It’s been about three weeks since the Indie Games Room(IGR) at AVCon and I thought it would be a good time to reflect on how everything went. This year I involved with AVCon in several different capacities. I was showing Expand within IGR as an exhibitor, I was a panelist for a panel called Getting Started Making Games on the Sunday and I was the Coordination Assistant for IGR. I’ll briefly touch on how things went in each of these different areas.
In case you missed IGR here is a timelapse video we did across the weekend. It starts from early on Saturday and runs until pack-up on Sunday. It gives you an idea of the number of people that moved through the room.
So this was the first time we’ve shown Expand publicly in 2 years. At this point in development we are mostly concentrating on level creation as most features are nailed down. We went into AVCon looking for confirmation that people understood the direction we were taking and would enjoy the game. The response to the game was fantastic and we’re definitely feeling confident going forward. There were only two minor bugs that reared their head. The first of which was a game breaking bug that occurred in one area of the game, we easily resolved it for the show by turning one checkpoint off. The other bug was extremely minor. Both issues have now been properly resolved which is great.
We were also fortunate to receive press from several different websites. The game was mentioned on games.on.net with James O’Connor lavishing high praise on the game.
Expand is fiendish and clever, but what really stands out about it is how curiously emotional the experience is. It’s definitely one of the most interesting games being developed in Australia right now.
We also did interviews with The Lead and Aussie Game Geek which was cool.
Photo by Anne Vu
On the Sunday of AVCon I was on a panel called Getting Started Making Games with Jake Moore. The panel went quite well with somewhere around 70 people showing up. We spoke for about half an hour and then opened the floor up to questions. Afterwards, we drummed up some conversation with several people from the audience. I challenged them to make a game within a month and then let us know how they go. We posted a series of resources on the Indie Games Room website that you can checkout if interested.
From the perspective of coordination IGR went extremely well this year. At the start of the year Brad(IGR Coordinator) and I decided that we wanted to achieve three things, host a developer party, improve the overall quality of games in the room and bring in more developers from interstate. We’re really stoked that we managed to achieve all there. On the Friday night we merged powers with ARGGGH(Adelaide’s Really Good Gathering of Game Developers) and hosted a party with a bar tab supplied by Simulation Australia. We improved the expression of interest promotions interstate which helped bring in new faces and improve the selection of games. This was the first year in which the expressions of interest were curated and the I think the room was better off for it.
So that’s the Indie Games Room for this year. We had a lot of fun and judging from the other responses, so did everyone else. It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here.