Meet Dmitrijus Babičius, an indie game developer, a game designer, a project manager, a usual suspect and a frequent winner at Startup Lithuania’s Hacker Games hackathons. Last summer, at Hacker Games: Vilnius, he won 1000 EUR from Game Insight for a trip to an industry event for Gadix, a two-player ping pong game with tower defence and RPG elements. Dmitrijus went to Pocket Gamer Connects mobile gaming industry conference in Finland and now shares his insights from the event.

When I won this prize at Hacker Games: Vilnius, I was mostly working with mobile games, I even had some of them published (such as Pyromind, a puzzle game, and Loading, an arcade). For this reason, I decided that visiting the Pocket Gamer Connects mobile gaming conference in Helsinki would make the most sense. Also, the weather is still nice in September in the Finnish capital, and I was slightly less loaded with tasks at job in this period, so taking a few days off and visiting a great event sounded like a good idea.

And it was! These two days at the conference proved to be truly intense. Before the event, the participants were given access to an online matchmaking platform where everyone could set up meetings with companies and/or individuals of interest. I was restlessly sending meeting requests to almost every participant, as I thought there was a small chance that major studios would be interested in a lone indie developer like me and only few would reply. To my surprise, not only did I secure a good deal of confirmations, I myself was constantly receiving requests from gamedev studios, publishers, game advertising agencies and other companies alike. It took me a week to set up my schedule and naturally it ended up quite tight – eventually I had to run to and fro, stopping for interviews in pavilions and meeting rooms. These days were beyond productive, I met people from Rovio, creators of ‘Cut the Rope’ and other pioneers of mobile gaming. And yet, there was still a little time to attend some the conference speeches and keynotes. I was, and still am grateful to friend Indrė who accompanied me on the trip and helped both to organize and keep up with the schedule.

Obviously, the event was the most valuable in terms of networking. You can always check the speeches and presentations after the event online, but people, contacts and feedback is something of tremendous value and often available only in person.

Speaking of Gadix, the game that brought me to this event, sadly, I must admit I haven’t published it yet. As you may have noticed during the Hacker Games events, I tend to be a one man army, usually working alone on programming, animation, and other aspects of my games. This way I don’t have to make any compromises and I save some time on discussions. However, with limited resources, it’s a dreadful long-term decision to have something developed completely on your own, outside of hackathons. Furthermore, Gadix is a PC game, and up to a few weeks ago I was focused solely on mobile gaming. Yet then Valve suddenly announced they are about to close Steam Greenlight and introduce Steam Direct, which might prove to be a rather expensive platform. This prompted me to switch to PC game development. My goal is to publish the games I have almost complete while Greenlight is still alive. Needless to say, Gadix is one of these games.

Thank you for your time, Dmitrijus, and see you in Kaunas this weekend. GameInsight is continuing its contribution to the Lithuanian gamedev scene with its 1K EUR industry event of one’s choice as a prize for the winners of the Games Track – register now and.. Have a chance to win it!