I wrote a one-year retrospective on moving to Seattle for indie game dev:
Considering Moving to Seattle as an Indie Game Dev? My one Year Retrospective
If you want to move to Seattle to pursue indie game development, I’m now you one year into the future. Looking back at my experience, I have attended many more gaming events than before, met countless developers in my shoes, fostered promising business connections, and got a chance to showcase my upcoming game frequently. But there are some disappointments as well, such finding a flourishing social life like I had before. Here are all the pros, cons and what I learned from living in Seattle for a year.
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Edit by Glaurung: link URL cleaned up
If its any consolation, I have never managed to make friends in game developer circles apart from the people I work with directly. Then again, I find it difficult to even make business related connections in this game. I have fairly cynical view, that any time I meet another indie dev they must have some sort of agenda - maybe its because of the places I have tended to meet fellow devs. I treat gamedev meetups and events as work outings and always feel like I'm on the clock. Especially if money is tight, its hard to relax.
My first big event was to attend GDC back in 2015. This was before gamedev was anything close to a career and I was still safe in the cradle of academia. I had managed to get a free ticket, along with some other UK devs (all of whom I did not know). We were all in the same boat, everyone had a small project nearing completion. After arriving, only one of the group was interested in meeting up during the event, the rest all had their own plans and seemed to be putting on a facade of business-like self-importance when I tried to chat to them as humans. I assume these people, although fellow nerds deep down, were probably under immense stress and felt they needed to dedicate the precious time at the event towards more influential contacts (they are probably doing it right as my contact network remains impressively insignificant). I left the event feeling like I spent the whole trip in a bubble, just observing everything that was going on.
Since then I have attended a handful of conferences and meetups. The meetups are always fairly awkward. I find myself surrounded by people with the same interests as me, but everyone always seems to be on their best behaviour, very rigid.