Hello everybody!
This week the update will be a little different than usual, as Cyangmou and myself attended the AMAZE ./Berlin Indiegames Festival, and the experience was nothing short of … well … amazing (in no small part because it was our first time showing the game ^_^’)
We took a few pictures to share with everybody, but what the pictures fail to convey is how incredibly satisfying it felt to watch others have a good time with something we created, and the amount of really good feedback we received from players, so much so that we ended up with a long list of changes - some of them pretty substantial - that we want to implement based on said feedback (more on that later…)
But first things first, the festival!
AMAZE ./Berlin was taking place at the Urban Spree, which is a “1700 sqm artistic and re-creative place focused on contemporary art and urban cultures” located on the banks of the Spree river in Berlin, Germany.
The crowd was a healthy mix of gamers, press, and publishers (which I didn’t necessarily expect)
The main entrance, with a pretty clever display of the games nominated for the awards.
After being assigned our machine, we faced our first bump in the road: the game crashed at launch while trying to initialize the audio device! It turned out the sound library really didn’t like it when no output device was plugged in (that was also our first bug in what was to become a pretty long list!). Thankfully Cyangmou had a pair of earphones with him, so we were able to work around the issue, and we were ready to go!
Yay, a player! (incidentally he provided very insightful feedback - if you see this … thanks man!)
Let’s check what’s going on here!
However our second bump in the road - one which would cause me to mentally facepalm throughout the rest of the day - followed soon after: everybody, and I do mean *everybody*, was running out of ammo barely 5 minutes into the game.
Guess we didn’t anticipate how much fun blowing s**t up would be ^_^ It got so bad that we started taking turns typing the ammo cheat code over and over (why I made that cheat code a simple “refill” as opposed to a more permanent “infinite ammo” is beyond me…).
As it became painfully obvious that we wouldn’t be able to interact much with players if we were busy repeatedly typing in cheatcodes, I decided to head back home to grab my laptop (mistake number 2: should’ve brought it along in the first place…) and make an emergency build.
One hour later I was back, build in hand, and we could finally let players have some fun and socialize a bit more with them!
Props for the sick bag!
We also had quite a few girls try the game
Discreetly watching somebody play. Not pictured: my huge nerd-gasm from trying to wrap my head around the fact that a stranger is playing my game and seemingly enjoying it
There were also some pretty cool “non-video games” (not sure what to call them?) such as Magnesia, a multi-player game where you drag metal balls around a plexiglass maze with your “controller” (a big fat magnet) and must deposit them in special slots to score points:
Also, world-famous 1D dungeon crawler Line Wobbler:
Alongside some pretty interesting VR games:
And of course indie-darlings such as Crawl:
But before wrapping up the day, we had one more surprise waiting (and by “we” I mean Cyangmou… the festival ran until 3am and I had to go to work the next day ^_^’ ). Some of the staff, having seen the game during the day but unable to play at the time due to being at work, approached Cyangmou and asked to have a go!
All in all it was an incredibly positive experience, and a great reminder of why all those sleepless nights spent coding and painfully arranging pixels really *are* woth it.
As a final word I just want to thank everybody who stopped by and tried out the game; you are all the reason why people make games, watching you play was mad fun, and your feedback, whether positive or negative, will help us reach our goal of putting out a kick-ass demo, so, you know, thanks for that too
Cheers!
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