Post PAX East!
Hello again, dear readers.
Its been roughly a week since PAX East 2020, and HOO BOY has it given us a lot to think about. This week has been about recovery and planning, as well as surviving a particularly rough migraine.
Before I begin, we wanted to extend our heartfelt thanks to Jeremy Cain and Brian Drelling, who helped us run the booth. They talked to guests, took photos, and gave us time to go explore and network. They were amazing and invaluable, we absolutely could not have done this without them. Thanks guys! <3
Jeremy also went above and beyond, and made his own Mister Mart Cosplay! Check him out down below, in our PAX East 2020 photos!
Lets just start at the beginning!
On the first day of PAX, we went to the Gameindustry.biz Investment summit! This was a gathering of developers, publishers, and investors all coming together with the goal of getting new games funded! The summit was talks and panels in the morning, a lunch break, and then a series of 1 on 1 meetings set up by publishers/investors, where they got the chance to talk to developers about their games. We were lucky enough to get two meetings, one with Oculus, and one with Graffiti games.
We heard representatives from Kickstarter, Xsolla, as well as some other industry professionals, such as Robin Hunicke (producer of Journey). The kickstarter meeting was quite informative and tempting, as the speaker showed us some frankly surprising statistics about how many successful projects occur in the games category! She said more than 20% of games in the videogame category are funded! This led us to thing that it may be a viable option in the future!
Our main takeaway from these talks was that a lot of success or failure comes from a community of dedicated followers. They help spread the word about your game, and they’re built in support for your kickstarter campaign, or even general release.
Another thing that was more and more apparent, is that a lot of the people who have “made it” in the industry are people who started in large, usually AAA studios, and then went indie. There wasn’t anyone who spoke who was doing it like us, diving in from basically nothing. It was a little disheartening, to be honest. We’ve looked into industry jobs, to try and get those connections and advantages, but for the most part (of what we’ve seen) they don’t like it when you run your own studio and work for them. Which makes sense, but that also means we have to choose between working for ourselves, and working for a big company, putting off our efforts for quite possibly years. Its a tough choice.
Anyhoo, PAX in general when fairly well! we got lots of people playing Mister Mart, and made sure to plug our new discord (gotta build that community), and saw what we could of the show floor. We were lucky enough to have a good friend from school helping us run the booth, and he did an amazing job! He even went so far as to build his own cosplay of a Mister Mart customer, which was a big hit with everyone. We also had another friend (who we usually get to help at PAX) help us, but he was unfortunately occupied by some bigger important life related events going on, so he couldn’t help us as much as he would have liked to. Still, we absolutely would not be where we are today without the loving support we get from all our friends. <3
Things were not all well however! We had been working on a new prototype of a game for Oculus Rift, an Asymmetrical VR Party game, working title Bossfight VR. We’d been working on it for a few months at this point, and unity had just been shitting on us for the past few weeks. We had constant crashes when we tried to run or build the game, almost to a point where we could not work. It’s been awful. Well we thought we had enough of a game to show at PAX, for a few hours each afternoon, to try and get some good playtesting in, but no. The game had so many bugs, we had to scrap it after the first night. Ugh. It was super frustrating, considering we’d stayed up so late the night before, and worked in the hotel room even, to try to get it to a point where we could get some use out of it from PAX, but no. In the end, we didn’t really get anything useful from it.
So now, Karen and I are trying to figure out the future for us, at least in the next few years. We thing that we’ll probably try to push for getting funding from Oculus, to get onto the Quest, one way or another. Considering how exclusive it is, and how popular a platform, we thing we’re in a good position to pitch. Especially since we had a meeting with Oculus, and so many other public events with Oculus have been cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. The time is ripe, it seems, and we don’t want to let an opportunity like this pass us by.
Anyway, enough long paragraphs. Enjoy some PAX East 2020 photos!
