The Big Indie Pitch is a regular event run by the makers of Pocket Gamer and PC Games Insider. It sees indie developers engage in a speed-dating-st.
The Big Indie Pitch is a regular event run by the makers of Pocket Gamer and PC Games Insider. It sees indie developers engage in a speed-dating-styled pitching competition for fame and those sweet, sweet promotional packages.
The event gives indies five minutes to pitch their games to a panel of press, publishers and industry pundits. The judges then pick three winners and everybody gets valuable feedback.
The indie view
The Big Indie Pitch is getting bigger and bigger as we bring it to events all across the world. To give you an idea of what the event is like, who attends the events and the games on show, we’ve sat down with several past Big Indie Pitch contestants to offer their views.
Today, we’re speaking to Shala Chen from City from Naught, who submitted Keyword2: Hotpot Detective to The Very Big Indie Pitch at Pocket Gamer Connects Seattle 2023 and walked away as the runner-up.
All the pitching madness
Sophia Aubrey Drake: Tell us a little about yourself and your indie studio – who is on the team, and what are their inspirations?
Shala Chen: My co-founder, Leon, and I were both machine learning engineers working full-time when Keyword started as a side project. At one point, a friend of ours asked if we could hack the person who had been stalking her. We used some social engineering techniques and took that account down. We found it really interesting, so we turned it into a game, which became Keyword: A Spider’s Thread. While creating the game, we realized there were many repetitive tasks that could be automated, so we developed an internal tool called Marleen to assist our own artists with those tasks. As it turned out, investors were highly impressed with Marleen, so we transformed it into a standalone tool, and now we are working on it full-time together with a sequel to the game and actively seeking publishers.
Tell us about Keyword2: Hotpot Detective that you pitched at the competition.
Keyword 2 is a world that is “an inch wide but a mile deep.” Anywhere you look, you can go. The city draws inspiration from Kowloon Walled City, emphasizing verticality and offering unique traversal opportunities and secrets in every corner. In Keyword 2: Hotpot Detective, players assume the role of detective Kurt Jiang, summoned to the penthouse in the middle of the night to investigate the murder of the most powerful man’s daughter in the city.
