This year our team at Articy Software returned to Krakow at Digital Dragons, one of the biggest game industry events in Central Europe. For small to medium businesses and especially the ones looking to enter the Polish Market, Digital Dragons is the place to be. Whether the target is sales, publishing pitches, keeping up with new trends or simply looking to start a new local business the two day trip to Krakow is well worth it.
We appreciated the great organization and loved the game showcases and the energy of the whole conference. For a non-consumer type of event it was refreshing to see everyone genuinely glad to be there, working and still enjoying the time, nothing felt tiresome. It’s probably one of the recurring factors that keeps us coming back to Digital Dragons and this year we did it all: we scheduled business meetings, showed off articy draft: 3, checked out new game showcases and tuned in to some of the talks that peaked our interest. The topics ranged from Game Design, Art in Games, Programming and Technology to Business and Marketing.
Our favorite talk:
The one talk that stood out for us was Josh Sawyer’s “Breaking the Mold: RPG Evolution and Paradigm Shifts in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire”. In this cleverly purposed postmortem, Josh talks about the way feedback from the first Pillars of Eternity game laid the foundation for the expectations for the sequel and whether they turned out to be true. We received a keen insight into the changes that were made based on that feedback, how they were implemented and most importantly how they were received and whether it’s something they would try again or not. He also spoke of some of the controversial features introduced in Pillars of Eternity 2 like the 5 character party, the full voice over and the ship to ship combat, what it took to implement them with the added struggles during development and the player reactions after the launch. We loved the non-sugarcoating approach and felt like everyone in the room was able to take a piece of this game’s story and apply some of the learnings to their own projects.
Between the fruitful meetings, the insightful talks and interesting conversations wrapped up in a great atmosphere we felt that we gained a lot from our trip and will definitely be returning to Krakow next year!
Digital Dragons was announced to take place next year on 18-19 May 2020 in Krakow, Poland
If you’re attending any future events and would like to connect, drop us a line at event@articy.com
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