IndieSkies are a fairly new, fairly large Derby-based developer made up of graduates students (edit: They’ve set up the company in the sandwich year of a four year course, which is an excellent strategy for students to deal with the chronic shortage of industry placements), including programmers from one of the finest games programming degrees in the country.

Programmer Andrew Roper approached me to ask if they could run a game at Bit of Alright, and we knocked some ideas around. We spoke about a game that happened at GDC in 2008: Destroy All Developers. It was a lovely idea with a fatal flaw. The concept was that, as a registered player, you’d be given missions, like “Get five business cards from European developers”. It seemed like a lovely way to get strangers talking, but in practice the leaderboards were quickly dominated by student attendees who had no meetings to get to and no boss to answer to as such. They roamed the halls with ridiculous stacks of cards, making perfunctory conversation with delegates or sometimes just asking them directly for their cards. It was needy, twatty, and not in the spirit of the game.

I told IndieSkies they could run something like it as long as they bore that in mind. It’s an interesting challenge to make a game like that run nicely, and they’ll be running the it several times throughout the day. It will center on teams of spies who have codephrases they need to slip into conversation, and near the end of the day there will be a debrief session to discuss how it all went.