We just returned from GDC in San Francisco. Here’s how it went!
Legion Hearts at GDC 2022
GDC was the first on-site event we did for Legion Hearts, and we put this post together to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what developers like us actually do at conferences like this.
On a personal note, this trip was actually the first time any of us went to the United States, and we got to do some sightseeing too while we were there. Thanks for all the tips you sent us, we had a blast!
What’s GDC?
The Game Developers Conference or GDC is an annual games industry conference taking place in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the largest of its kind and features talks from all sectors from the industry, new tech announcements as well as an expo.
This event is much less relevant for gamers compared to Gamescom or E3, but it’s a great opportunity to network for studios like ours as pretty much every industry player has a representative attending.
Pitching
Most of our time at the conference was spent pitching Legion Hearts. In roundabout terms, this means presenting a PowerPoint to explain what the game is, when we’ll make it and how much money we think it’ll make.
The goal is to convince an investor or publisher to provide us with the funding required to actually make the game. Depending on the type of investment, the investing party then receives a percentage of the game’s revenue or company shares in return.
GDC Expo
GDC has a dedicated Expo area where we pitched the V0.10 build to investors, publishers, platform holders and other developers for three days straight. Sources say we occasionally got to eat some food in-between meetings too.
Special thanks to our sponsors Pro Helvetia and Swissnex – getting a dedicated booth at GDC is prohibitively expensive and having one made the trip incredibly worthwhile. If you’re a dev yourself, check out some local accelerators to see if there are programs to send indies to conferences like this.
Side Events
In addition to GDC, we were also selected to present Legion Hearts the European Games Showcase and the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Mix. Hauling our entire setup from one end of town to the other was pretty daunting, but par for the course for events like this.
Each event usually draws in a slightly different crowd of people, and that means the elevator pitch for the game needs to change as well. To some, “Tactical Autochess RPG” clicked instantly, while for others, talking about time traveling Valkyries did the trick. Naturally, some people just won’t be into our game regardless of what we say, but that’s life.
Next Steps
Now that the jetlag has passed and we can feel our legs again, it’s time to follow up with the people showed interest in the project. This usually means sending the pitch and a playable build to publishers and investors who will evaluate the proposal internally.
This evaluation process usually takes a couple of weeks, and if things go well, we’ll move on to negotiating a potential deal. NDAs and the financial nature of these talks means we can’t be as transparent about our progress here, but rest assured you’ll be the first to know when we get funded.