This weekend I went down to the Insomnia gaming festival, i53. I was really looking forward to it after the amazing time that I had at EGX in London and found that I was slightly disappointed. The website advertises this as one of the biggest gaming events in the country and there are meant to be a number of different panels that you can interact with, but upon arrival there seemed to be 5 a day and they were in no way helpful. There were mainly YouTuber's that were competing in game challenges that were funny to watch but I could have done that at home, and other than that there weren't actually any talks with developers, apart from one that was really helpful towards my PPP brief.
Other than that the website said that there would be meet and greet sessions available but does not state on there that these are only to meet YouTuber's, again not something that I really wanted to do. This was pretty much it, and the whole event was crammed into 2 rooms and filled with children running around, far less professional than EGX which had different sections that broke everything up and even had an over 18s section, which is the best thing ever done at an event as you don't have to push your way past screaming, excitable little horrors.
Overall the experience wasn't completely worthless as I did attend a good talk about how to get into the games industry held by 5 people who took it in turns to speak up on a platform at the front. It wasn't the best advice because it kind of just went through if you want a job you have to be great and go through companies, if you want to start your own company your best bet is to go through Kickstarter and kind of hope for the best. Not the greatest advice but they did make a fair few points about what they did to get into the industry and they also made lots of hints that you should go through the industry before creating your own game as you can then learn how it all operates before diving in at the deep end, which I guess is fair enough. After the talk I really wanted to go round and ask the developers some questions about my dissertation, but due to the sheer volume of children running around and jumping in front of you to grab their attention on what to do next in their game level it became very difficult to even get a word in.
All together I really don't think it would be worth my time going to this event next year. It was fun to walk around and see what was going on, but when you've paid for a weekend ticket and find that you've done everything in a day and a half, it really doesn't seem worth staying any longer. I don't feel it was a complete waste though, as I knew that I would have been annoyed if I hadn't have gone, but now I know not to go again and stick to EGX in the future, as it just blew me away at how good that was.
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