Vincent Yang
Vincent holds a degree from Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University. He has been the keyboardist, composer and arranger for PUMPKINney Fan Club in the past. After his compulsory military service in Taiwan, he went on to work at The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. Vincent founded his own indie game studio in 2014 and jumped into the game industry, creating a few small projects on his own, and later co-founded Red Candle Games in 2015.
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.