The SGA community rocked Novi Sad – the third SGA Assemble

The autumn gathering of the SGA community was a little early this year, so we spent the last days of summer in Novi Sad, soaking up the setting rays of the Vojvodina sun, awesome wine and really strong gin and tonic. If you want to soak up all the vibes from the gathering, read on!

On September 20, members, friends and partners of the SGA community gathered for the third time, this time in Fabrika in Novi Sad, and in the largest number yet. This number shows how important the step away from Belgrade is and how the other game dev centers of Serbia are no less productive. The Assemble was hosted by 3Lateral as part of Epic Games, one of the founding members of SGA. The great technology they have signed had the opportunity to shine at the SGA Assemble, too.

Uroš Sikimić, Business Development Lead, addressed the audience on behalf of 3Lateral. He pointed out that today it may seem that the Serbian gaming ecosystem is developing on the shoulders of giants, but almost all of those giants started as indie teams, so the next gatherings will probably reveal many more giants among us. 3Lateral also showed the results of the first Unreal Fellowship held in Serbia, and if you didn’t have the opportunity to attend our “family” viewing in Fabrika, you can make up for it here.

Then the familiar SGA trio took to the stage – Marija Ilić, President of the Board of Directors, Relja Bobić, Program Director, and Kristina Janković Obućina, Executive Manager. They had a huge task before them – to present what SGA had done in the previous program cycle and, more importantly, what it’s planning on doing in the next one. In short, we delivered.

Let me try to speedrun this: we celebrated our fifth birthday, and on the eve of the celebration a new board of directors was elected. Another annual report is behind us, as well as the Creative Tech Serbia pilot project. There were many more projects and it can seem like a big challenge to keep track of them all, so now we have a page on our website where you can learn more about them.

Shift2Games occupies a special place among the projects realized last season. By this name, we now primarily mean an online platform where everyone interested in joining the game dev club can learn the how, the what and the where. This is also the name of the Career Day held in June in Belgrade, which will soon visit two other Serbian gaming centers – Novi Sad on October 18, and Niš on November 9! Also, on September 27, the Shift2Games TV series of six 20-minute episodes in which we spoke with industry seniors began, which you can follow every Tuesday at 8:00 PM on Sport Klub Esport.

This year may have been (and is yet to be!) mostly about conferences. We held our second FTW! conference – a b2b and stakeholder gathering of over 500 people from over 20 countries from the field of game development. And while we were bringing Europe and the world to Serbia, we went to European conferences and fairs ourselves. The crown jewel was definitely Serbia’s first official participation at Gamescom!

This important trip was announced at last year’s SGA Assemble. Since this event serves as our New Years resolution list, which we take extremely seriously, we decided to raise the difficulty level this year by announcing that next year Serbia will send a trade mission to one of the world’s largest conferences, which is held every year in San Francisco – the GDC!

The hype after this announcement was not easy to calm because it was time to present the upcoming program, too. Feel free to copy these points to your “to do/follow” list:

• Eskalator – this is really big news! In the coming period, you can expect the establishment of the first regional accelerator program focused exclusively on game dev.
• Ecosystem development strategy – we have grown enough in these five years that it is time to put concrete goals on paper and chart a path for further growth.
• Unreal Day and Unreal Game Jam – on October 26, the second Unreal Day will be held in MTS Dvorana, and this time it will be preceded by the first regional Unreal Game Jam, which we are trying to grow into a European one next year.
• Pandora Conference – On November 22 and 23, the second Pandora Conference will be held, where the theme that marked this year – artificial intelligence – will be discussed again in the context of gaming.
• Playing Narratives events in Skopje and Sarajevo – in October and November SGA will organize something outside the country’s borders for the first time. Skopje is expecting a meetup related to game art on September 29, and as for Sarajevo – stay tuned!
• A MAZE. exhibition of arthouse and alternative games – this year, too, as part of the Playing Narratives finale, you will be able to visit the exhibition of the Berlin festival.

A lot of information at once, right? There was even more in person, which made for a positive explosion of the mind. Especially for someone like me, who hasn’t even completed her first year in a games-related position. SGA Assemble is a great opportunity to connect with like-minded people. I met those I know from the first Playing Narratives cycle (which is how I swam into these waters in the first place), who today are part of a flourishing indie studio, and I hope also the future giants I mentioned at the beginning of the text. I moved from rambling chats to serious topics, since there were also representatives of the academic side of gaming at the Assemble. And I chatted with those who have been part of this story even shorter than I, and it was amazing to hear how quickly their lives changed for the better. There were also unexpected moments – a certain Branko Miljković read his poetry to us on the party bus back to Belgrade. Who would have thought that there are such among us?

Well, that’s all from me for now, but as you can see, there’s a lot more from SGA until the end of this calendar year, and especially in the next program season. See you next year at the Assemble!