Visual;Conference 2018 call for speakers is open

[Aginyan]

Hi! Some of you may remember that in January 2017, the first Visual;Conference for VN developers happened -- some ~90 participants got together and we shared talks, experiences, and met a ton of VN developers from around the world. Everyone was so excited about how the event turned out, I've decided to run another one this coming January!

For those that missed the event, Youtube videos of the event are available on this playlist: http://bit.ly/VNConf2017playlist

I've opened the submission form for speakers: http://bit.ly/VNConf2018cfs

If you have a story you want to share about any aspect of the VN development process, I'd love to hear from you. No matter how big or small the topic, whether it's programming, business, art, music, localization, tech demos, whatever. The deadline for talk submissions is Dec 1, so you still have some time to think up ideas and submit them (multiple talk submissions are OK, the best one will be chosen, max 1 speaker slot per person).

I'm working on getting a couple of awesome guest speakers this year, but what really makes the event awesome are the wonderful talks submitted by you guys. So please send in your ideas and join us next year!

[Morhighan]

I am looking forward to this! I'd apply for a talk, but I'm stuck in a rural area for an unknown amount of time sharing an internet line with twenty other houses. So I won't subject you to such buffering horrors. Looking forward to submissions and special guests!

[Katy133]

Thank you for including the YouTube playlist!

[sasquatchii]

This is wonderful!! Thank you so much for taking the time to organize this & put everything together. I'm really looking forward to participating in next year's Visual;Conference and letting people know about it.

I really like how the event is online and free at the moment - it makes it easy to access for people who might not be able to go otherwise, especially for such a niche community. I'm still working through the youtube videos from January, but I believe you mentioned something about possibly making this into a reality - and possibly having Visual;Conference at a real place/live venue in the future. I'm curious, what do you think it would take to be able to be able to make that happen (logistically)? Have you thought about doing it on a smaller scale to start, and then growing it as the event got larger?

I live in the southeast and have seen two Conventions really skyrocket in terms of attention & interest over the last few years - DragonCon and Anime Weekend Atlanta. They're both pretty successful conventions which I (and a lot of other people) really look forward to going to.

Anime Weekend Atlanta specifically I know started out as something extremely small in 1995 - with around 15 people that started the con back when they had to watch anime on VHS (and they'd mail those VHS tapes to each other to share shows). I believe at the time anime wasn't nearly as popular in America as it was now - but they all were passionate about it and decided to get together once a year to celebrate something they loved. I think it's amazing and really cool that something that started with only a handful of people and a little-known hobby has grown into the most popular anime convention in the South East, with more than 20,000 people that went this year.

[Aginyan]

The previous VNConf worked out great and from the moment it ended people wanted me to run a another one. Eventually I decided to make it an annual thing because of how long dev cycles are for games, and not wanting to have too much of a good thing.

The talk videos are made free a couple of days/weeks after the event (because I have to edit/upload them more than some nefarious plot). Actual attendance of the event is free for speakers and there's a very nominal $10 earlybird ticket, and $15 last minute tickets to attend. I'll consider free financial-hardship tickets to some extent too. We don't have any sponsors so the tickets pay for the commercial webinar software we use, as well as other incidental expenses like taxes, logos, artwork, etc. It also kept the signal-to-noise ratio high for attendees during the Q&A sections kept the live chat informative.

Last year we roughly broke even after all bills and invoices were paid, so this year my goal is to have enough left over to maybe afford to get some conference stickers and mailing them out by hand. I've also got some other ideas for the future if we have some extra cash, but for now I'm keeping the goals low.

A physical event would be a crazy dream come true. One day! But a lot of it will depend on you guys, the devs. Until devs make enough money that they can afford to spend the $1-4k+ it would cost to fly somewhere for 2-3 days, we'll probably stay online or maybe piggyback off a bigger event like GDC. It's really hard to find more than 2-3 devs in any one city (that don't work together already).

If anything, the next step is to see if we have enough attendees and interest to expand the online event into a 2-day format. I have some ideas for a fun 2nd day that is more interactive and less exhausting. But VNConf2017 numbers weren't quite high enough to support that. If 2018 is bigger, I'll seriously consider it for 2019.


Fun fact: last year people asked me to invite professional japanese VN devs to speak, I said no because organizing the conference for the first time was insane enough as-is without me having to do interpretation/guest handling work. Well, this year I've asked not 1, but 2 JP devs to attend. Good ones with over a decade experience, each. They've tentatively said they'd like to attend, but stuff can come up last-minute. I'm hoping to announce them around the time accepted talks are announced.

[Aginyan]

Don't want to create a new thread and spam, so I'll just necro-bump the thread, The submission cutoff is a few days away, so anyone who's thinking of submitting a talk idea, please do so before end of day 11/30!

I'll take a few days to go over submissions, potentially ask for clarification for some borderline submissions, and then make speaker announcements a few days afterwards.