Thomas Fan
Thomas has been a life-long, passionate gamer since he first got his hands on a black & white-only computer game, and enjoyed a wide variety of videogames during all these times. He once participated in all of the raid bosses’ first kills in 2 of the World of Warcraft Taiwan servers. After joining the industry, he devoted his time in helping game developer communities, securing resources for local game developers, in the hope of creating a better ecosystem for self-developed games. Thomas currently works at Institute for Information Industry, and is also one of the co-founders of Taipei Game Developers Forum (TGDF).
Manapool - Indie Fund Model in Taiwan
During 2013 Taipei Game Developers Forum, we invited Aaron Isaksen, one of the original partner of Indie Fund, to talk about its concept and model. Though it did help quite a few excellent indie games and viable as an indie-friendly funding option, it would be really hard for teams in Taiwan to approach Indie Fund, due to cultural barrier, the game genres that are more prevalent in Asia in general, and the quality of indie games we had at the time. It was also very hard to assess the viability of such model if we were to run it ourselves here.
At the end of 2015, Howard Tsao, the founder of Muse Games, mentioned that he wanted to try out this model in Taiwan, and was seeking potential projects. After several months of communication, we managed to kick start this initiative, and we luckily had Detention from Red Candle Games as our project zero, which had excellent performance within its genre.
Now, we identify ourselves as Manapool, the indie dev funding option in Taiwan. This panel consists of one of the co-founder of Red Candle Games, and 3 of the core partners of Manapool, to share our experience of this collaboration, and what we are looking for in the future.
* This session will be conducted in Mandarin.