The first day of Austin GDC has wrapped up and there’s been quite a bit of interesting content out there especially from the Indie Games Summit. I’ll post a few of my notes over this week, but for the first day here’s a quick round-up of all the excellent summaries already published for you to check out.

If you only have a few minutes, make sure you check out these two:

  • Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption by Colin Northway – Gamasutra’s Summary, Destructoid’s SummaryColin Northway’s post-mortem about Fantastic Contraption, the Flash game which made him a “boatload of money” for his efforts. This was probably the best talk of the day in my opinion and had tons of great points and data. What particularly interested me in his game design approach was how much play-testing he did early on to discover what I would term as emergent gameplay behaviors, finding out early what people considered a “fair” win to a game and that they loved to share their contraption videos with each other. The built-in social aspect from sharing and posting videos was one of the ways that Fantastic Contraption grew and became more viral. Also, it’s great to see such a successful Flash games developer! 3.5 million plays in the first 3 months, 0.5% conversion rate at $10/pp and you can do the math :)
  • The New Indie Hotness by Brandon Boyer – Boyer’s own talk summary complete with pictures and links (!!) on his siteBoyer covered some awesome video games in his morning session, playing some of the latest and greatest indie games live in front of the audience. How many out of these seven have you heard of? Hit the link and comment on this post to say how much indie gamer cred you have!

Want more? Gamasutra and Destructoid have done some great coverage of the IGS talks today, summary links below:

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