L-R: Marigold Bartlett, Leanne Taylor-Giles, Wren Brier and Simon Boxer
Well, this year's Melbourne International Games Week, GCAP and PAX are over. Most of the Australian Drop Bear Bytes team were in attendance, with Narrative Director Leanne Taylor-Giles hosting two panels with Marigold Bartlett, the Art Director at Ghost Pattern (who just released Wayward Strand), Wren Brier (Creative Director of Unpacking), and Simon Boxer (Creative Director at Twice Different, who made Ring of Pain and are working on The Dungeon Experience), one at GCAP and one during PAX.
We’ll post the video of the PAX panel to our YouTube channel as soon as we’ve done some cleanup and minor editing.
Drop Bear Bytes has been a fully distributed studio since its founding in early 2019, and much like gamescom in August, this was the first time some of the team had ever met in person.
L-R: Dean Baron, James Giles, Leanne Taylor-Giles and Eloise Campbell
There were many excellent panels and talks which the team attended (see the list below) and many of these will be uploaded in the coming months (although you may need to pay for access...) - but the highlight of PAX Australia is always the indie area.
It's always great to see what smaller studios have been up to, and the indie area shows off just the best of Australia. This year there were so many amazing games, each with their own unique identity.
It was great to see World War I survival horror CONSCRIPT on display again. Drop Bear Bytes was next to them at gamescom, and they ended up next to the fine people of Innchanted at PAX.
The competitive-minigame-’em-up ShapeVS was always getting a lot of attention throughout the show. They need to watch out or someone’s going to poach their developer…
Ricochet Rodeo, a PVP platform shooter with strong Nidhogg vibes, was another one drawing the crowds - that’s our Lead Unity Developer Amos with the blue backpack.
Several studios took memorable approaches to marketing, from Godfeather’s “Feed the boids” seed packets:
To Bustin’ and their “roll wrapping service” (sadly, no one had any toilet paper to spare):
And, of course, everyone’s (Dean’s) favourite, Duck with Helmet from Knight Crawlers:
Check out the full article here!