VN developer's web-conference Jan 14, 2017

[Aginyan]

Hi guys,
Sorry about dropping out of the sky w/ this, I hope no one is offended.
I'm Agilis, an old fan translator and now currently a TL/project manager at Sekai Project. And I've been organizing an independent event that I think is super relevant to everyone here, a visual novel developer's conference.

Visual;Conference 2017. Scheduled for Jan 14, 2017. 11AM EST until 5-7PM EST.

It's essentially a single-track tech conference for people involved in VN development to get together, listen to talks, and chat w/ each other. Since most VN dev teams are global and can't afford to travel to an event, it'll be done online in a webinar format. For logistical reasons, all talks will be done in English and many of the speakers who submitted talks are developers like yourselves.

Open speaker proposals close tomorrow night, and I'm currently in the process of confirming our guest speaker roster.
The current schedule is 14 20-minute speakers and 4 5-minute lightning talks. We've got plenty of submissions but more are welcome as I try to balance the content between artistic, 'hard' technical and 'softer' business side speakers.

For those interested in simply attending, tickets to attend are a mere $10 until 12/31, $15 thereafter.
We don't have any sponsors, and the small fee is there mostly to keep uninterested lurkers from cluttering the audience and to help defray some of the many costs involved in setting everything up.

If anyone has any questions, I'm happy to answer.

[firecat]

i dont see how this is any better than having a twitch stream, also, you making people pay for something that has been free and on top of that you making it exclusive to english speakers. just no.

[Albridge]

Aginyan, invite Japanese professionals.
English devs are struggling to make decent products themselves. Amateurs attempting to teach other amateurs on a subject they are poorly versed in are unlikely to end well.
What this conference needs are actual professionals--Japanese Professionals that know what they're talking about. And that's what will make this event worthwhile for all interested.

Best of luck.

[KittyWills]

Seems like a fun idea, but not something I would put money into. I hate agreeing with firecat, but using a free service like Twitch would probably get you more hits. Sorry mate. Best of luck though.

[Tempus]

I'll be doing a 20 min talk at this about my design process using the StoryDevs logo as an example.

[Morhighan]

I'm excited for this!

[Ulalaria]

Looking forward to this! See you in January!

[Kuiper]

All of the talks have now been posted to Youtube!

For those who didn't want to spend $10 on a ticket (or just happened to be busy that day), now is your chance to watch an entire day of talks from a really impressive lineup of speakers, featuring folks like Christine Love and Tom Rothamel (aka PyTom, creator of Ren'py).

Oh, and I'm there, too. (I gave the talk about fundraising.)

From what I understand, the event was a big success; I believe the conference hit over 80 attendees, which is a really impressive turnout for a paid event, especially a first-time event. Hopefully it's the first of many, as I really enjoyed this!

[Tempus]

From what I understand, the event was a big success; I believe the conference hit over 80 attendees, which is a really impressive turnout for a paid event, especially a first-time event. Hopefully it's the first of many, as I really enjoyed this!

Yeah, from the stories I've heard many early games conferences were smaller in the number of attendees than VNconf was. Though I suppose VNs aren't exactly a new art form now but hey. Still a nice turn-out, and as someone remarked during the event everything went more or less on schedule which was an achievement considering how long it was.