May 7th and 8th marked this year’s IGC East conference. The conference, as described by their website, is:

…for developers of console, flash and casual games who want a leg up on the competition and for the publishers who want to see the hottest games in development by the rising stars of the industry.

Over the two days these Independent developers get to meet with other indy developers as well as listen to panels and keynote presentations ranging in topics from “Focus Testing – Making games that people other than you like” to “How to maximize PR for your game”.

(Chris Oltyan of Zeitgeist Games speaks at ‘Focus Testing – Making games that people other than you like’)

For the most part there normally is not very much news that comes out of these kinds of conferences, however, on Thursday night, after the panels and Keynotes, a few of the developers showed off the games that they had been working on. There were about ten groups showing off their work and out of the ten I found two developers that I felt had something unique in their games. The first was Ichiro Lambe Founder/ President of Dejobaan Games and the second was Scott Macmillan, Founder of Macguffin Games. Be sure to check back later for parts 2 and 3 of my IGC East wrap-up where I will go in depth about these two developers and why I think they will succeed.

UPDATE: Read Part 2 here

(Attendees crowd into a room to see the latest Independent games during Game Demo Night at IGC East.)