AzPlay 2017: The Festival Of Indies
Azkuna Zentroa, a multipurpose venue in Spain, is ready to host the 8th edition of AzPlay International Festival of Independent Games from 29th November through 3rd December 2017. AzPlay acts as a springboard for indie videogame developers and Basque developers to earn global recognition for their work. This year’s AzPlay fest anticipates 432 videogames representing 63 countries across the world.
Azkuna Zentroa organizes this pioneering convention with an active partnership from NordicGame, AdopMyGame, Indie Couch, Game Slovenia and many others.
From the second day of the festival, there will be some amazing talk sessions in various languages by various speakers. The event includes: Argentinian Videogames (Spanish) and a Roundtable session on Designing the Videogame of the Future (spanish) along with Future II. Mapping Reality (English) and Marketing of games (English).
Cutting-edge technologies evolve from a healthy competition between the creators. AzPlay believes in this and so, it organizes the event ‘International Contest of Indie Games AzPlay’. To this global contest, hundreds and thousands of game devs show up from all over the world and only one will emerge as the global winner. Besides the explicit recognition, the winner can also stand a chance to win prize money worth a whopping €25,000 for all five categories including: Best Original Idea, Best Visual Art, Best Sound-music, Best Playability and Best Basque videogame. The winner of the competition doesn’t stop there at Spain, but will reach Sweden to be the Champion of the Champions. Yes, Nordic Game Discovery Contest is here at AzPlay 2017 too. One of the winners in these events will be one of the finalists for Nordic Game Discovery Contest in May 2018.
The AzPlay exhibition is free for anyone to have a glance at the most creative videogames of late. There are four expo areas where a variety of games will be exhibited. The organizers will select 25 games from all over the world to show at the 8th International Festival of Independent Games finalists’ exhibition area. These games will be witnessing the latest trends and creations. Especially for developers from Basque, there is an exhibition area called The Basque Developers’ area. Prior to the festival, students can learn the way to bring their creative ideas into reality through extensive workshops organized by AzPlay. Among many designs of the participating students, designs that project the future of videogames will be selected and featured at the ‘Designing the Videogame of the Future’ area. The organizers selected some games from the past seven seasons of AzPlay and these games will be displayed in series at the JokuPlay area.
When hundreds of videogames and creators, publishers, and investors meet up at one place for five days, what else could be better than it for an indie developer? Definitely, AzPlay is one of those precious events for a gamedev, isn’t it?