Brighton Develop Conference and other UK game developer conferences

brighton develop conference logo
Develop 2007
The Develop Conference and Expo in Brighton is on next week, and I’ve volunteered to help. It should be an insightful view into the conferences put on by the industry, this one is pretty new (started Last Year since I can’t find any older information).

Expect some kind of insight of how it went and if my camera captured anything interesting (off-work of course, its a long event). I’ve done a few conference-like events for my SU before, and it should be good fun to do something I’m very much interested in, and will at least be a good holiday away from my precious computer for 5 days or so. If you’re interested, I found out about volunteering via. the IGDA forums.

On the subject of conferences, the amount of UK-based game developer conferences is not exactly high compared to the USA, as there are some that have come and gone. Some good ones still around as far as I can tell (having not visited them).

The Game Developers Conference London is still active (although shows no plans for the 2007 conference yet) and I found out about the Northern Exposure event, which started this year (there are also group-organised events by the IGDA and Nevermind the Polygons – a midlands-based meetup).

There is also the London Games Festival in October – all told, according to the British Gaming Blog not a great deal was going on consumer-wise (although the BAFTA’s are on at the same time, which wish I could go to!). I couldn’t make it last year so I will have to try and make it for a day this year, probably to see the London Game Career Fair.

I’ll see if I can volunteer or help at any further events, pending university work, and hopefully this one will be interesting. Sadly, finding material from these conferences is pretty futile, since most is not made available (at least for free in any form), so I won’t be able to read more about any of the interesting events in Brighton. Getting to America to volunteer at one of the larger conferences (the GDC for instance) is impossible due to the amount of time it’d take away from my studies, and costs too much to do for free *sigh*.