Tag Archives: convention

PAX East 2019 Recap

Posted on by

The show was a full week ago, but PAX East seems like yesterday! Jack and I are still exhausted from our travels to Boston, but I didn’t want to let too much time pass without recording our thoughts on the trip.

Day 0: The PREGAMER Show

This year’s PAX began differently than in recent years. I’ve never made it up to Boston a day early for Playcrafting’s PREGAMER party, but I’m glad I went for it this year. (The regular fee was included with our booth) Dan got a bar at the convention center hotel and covered the whole room in indie games! It was a nice way to start the show – essentially like a Spring Play esque Playcrafting event in a different city, the night before PAX East!

My strategy was to leave the iPad playing our trailer, and put our sweet MOO cards out to attract people over.

Your setup is pretty simple – two bar tables pushed together with a chair for each one, and a power strip behind you. I was next to an adult party card game (similar to Cards Against Humanity) so I don’t think the games are sorted into categories, it’s kind of a free for all. The event had a lot of people in it, but not too much traffic – meaning that I didn’t see too many people at the table as the night went on. Maybe that’s my fault for not bringing my cool Where Shadows Slumber banner? In any event, the people that played it really enjoyed it. One dude even bought it in front of me!

I got to chat with some young developers who are basically where Jack and I were at two years ago – they just graduated college and have a beautiful demo of a promising indie game, with a lot of work ahead of them.

(This wasn’t taken at PREGAMER, it’s just a sweet photo)

Next year, if you’re going to be in town for PAX anyway, you ought to at least show up to the party before the real convention begins! Also, if you happen to be at PAX but you couldn’t get a booth, this is a nice way to still represent your game and maybe get some media attention before the news storm hits.

Days 1 and 2: Showtime!

When the show began in earnest, I was shocked at how busy the event was from the moment it started. In recent years, Thursday has been a terribly slow day. Almost one of those days that makes you say “man, why does PAX even start on a Thursday anyway?” But this year Thursday felt more like a Friday, which was great!

It’s hard to quantify crowd sizes. Every year, Where Shadows Slumber has been at different spots on the show floor. (PAX East Indie Showcase in 2017, Indie MiniBooth in 2018, now Playcrafting in 2019) You don’t just want “a lot of people at the show”, but rather “a lot of people who come to your table excited about your game, eager to engage.” It would do us no good if 1,000,000 people came to PAX East but only cared about Roblox.

I can’t put it into hard numbers, but we felt busy all through the show. Tons of people remembered the game from last year’s spot at the Indie MiniBooth. A few diehards remembered the demo days, which is always heartening. And we bumped into some old friends from Stevens, too! There’s a suprising amount of them that either live in Boston or make the journey north just for PAX. The more of these shows I do, the more I look forward to just making connections with devs, industry people, journalists and old pals.

Our placement at the Playcrafting booth was perfect, too! We were facing out toward the aisle near a corner, with nothing in front of us. And since we were next to the Bose AR-cade (also run by Dan) we got a lot of spillover traffic from them, too. Jack joined the fun Thursday night, which was just in time, because I was already feeling tired. PAX East is a marathon, not a sprint!

Left to right: Jack Kelly, Kati Nawrocki, Adriano Valle, and Dan Butchko.
(I took this from the podium!)

Day 3: How Our Panel Went

Before we even had a booth at PAX East, I took the liberty of submitting a few panel ideas to the show just so we could talk about Where Shadows Slumber. This would be a special PAX, since it’s the first time our game is available on the market for sale instead of just as a demo or beta download. Some of my more selfish ideas didn’t fly, such as an entire 1 hour lecture on the greatness of our game, how beautiful it is, and how handsome the developers are. However, our panel “How Much Do Premium Games Make” was accepted!

It was scheduled for 1:30 pm on Day 3, Saturday. We didn’t get to pick the time, and I wouldn’t normally miss the busiest time of the show to do a panel, but we ended up getting a great crowd! Here’s a shot I took from the podium of them coming in:

Like lambs to the slaughter!

The panel was a fantastic success! Jack and I were joined by Dan Butchko of Playcrafting, Kati Nawrocki of Dots, and Adriano Valle of OrcPunk. (Though, to be honest, I know all of them through Playcrafting!) It was a frank and honest conversation about how difficult it is to be a premium indie game in a crowded marketplace. We talked about changes in consumer patterns, and new business models that can appeal to today’s phone gamer. The short version is that free-to-play isn’t just a “good idea” – it’s a requirement on mobile. Or… don’t focus so much on your game making money!

A line of questions… for us?!

I want to thank our fellow panelists, everyone who came to the panel, those who asked questions, and Matt our theater manager for making the event so successful! We’ve all leveled up and become “game devs who do panels sometimes” which I’m sure is just a few steps from “game devs who are incredibly successful and happy.” So close!

BONUS: I think Night 3 was when we got to try an awesome party bluffing game called Pluck Off! that is still in development. It’s a card game, so don’t expect to see it at too many video game events in the future, but if you can get a print & play it’s totally worth it. (Warning: don’t play with Jack, he’ll destroy your face)

Day 4: An Exhausted Success!

By the time Day 4 rolled around, I had basically checked out and spent most of the day collapsed in a chair in the back of the booth. This ended up being a mistake, as I actually missed a lot of people who planned to stop by the table but hadn’t scheduled a time. (Sorry people!)

We can call the weekend a success though, because we nudged so many people to buy & review our game that it brought our Apple rating up from a 4.4 to a 4.5! This may seem insignificant, but it brings us past the threshold that Apple uses when deciding which games to feature. Some games, like our muse Monument Valley, are featured at least once a week. If we climb the ranks, Apple might give us at least a feature every month. Bring on the Today tab, boys!

Me during day 4 of PAX East (Dramatization)

I don’t know about Jack, but I’m still recuperating from the weekend. I have no idea how some devs did three shows back to back in March… (This is the SXSW / GDC / PAX East Trifecta, sometimes called March Madness or dying.) I’m hoping to get back on the wagon soon though, because we have a lot of little changes to make to the build in response to your wonderful feedback. Jack and I spent the entirety of our 4 hour drive back to Hoboken planning what we can do in the short & long term to improve Where Shadows Slumber. I’m excited to put the plan into action!

Thank you to everyone who visited our table, bought our game, gave us a review, or attended our panel! You helped make a good PAX great. Wish us luck finding the energy to keep going!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Where Shadows Slumber is now available for purchase on the App Store, Google Play, and the Amazon App Store!

Find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, ask us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, and feel free to email us directly at contact@GameRevenant.com.

Frank DiCola is the founder of Game Revenant and the artist for Where Shadows Slumber.

Show Prep!

Posted on by

For those of you who haven’t heard, Frank and I will be trekking down to Austin, Texas tomorrow to represent Where Shadows Slumber in South By Southwest’s Gamer’s Voice Awards! It’s a real honor to have been invited, and we’re super psyched to participate in one of the biggest media conferences in the world.

Of course, attending a show like this isn’t a walk in the park. There’s a lot of stuff we have to do to get ready for it, and that’s not even including the toll the show itself takes on us.

Since we’re going to SXSW tomorrow, last week was prep week. Let’s take a quick look at what that prep involves.

 

4-4-Fountain

 

Pre-Show: Game Prep

The whole point of these conventions is to show off Where Shadows Slumber, so one of the most important parts of preparing for the show is making sure we have a version of the game ready. One of the biggest surprises I’ve found is how much time and effort this takes. Since we’re actively working on making a game, you would think that we would be able to build and deploy it in a matter of minutes. However, this model of game development isn’t quite correct – having a game that’s 90% complete doesn’t mean we have a complete game with 90% as much content. Rather, it means that we have a game where most of its parts are 100% complete, and some of them haven’t even been started; we might even have a bunch of complete pieces that aren’t hooked up together.

Unfortunately, this means that show prep is quite time-consuming. It mostly comes down to the minutiae – we update the game’s build settings from “easy to develop” mode to “ready for production” mode. We have to change some configuration in order to bring only the levels we want. Small bugs or visual glitches are things we often ignore for the time being and revisit after level design and implementation is complete, but they have to be fixed for a show (even if they’re going to be changed again later). If we weren’t planning on implementing something (like menus), we may have to throw together a crude version just for the current show.

These annoying little time-wasters are one of the reasons we made the demo version of the game – no matter where we are in development, we can always simply bring the demo to a show, and know that it will work. However, as development has stretched out, we find that we don’t reap very much reward from showing the demo; people have already seen it, we’ve already heard all of the same feedback on it, and it doesn’t do a great job of showing how far Where Shadows Slumber has come. Especially for a big show like SXSW, we like to have a build of the game that has some recent work and shows off how awesome it can be, even if it does require jumping through a few more hoops.

After all of that, the only thing left is to actually build the game. This process is pretty easy for Android, and a little more complex for iOS, but it’s not too bad in either case. Then we actually test out the build on our devices, to ensure that users will get the best experience they can out of Where Shadows Slumber. If there are any bugs, then we have to go in, fix them, and build again. This is a much more time-consuming debugging process than usual, but, again, it’s usually worth it to get a chance to show off the most recent developments of the game.

 

20180313_130606

Buttons from Herb Ferman, dropcards from Moo, and Alba & Noah’s Phoz cards!

 

Pre-Show: Physical Prep

The most important part of showing off the game is the game itself, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things that need to be done. First and foremost, we need travel and lodging – a show isn’t much good if we’re not there for it! This is one of the reasons we go to a lot of shows in the northeast, but not too many elsewhere; we can often drive to Boston or Washington D.C., and sometimes we even know someone who lives nearby (and is willing to put up with us).

Another important factor in going to shows is actually being allowed to show Where Shadows Slumber at the show. This involves a lot of emailing back and forth with the convention runners, whether it’s them inviting us and us accepting, or us begging them to let us come.

Once we know where we’re staying and how we’re getting there, we have to figure out what else we’re going to bring. Most of this comes from a pretty stock list – we need devices to showcase on, computers to play videos, our banner, a tablecloth, foam floor padding, etc. On top of that, we like to bring business cards (above), and sometimes Where Shadows Slumber buttons. These can take some time to design, because we like to use very recent content from the game. After that, the only thing left is to coordinate between us when and where we’re going to meet, and it’s off to the show!

I should mention that most of the non-game prep that goes into these shows is done by Frank. He’s the one in charge of Game Revenant’s bankroll, so he ends doing anything that requires actually purchasing something. Which is pretty awesome, because I’m far too scatterbrained to handle organizing any of that stuff.

 

gaming_ma

The Show Itself!

I know this post is about the show prep, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention the show itself! The preparation is a lot of tedious stuff that makes us feel like we’re wasting time, but actually going to the show is the part that really exhausts us. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort making a great game to show people (both in terms of specific show prep and in general), so we end up spending 2-4 days showing it to literally every person we meet. And at a large convention, that usually ends up being several hundred people. We’re on our feet, talking, conversing, explaining, and schmoozing for pretty much the entire convention – it really takes it out of you!

All in all, show prep is a necessary evil. When you’re already spending most of your free time working on something, it’s really galling to have to spend even more time on more tedious parts of that project. But, once we get to the show, it quickly becomes clear that it’s all worth it. Frank and I are pretty used to Where Shadows Slumber at this point, but seeing the look on someone’s face when they realize what’s going on for the first time is a really great feeling. And knowing that we put in the work to bring the best possible version of the game to a show really helps us understand how people are going to react to the final game itself.

I should probably wrap this post up. Honestly, it’s shorter than most of my other posts, and probably not quite as good, but I don’t really have any time to make it better – I have to fix a bunch of bugs before we leave for South by Southwest tomorrow!

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I hope you enjoyed a look at our pre-show process – if you have any questions about our con-going habits or anything else, we would love to hear from you (although we probably won’t get back to you until after SXSW). You can always find out more about our game at WhereShadowsSlumber.com, find us on Twitter (@GameRevenant), Facebook, itch.io, or Twitch, join the Game Revenant Discord, and feel free to email us directly with any questions or feedback at contact@GameRevenant.com. And if you’re in Austin this weekend, make sure you come by our booth!

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