SUBOTRON arcademy: Community Building /departure talk

Andreas Suika
Head of Indie Arena Booth, Cologne

Creating and nurturing a healthy community is crucial for the development of sustainable creative industries. Since 2005 SUBOTRON has been encouraging developers, artists, scientists and educators from the game scene to think collectively outside their boxes with its activities. Since digital games are not only the key medium of the digital transformation but the most exciting artistic expression of our age, how can we enhance the frameworks and increase the awareness of the innovations thriving on our exchange?
A best practice for this is the Indie Arena Booth, a platform for developers as well as a showcase for the colorful and vivid game scene between avant-garde and AAA from all over the world. It started as a very small hand-made exhibition space for indie developers at gamescom 2013. In 2018 it reached the size of 1012 sqm, with 86 developers from 28 different countries. The talk explores the motivation of the team behind the booth to bring people together and to connect games, partners and developers. It will give a peek behind the scenes and show how a cozy, tolerant and open atmosphere can be created.

After the talk, a panel of Austrian exhibitors of the 2018 Indie Arena Booth and local community activists will discuss their experiences and learnings:

Georg Hobmeier (Causa Creations, Vienna)
Wolfgang Tschauko (VR Giants, Graz)
Michael Hartinger (Organizer of the monthly Vienna Gamedev Meetup)
more tba.

Biography
Andreas started his career more than 18 years ago at Blue Byte and worked in different positions. As Tester, Data Wizard and Level Designer he had the chance to work on products like “Battle Isle” and “Settlers 4”. “Settlers 5” and “Settlers 6” he attended as Lead Game Designer. As Creative Director he worked on “ANNO” for Wii and DS and on “My Fitness Coach” for the PS3 with Move Controls. Besides the larger projects he had the chance to spend time in research, development methods and smaller games like “ANNO” for the iPhone. Working on such titles gave birth to the idea to take his own steps on this market. With Klaas Kersting, Matthias Schindler and Georg Broxtermann he co-founded flaregames in the role of the Creative Director. The start-up is developing and publishing successful mobile f2p games on all relevant mobile platforms. Since 2013 Andreas has been working as a freelancer and is helping companies to develop and publish games and applications. His work spans from Creative Direction to Level Design (e.g. Level Design for “Battle World: Kronos”) to strategic consulting (e.g. rondomedia). In 2014 he co-founded Daedalic Studio West as a Creative Director and released “The Long Journey Home” in 2017 with a great team. After that he worked as a game scout. In 2018 he took over the role as Head of Indie Arena Booth managing the biggest shared Indie Developer Booth in the world. Games he was working on won awards like the Red Dot Design Award, the TOMMI and several German Game Developer Awards.