The Where Shadows Slumber team has just returned from our biggest event yet. That’s right, this past weekend was PAX East! If you’re just starting to read this blog because you found out about us at PAX, then welcome!

An awesome sign for an awesome show

For those who don’t know the details, we were accepted for the PAX East Indie Showcase, which showcases the “best indie [mobile] games you’ve never heard of”. As Frank mentioned when we first found out, we were totally honored to have been chosen, and the showcase really delivered. It was a wild weekend, and I’m here to tell you all about it!

What Happened?

We got to the convention center early on Friday morning, and it totally blew away our expectations. Despite knowing the scale of the event, it didn’t really hit us just how big it was, and that was just the main Expo Hall. We set up at our table, and before we knew it, PAX East had begun!

Even this shot doesn’t do justice to the size of the hall

We spent the next eight hours showing off Where Shadows Slumber, talking to hundreds of people about the game, getting a ton of feedback, and completely losing our voices in the process. We’ve done this a lot in the past, but it’s always very refreshing to see new people playing our game. It just feels great meeting people and getting our game in their hands.

Once the main expo floor closed at 6 pm, we took some time to catch our breaths – but before we knew it, we were informed that the members of the Indie Showcase were going to be putting on a panel!

Despite all of the awesome things that happened this weekend, I think the panel was my favorite part. Since I do game development as a side project to my actual job, and I haven’t made any money from it, I never really consider myself to be an ‘expert’ of any sort. It was incredibly validating to have people seeking my advice, and I was surprised to find that I had good answers for (most of) their questions. It’s almost as though I’ve been working on indie games for the past three years or something.

After a passable Boston meal (what’s with all the seafood?) and an almost-full night’s sleep, we were back and ready for more! Saturday is always the busiest day at these conventions, and PAX did not disappoint. From the opening at 10 to the closing at 6, we consistently had a full booth, which was awesome. Fortunately, we didn’t have any obligations on Saturday night, so we hung out with some friends before heading back to the hotel early, in preparation for daylight savings time.

We had been taking Uber to the convention center on Friday and Saturday, but since we were leaving on Sunday, we decided to drive in from the hotel. Apparently, a lot of other people had the same idea, and Frank ended up sitting in traffic for over an hour; I ditched him and walked the last mile, and I was still late.

Despite the inauspicious start, Sunday was a great day too. One of the biggest problems with these shows is that we’re at this awesome event, but we spend the whole time at our own booth. It’s great telling people about Where Shadows Slumber, but it’s nice to see some other stuff. Fortunately, our web developer, Caroline, worked the booth with us for two hours or so, so Frank and I took turns exploring the expo floor. There were a lot of awesome games, and I still wish we had had time to see more of them!

After a great three days, we packed up and headed home! The weekend was incredible, and it felt so good to share it with our fellow indie game developers and show off Where Shadows Slumber.

What Did We Learn?

The main thing we learned from this show was that, while people may say less is more, in reality, more is more. This was the biggest PAX East ever, and it was definitely the biggest show we’ve ever been to. To be honest, we really weren’t ready for the scale. We brought five test devices and no power strip, which led to some battery problems toward the end of the day.

With only five devices, we often had people watching and waiting for their turn!

The devices and the batteries weren’t the only things we didn’t have enough of. We brought 400 drop cards and 300 Where Shadows Slumber buttons, but we didn’t bring nearly enough. We only had a few business cards left when Sunday started, and we were out of buttons halfway through the day. If we had to do it again, I would make sure we brought a lot more – it’s better to have some left over than to leave anyone empty-handed.

Other than that, the other lessons were things we’ve learned before, but they’re still worth mentioning:

• Bring hundreds of cough drops – continuously talking to people over the ambient sound of a convention for eight hours a day is a real strain on the voice. I went through almost two bags this weekend.

• Don’t expect to get anything done – for some reason, I always assume I’ll be able to do some work after the convention ends for the day. Between finding food, getting back to the hotel, and planning for the next day, there’s never time for anything else.

• Daylight savings time is the worst – yeah, it started this past weekend. Sleep is the most valuable commodity at a convention, and it seems totally unfair that we had to lose an hour of it.

• Plan ahead as much as possible – we had a lot of trouble finding food on Saturday night, because every restaurant in the area was completely booked. Frank has mentioned it before, but I want to mention it again – plan ahead!

What’s Next?

I definitely consider PAX East to have been a success, which is a good thing – it’s probably the last big event we’ll be doing for a while. Everyone really seems to enjoy our demo, but they also want the full game, and that means that we have to actually make it! So, the next thing on our schedule is to simply get to work and start putting Where Shadows Slumber together. There are really four big things going on in the immediate future:

• Cutscene – The final step in creating the demo is to give you all a taste of the storyline. Every show we go to, people ask about the game’s story. As of yet, the demo does not contain any discernible storyline, but Frank is working hard to change that. We’re planning on adding a short cutscene to the end of the demo, which will server as a little teaser for the kind of story you can expect to see in the full game.

• Testing – Over the last two months, we have designed all of the levels for the final game. However, we don’t know if the players will like our levels, and the best way to find out is to ask them! So, we’re going to be creating very basic versions of the levels we have planned, and send them out to our dedicated volunteer testers to tell us what they think! If you want to sign up to be a tester, simply let us know – you can email us at contact@gamerevenant.com, or send a private message with your email to the official Game Revenant Facebook Page.

• Art – One of the most important parts of Where Shadows Slumber, I must begrudgingly admit, is the art. As such, we are going to be putting a whole lot of work into the art for the final game! The levels we send out to our testers will not have any art on them, since that’s the part that takes the longest. Once we know that the design of a level is pretty good, we’ll start putting some beauty onto it!

• Refactoring – This is kind of boring to you non-technology folks, but it’s still important. As projects advance, a lot of technical debt and scope changes cause codebases to become a little unwieldy. Right now, Where Shadows Slumber is a house carefully constructed out of sticks; it’ll stay up as long as we don’t blow too hard. So, in the coming months, I’ll be working hard to redesign the code into a strong mansion of stone (or whatever mansions are built out of) that will serve for a full game.

Aside from these main four tasks, we will of course be updating this blog and trying to keep up on social media. We might also swing by a few smaller shows, but we don’t have any plans bigger than that for the next few months.

A few weeks ago, a fan of the game requested that my next blog post touch on the technical side of our process. As much as I wanted to do that this week, we really felt the need to talk about PAX – it was an awesome whirlwind of an experience, and we wanted you to know all about it! But fear not; I’ll be back again next week with a deep dive on one of the most important and most technical parts of Where Shadows Slumber – the shaders.

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Were you at PAX East 2017? Tell us about your experience in the comments below! You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber.

Time for part three of my three-part miniseries! This week’s topic is Finding the Time – you can find part one on adversity here, and part two on motivation here.

One of the questions I get most often from developers starting their own projects is ‘where do you find the time?’ This is a very good question. Finding time to work on your game is very difficult – there are a lot of things in life that you can spend your time on, and you can only choose so many! No matter how important your game is to you, other things often take over, and you don’t work on it as much as you want (or need) to.

I think that I do a pretty good job with time management, and I hate wasted time so much, I want to make sure you never waste any time either! Below, in the style I have apparently developed, are some tips I have for making the most of your time, and finding the time to work on your game (or anything else you might need the time for).

Abandon All Of Your Responsibilities

This kid knows how to make an indie video game.

We all have responsibilities – your game is important, but so is your job! However, if you want to make any progress on your game, you need to commit a certain amount of time to it. The best way to do that is to set aside time to work on your game.

In my last post, I mentioned that I spend an hour before work every morning working on Where Shadows Slumber. That’s the time I’ve set aside for my game – even if there’s a bunch of stuff going on in my life, I only ever use that time for my game. That way, there’s always a minimum of time I work every week.

Maybe your schedule doesn’t have a nice time slot like mine does, or maybe five hours a week is too much time to commit. Either way, you have to decide what time you can commit to your game, and then decide when that time will be. With a time block in place, you will find yourself consistently working on your game.

The most important part of this plan is to respect the time you set aside. Consider that time completely booked – if someone asks you to do something then, don’t do it. You already have plans! Setting aside time to work on your game is only useful if you consistently make use of that time.

Learn To Predict The Future

I can see your future, and it is… Grongus.

It’s pretty obvious why this is helpful – you can already know the time you’re going to spend on your game! While that’s not exactly possible (yet), we have something close enough. If you can look into the future and know how long it will take you to do something, then you can know how much time you need to dedicate.

What I’m trying very poorly to describe is the concept of project management. If you’ve taken some computer science classes, then I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I’m sure you also scoffed at it and started coding anyways, which is exactly what I did. And then, four years later, I realized I had wasted six months working on a project, because I hadn’t planned it out correctly.

I don’t want to lecture you on the importance of project management (maybe in another blog post…), but I do want to mention how useful it is for time management. For Where Shadows Slumber, Frank and I sit down every week and discuss what we did, why it took so long, and what we’re going to do in the coming week. In this way, we keep ourselves accountable – it’s a lot harder to blow off your work when you’ve committed to doing it.

Another boon of project management is time-boxing, or estimating how long a task will take. If I know I have an hour to work on something, I don’t want to start working on a three-hour task. When I have to stop, I’ll lose my train of thought, which makes it that much harder to start again. That is an inefficiency that can be avoided through time-boxing. Whenever you go over your tasks, look at how long it took to complete each task, and then use that information to decide how long it will take to complete your upcoming tasks. In this way, you can always work on the task that makes the most sense, and you don’t lose any time to context-switching inefficiencies!

Feed on the Scraps

Delicious!

Scraps are the lifeblood of the rodent community. Despite how some people might view the indie gaming community, this is not the point I’m trying to make. Rather, I want you to feed on the scraps of your day.

Let’s go through my (theoretical) 24-hour workday. I sleep from 11PM – 8AM and work from 10AM – 6PM. Together, that’s 17 hours, during which I am fully occupied with something important. That leaves seven hours, during which I am free to do as I please.

That sounds pretty decent, but I’ll tell you that it certainly doesn’t feel like seven hours – it feels more like three. There are so many smaller tasks that we don’t even consider that take up our time. Even if I spend two hours on all the little things (grooming, eating, transit, etc.), the five remaining hours still feel like three. Where did the last two hours go?

Those last few hours just get lost in the shuffle. There’s seven minutes waiting for my roommate to get out of the shower, nine minutes waiting for the train, two minutes waiting for the elevator, on and on and on. These minutes really add up to a lot of wasted time. This time is the hardest to get back – if I decide to go to the train later, I might miss it!

Rather than trying to get all of these minutes back into a two-hour block, you have to appreciate them for what they are – tiny little pauses in your day. Once you’ve accepted that, you can figure out how to make use of them. Personally, I carry a notebook and pencil around, and write down things I think about. While I’m waiting for the train, I think about level design. On the elevator, I consider algorithm implementations. If I get home at 6:30, but I have to leave at 6:45, I jump on my computer and tackle the smallest task I can find.

By taking advantage of all of these ‘scraps’, I don’t get the full two hours back – it’s just hard to be that efficient. However, I do get a solid 30-45 minutes of drudge-work done, which means I don’t have to spend a block of time doing it later! If you develop little habits to try and use up these wasted minutes, you’ll find that you can knock off some of your tasks without even sitting down at your computer.

Become Conceited

Nobody loves a Grongus like another Grongus!

This is along the lines of ‘nice guys finish last’ – you have to be conceited in order to be successful!

I firmly believe that is not the case – however, this tip is still true, and applies to time management even outside of game development. The core tenant here is commonly phrased like ‘if you don’t value your time, no one will’. In this case, we don’t care about how others value our time, but we do care about how we value it.

Your time should be important to you! If you want to finish your game, you need to spend time on it. Wasting time that could be spent on your game just delays your release. I loathe every minute of wasted time – even if I wasn’t going to work on Where Shadows Slumber, I would be doing something better with my time than wasting it.

This can be hard to apply to everyday life – a lot of minutes slip through the cracks every day, and there’s no real way to get them back. But if you can prevent it, you should. If you’re waiting on work from someone, let them know! If you’re always waiting for someone who is consistently 30 minutes late, tell them the meeting was moved up by 30 minutes!

These are just examples, but the key is to keep in mind the fact that your time is valuable – you could be doing anything with it, so why are you waiting around for someone or something else?

These are my four tips for managing your time. I also want to mention that there’s really only one of these that I practice with regularity, and thus it is the one I consider the most important. It is, of course, the last one. This shift in mindset is so important, as it’s hard to really apply any time management strategy if you don’t value your own time.

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As always, let us know if you have any questions, feedback, or topic requests! You can find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Jack Kelly is the head developer and designer for Where Shadows Slumber.