bad.

The version I showed has some updates from the last version that was shown, which I’ll mention in a separate blog post.

So the LAUNCH conference was a great place to be, I’d like to attend more, but my placement work will restrict me unfortunately. Many thanks to the organisers and all the game developers I’ve met who made it a fun and social event to go to!