Earlier this year, I submitted Relativity to IndieCade. However, on September 10th, I received an email saying that the game wasn’t selected as a finalist. I was pretty disappointed, but much of the judges’ criticisms were valid, and I was happy to have received such detailed feedback. If you hadn’t seen the feedback from the judges, I posted them here on this post.
Anyway, I decided I would go to IndieCade anyway, since as a dev submitting a game, you get a free 3-day festival pass (you can’t go to talks or panels, but you get to go to the festival for all 3 days, as well as night games on Saturday). Between that and getting to stay with friends while in LA meant that I only had to cover the cost of flight. A lot of indies are at IndieCade so I figured, even though I’m not showing, I can still meet people and get really useful feedback on Relativity, so the trip will be worth it.
So, what is IndieCade?
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, IndieCade is a festival/conference of independent games that takes place in Culver City (LA). This year, it was from Thursday, October 9th to Sunday, October 12th. IndieCade consists of IndieXChange, a full day event targeted towards developers, with workshops, talks, and meetings with publishers. This takes place on October 9th. Then on October 10th, the main conference/festival starts, and you can check out the officially selected games, as well as games for PlayStation, Ouya, Nintendo, and XBox, amongst other platforms, in their respective tents.
Pre-IndieCade / Glitch City / Grand Ole Glitch
On October 8th, the day before IndieCade began, I went over to Glitch City, a co-working space in Culver City made up of a bunch of independent game developers and artists. A bunch of developers from out of town were already there hanging out, and playing each others’ games.
Later that evening, Glitch City organized a party called “Grand Ole Glitch”, which was a showcase of different talents from around LA. It was really cool, because even though most of the people in the audience were game developers who had come in for IndieCade, the showcase itself was full of artists from different fields.
One performer that really stood out for me was Beau Sia, a spoken word artist. Here he is on Def Poetry Jam several years ago..
IndieXchange
The next day, on October 9th, I headed over to IndieXChange. As stated earlier, IndieXChange is an event primarily for developers. Everyone who submits a game to IndieCade is invited to attend. It’s intended to help developers network, learn, and get feedback on their work. IndieXchange provided pastries and coffee at the event, which was really great as registration for the event started at 9 AM.
At IndieXchange, there was also Game Tasting, which was basically a show & tell event that was happening throughout the day. There was an online sign up form for Game Tasting prior to IndieCade had started, but if you didn’t sign up, you could also ask to be placed on the waiting list. A key thing to remember is to always be ready to show your game. I think a few developers who were on the waiting list ended up missing their opportunity because they were either not present when their names were called or didn’t have their equipment with them.
Anyway, I had applied online prior to the event, and had been given a table to show in the morning session, from 10 AM to 11:45 AM. This was a really great opportunity for me to get feedback from other developers, as I had made several changes after Tokyo Game Show, and I wanted to see how players would respond.
There were several talks and panels going on throughout the day. I went to one called “Physically Based Rendering for Indies” by Anton Hand ofRust Ltd. The talk focused on techniques of physical based rendering used by their studio, and how that specific pipeline allowed them to create really photorealistic stuff with only a small team.
Here’s a pic of the talk: 
At 4 PM, there was a “Best of Game Tasting” event happening at the IndieXchange reception. Like the name says, it was a selection of some of the best games that had been shown during the day. I was very fortunate to have been selected, so I was able to show Relativity again at this session.
Here’s another pic of Game Tasting:
Here’s the Mayor of Culver City giving a talk at the reception:
At the end of the day, there was the IndieCade Award Show. I went but didn’t take any pictures.