Day of the Devs has grown a lot since it first began in 2012, now serving as one of the biggest places for indie developers to showcase games. The event started as a collaboration between iam8bit and Double Fine to shine a spotlight on smaller titles, and has featured over 500 different games since its inception. This week, Days of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition showed off a slew of upcoming titles, including multiple world premieres.
While it does feature the occasional indie game, the Game Awards nominees and titles featured during presentations are more often than not AAA titles. Day of the Devs serves as a welcome contrast to this, with this year’s lineup highlighting 20 exciting new independent titles. Some are previously announced titles that may already be familiar to indie fans, like Hollow Ponds’ co-op herding game Flock and Coal Supper’s eccentric platformer Thank Goodness You’re Here!, while others like Digital Eclipse’s tea brewing sim Loose Leaf and Kind Words 2, the sequel to the beloved Popcannibal letter writing game, were featured for the first time.
Ricky Haggett & Richard Hogg Interview: Flock
Developers Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg, previously behind games like I Am Dead and Hohokum, discuss their upcoming colorful herding game Flock.
Screen Rant interviewed Jon Gibson and Amanda White to discuss the history of Day of the Devs, the importance of highlighting indie voices, and their plans for the future of the event.
Jon Gibson & Amanda White On Day Of The Devs
Screen Rant: This event began in 2012. Can you talk a little bit about how that first started and the biggest ways you’ve seen it grow over time?
Jon Gibson: Sure. 2012, geez, that was so long ago. It really spawned out of Double Fine in their last crowdfunding campaign for Broken Age and seeing the need for more of a spotlight to be shined on indies in general, especially in relationship to their own game. The idea of Broken Age, being out there and being a crowdfunding success. They also weren’t too shy about highlighting the idea that they were fortunate and being Double Fine and being renowned as a developer such as them was a very unique position to be in. So could they have an event that allowed the community to come out and play Broken Age and some other Double Fine things, but also at the same time serve the purpose of highlighting some underserved indies that didn’t have the same platform that they did as a developer.
And we’ve been working with Double Fine for many, many years as this idea was coalescing before it was even called Day of the Devs, and it was just kind of like throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to figure out what this could be. They invited us along to start formulating the notion for what a Sundance of indie games could look like. So the festival was born out of that, but it was much smaller back then than it is now. Amanda, I feel like it was less than a dozen games, that first one, right?
Amanda White: Yeah. We were in a very small venue and I mean, I think the crowds came, but again, it was sort of mitigated by the space that we had for people. But it’s definitely grown. We now show often 70, 80-plus games in a pretty giant space and service up to 7,500 people in a single day coming through to play. And then of course, we have the virtual events, the showcases which are reaching, I don’t even know how many people, maybe you do, Jon.
Jon Gibson: It is multi-millions in viewership for sure.
Oh, wow.
Jon Gibson: Which has been an effect of the thing that no one loves to talk about in the press. But the reality was pandemic was a very interesting, trying time for games. The games’ community was very focused on conventions and events and going to places to see people. And that was the lifeblood of Day of the Devs for so long. It was this free event that was free for developers to attend and exhibit and free for fans to come play games at, all under the auspice of making things as easy to access as possible. So born of pandemic was this desire to continue to spread the love while we were all locked up in our houses.
And it turned out to be a really nice boon for Day of the Devs. And now we’re doing both digital and physical events. Sometimes fantastic things are born of challenges, so we’re really grateful. It’s really provided a platform in a way that most people – if you really run the numbers, 10,000 plus people can attend the physical event, but millions of people can watch at home, and that’s a pretty magical thing.
Yeah, definitely. I’m curious now that you’ve seen so many games over the past decade, what genres do you feel like you’ve seen the biggest rises in popularity of over the years?
Jon Gibson: That’s a toughie. There’s always, with submissions every year, Amanda, I feel like when we’re working with the curation team, trends do emerge. Like you start to see each year certain kinds of things. Hard to pinpoint exactly what though, but there’s definitely been a rise in horror games actually in this last year. You’ll even see it in the digital showcase on Wednesday and at the show on Friday. But yeah, indie horror is definitely a thing that’s emerging forth most recent of mind.
But when it comes to the other genres, I would actually say ambition of games has increased, especially for smaller developers. When we’re talking about teams that are solo developers or just a few people, it’s really interesting to see just how much depth and just how many hours of gameplay might be going into what we consider an indie. You think small and manageable in terms of scope.
You don’t think dozens and dozens of hours is a really heavily wrought and incredibly cavernous RPG. But when you look at games like Tunic or Undertale and those kinds of things, it’s very clear that people spend a lot of time making these things and probably didn’t get a lot of sleep over the course of many, many years. So yeah, I mean, doing Day of the Devs for now almost 12 years, we’ve seen games at their infancy seven, eight years ago, finally starting to emerge to the world, which is kind of a fascinating prospect too, to think that a lot of the games you tend to play at Day of the Devs or see have been in the works for nearly a decade. That’s pretty wild.
Are there any of those that stand out to you that you saw grow over time?
Jon Gibson: Spy Party, actually, Amanda, I feel like holds the record for most time.
Amanda White: Most Day of the Devs.
Jon Gibson: This game from Chris Hecker, who famously is one of Will Wright’s chief humans over on the Spore franchise. But yes, SpyParty was this thing that he was working on as a passion project for many, many, many years. And it’s clearly out there in the wild now you can go to Steam and get it and it’s great, but that punctuates what Day of the Devs truly is about because it is unlike a Sundance film festival where you’re seeing movies that are finished.
Maybe a big studio will buy them and afford them some extra dough to put some popular songs as part of the soundtrack or something. But the movie’s there; Day of the Devs, you’re playing things that are not complete experiences. They’re still a little broken and a little rough around the edges.
And a lot of what developers are hoping for, and a lot of what we hope we’re bringing to them is the ability to get feedback that’s really critical. And you can play test all you want and send people surveys, but seeing someone play your game and then being able to have a real honest, candid conversation with them in person is a pretty fortuitous and awesome thing.
And you mentioned a little bit about the curation process. Can you talk a little bit more about how that selection works every year?
Amanda White: So we have reps from all the first parties along with Spaff [James Spafford], Tim [Schafer], Jon, Greg [Rice], myself. This group comes together, and we look at every single game that’s been submitted. If people are somehow connected to a game or have a conflict of interest around a game, then they recuse themselves from the conversation, so it lets every game be considered on a really level playing field.
So we all come together, we talk about all the games, and then people just root for their favorites, and they make arguments to support why certain games should be considered. And of course, we have a mandate to work on things like improved diversity in any games, and we want to showcase and highlight folks who come from all backgrounds and from all over the world, and no matter what stripe they might be, we want to make sure we’re giving people a fair shake. That’s kind of how it works, I don’t know if I missed anything vital there, Jon.
Jon Gibson: No, I mean, we’re very much aware of the need for representation and shining a spotlight on things that really don’t have that amplifier, that megaphone. We realize the more and more that we’ve grown and the more and more popular that Day of the Dev has become, it’s our job, the whole curation team, to continue to seek out and encourage folks to submit things when they might not have the resources to. And every year we try to think of new ways to bring more diverse and cool things into the fold.
So I think going into next year and beyond, you’ll see much more of that effort. But over the last couple of years, I feel like we’ve been pretty successful in finding games, Amanda. I mean, they come from all around the world, from every kind of gender and race; it’s neat. Even in the submission field, we ask if a team or certain team members of that developer feel like they’re from an underrepresented group. And sometimes people are really honest and they’ll say, “No, we’re just a bunch of white dudes.” [Laughs]
And then other times you hear a really detailed and personal story. When we put that field in the submission form, one, it was referential and helpful, but we didn’t expect really kind of emotional and kind of lovely pointed and candid stories. It’s been kind of a thrill to read through that stuff, and see where people are coming from.
And I love how this event is sort of a nice contrast from the Game Awards, which features indies, but it tends to be pretty AAA-centric. You talked a little bit about how a lot of this is about amplifying voices. How would you describe the importance of this event in regards to highlighting those independent developers?
Jon Gibson: I mean, indie developers don’t have the money to spend on advertising and travel and do a lot of the things that AAA companies can because they have the entire divisions, and they have budgets. The industry as a whole though, is an ecosystem. So the idea of big AAA is fantastic, and the idea of indie is wonderful, and coalescing it altogether is really the magic sauce.
And that’s why we’re so grateful to continue a collaboration with Geoff Keighley. We’ve done it for many years with Summer Game Fest where AAAs and indies all live together harmoniously. And that’s born of that Summer Game Fest collaboration for the last, going on five years now, came the Game Awards opportunity as well. Like the idea of using game awards as a platform to really amplify and spotlight indies.
I mean, Geoff’s given us an awesome opportunity in that. It’s so easy for the big games to trounce over the little guys, but it’s been a big mission of his to make sure that everyone gets their first slice. And that’s what we’re doing right now this week. Day of the Devs leading into The Game Awards is a really awesome thing we think.
And this event has already progressed so much over the past decade, but I’m curious where you hope to see it grow even more in the future. Are there any specific goals you guys have in mind?
Amanda White: Well, I think coming to LA and doing a show alongside the game awards was one of our goals. Next year we’ll be in San Francisco the first few months of 2024. We’ll do another sort of popup within Summer Game Fest Play Days, there’ll be a couple of Day of the Devs pods there. And then I think beyond that, we’d love to do more Day of the Devs events.
I think we are all interested in the notion of expanding our reach and being able to do things like offer scholarships or grants to indie gamers or developers, people who need help breaking into the industry and need help making their games on an even more fundamental level. And I think we’re all also interested in potentially going international. We’ve already partnered with Bit Summit to have some Day of the Devs presence there every year, and they of course come and have a presence at our shows too.
And so more relationships like that where we can really put fingers into parts of the world that don’t know anything about Day of the Devs unless it’s maybe through the virtual event. So having boots on the ground and just being able to be face-to-face with people internationally would be cool.
