IMGDC - Post Mortem - Part 1 - The Planning

I'm lying in bed staring at the spider on the ceiling. As the spider completes his web and scatters across the ceiling I find myself wondering if he's thinking about his next web. Do spiders have multiple webs? Then I remember why I'm still laying here awake instead of sleeping like I should have been the hour and a half ago I came in here. I surrender to the fact that I'm not going to fall asleep now, so make my way into the kitchen for something bad to eat.

It's been nearly a week since IMGDC 2007 and I can't get the damn thing out of my head. I keep remembering bits and pieces from it. How excited I was to meet Richard Bartle. How much more excited I was to hear him speak. How it felt to stand in front of everyone reading the opening speech. How tired I was from getting just a few hours of sleep the three days leading up to the event. How surprised I was that I actually pulled it off.

Then the real trouble hits me. Next year's IMGDC. I should start planning it now. I should get a date and the venue sorted out now so I'm not stuck using someone else's timeframe like this year. I should try to line up sponsors early this time.

"Why are you still awake Jon?" Now my wife has a beautiful voice and I could listen to her talk all day, but not all night. If I even mutter the words "conference" or "IMGDC" I'll probably be sleeping on the couch tonight. "I'm hungry" I offer hoping she doesn't see the half-handful of my 8 year old's Easter candy in my hand.

Because IMGDC was one of the greatest experiences of my life, what follows will be the post-mortem of the planning, execution and after-math of the Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2007, my first attempt at planning and running a conference, and the events that put Last Straw Productions on the map. I have split this into 3 blogs: planning, executing, and after-math.

It's October 2006 and I'm staring at yet another GDC ad for 2007. I'm disappointed because there seems to be a trend of game dev conferences. I should say two trends, the first being that none of them are in the north or mid-west. Everything is down south, in the east or in the west. I live in Minnesota and being an Indie developer with a wife and 2 kids, I don't get to just run off and fly across the country whenever I want.

Trend #2: Everything is becoming more commercialized. Prices keep going up with 100 different options to choose from for passes. What happened to caring about the content and what you are delivering? What happened to running a conference for the benefit of those who attend and not to run a company? An entire company that simply holds conferences. Great business, Poor community.

I also noticed that all the MMOG related conferences (or sessions within bigger conferences) never really fit for an Indie developer. I asked myself "What games am I really passionate about making?" The answer was easy causing the birth of the idea: Indie MMO Game Developers Conference.
I shot out a quick forum at GG and mydreamrpg.com to find out if anyone would actually show up. I planned on either putting it in Minneapolis or Chicago. The replies were overwhelmingly Minnesota, which worked out well since that's where I live. Over 25 people replied that they would be interested in this conference.

This was enough to get me excited about planning it, so I immediately kick-started the internal gears and we were off. I need a few speakers. The first name that popped in my head was Dr. Richard Bartle. Yes, THE Richard Bartle. The godfather of virtual worlds. The one that anybody who's anybody in the MMOG world knows the name of. Of course, there's not a chance in hell I'm going to get Richard Bartle, who lives in England, to fly to the US for an Indie conference of 25 - 30 people.

After tracking down Dr. Bartle, I shot him an email about the conference. I had to reread his reply several times and pinch myself a couple because his first reply was that he was definitely interested in speaking at it! I was in shock. The only stipulation was that he didn't want to pay to speak at it. A quick yahoo travel quote set his tickets in the $700 range. (How the hell you can fly overseas for $700 yet it costs $450 to fly to Florida from Minnesota is beyond me, but that's a whole other blog) Ok. So about $1000 and I got Richard Bartle, I can do it.



I started scouting locations at local hotels and casinos (I should say casino, since only 1 is near enough to pull it off.) My initial goal was a day and 1 track, but my ambition wont leave it to that, so I expand that quickly to two days and three tracks: design, development, and business. The range of rooms I'd need was between $1500 and $2500 depending on the location.

While looking for locations, I'm also looking for a sponsor. My wife will kill me if I end up paying for all of this out of pocket, so I had to promise her I wouldn't spend our own money on this conference. I only searched for a few days before landing in front of the team at Dream Games. I pleaded my case to Ashley, letting her know that I needed about $1500 to cover the conference rooms. If I could get this, I believed I could get enough from registrations and other sponsors/vendors to cover the rest of the conference.

A couple days later, the sponsor agreement is signed and IMGDC is officially a conference. I can't even describe the relief I felt and the gratitude towards Dream Games for taking the chance that their $1500 would go to an unsuccessful first time event like IMGDC. If it weren't for Dream Games, IMGDC would have simply been an idea in my head. Even though I have thanked them profusely, I don't think I can really tell them in words how it felt to not have the weight of "will this conference actually happen" on my shoulders anymore.

I settled on the Minneapolis Convention Center because it was surprisingly cheaper than most of the hotels and made the whole thing feel more "professional." I didn't want IMGDC to feel commercial, but I did want it to feel professional.

I ended up dropping one class for sake of expenses and thought it would be easier to plan with only two tracks. So I cut business and just had design and development. This was met with many comments pointing out that Indies generally know the development aspects, it's the business stuff that they really need. This struck a cord, so I decided on the final two tracks being design & development and business & legal. I seemed to have more interest in people speaking to the business & legal track than the design track, but more on that later.

The search for speakers began with Brian Green. I can't remember how I found Brian, but I do know that over half of the speaker contacts I received (and ended up speaking at the event) were a direct result of introductions Brian set up. Brian is another true success story of an Indie studio and a prime example of what Indie Passion can accomplish.

Here is Brian about to cast 'fireball' on me.

Hundreds of phone calls, emails, and sleepless excited nights later, I'm 2 weeks prior to the event. It's about 4am at my local Kinkos and I'm picking out signage and designing the conference program. I never really used Kinkos before, but holy crap can they pump out great quality stuff quickly. This would be the first of several early morning Kinkos trips, last of which was two days before the conference to print off Last Straw Productions brochures which I didn't even think to make up in the mix of things.

Multiverse becomes my second sponsor, allowing there to be bags at the conference. Brown College becomes my third sponsor with a vendor booth rental, allowing me to actually feed the speakers, sponsors, press, and volunteers. I've secured about half a dozen volunteers at this point as well, which is another load off my chest considering I didn't start looking for them until a week prior.

GarageGames comes through a week before the conference with the last sponsorship, which pulled me from paying about $450 for this conference to happen (don't tell my wife, she'd probably still kill me for almost paying for it) to being ahead about $45.

Overall, the planning of this conference has been a very stressful, complex, time-consuming, expensive, and exciting experience. I've made many, MANY great contacts that will help me build Last Straw Productions into a self-sufficient gaming studio.

I've had an unofficial board of advisors between Kelly Heckman, Brian Green, and Cynthia Freese from Evergreen Events. Cynthia was a strange one to get as her business is running events, one of which is a direct competitor to IMGDC which is OGDC (Online Game Developers Conference). Cynthia has been a wealth of knowledge and although Dream Games allowed IMGDC to happen, Cynthia allowed it to stay professional and enabled it to be a success. I can't thank Cynthia enough for her help with the planning of IMGDC.

Tune in next week for the execution post-mortem for an inside look at IMGDC.

Dream Games - www.mydreamrpg.com
Richard Bartle - www.mud.co.uk/richard/
Brian Green - www.neardeathstudios.com/
Cynthia Freese - www.evergreenevents.org/
Last Straw Productions - www.last-straw-games.com
IMGDC (2008 site coming in a few weeks) - www.IMGDC.com