Now that the dust has settled from our back to back conventions, I had the opportunity to corner Alison into giving us a recap of gamescom!
This is the layout of the booths for those of us who came with the Edmonton Screen Industries Office.
We survived Gamescom! (and no joke, several of our peers came back quite sick, so something was definitely going around the show).
Gamescom was an amazing experience, and we are incredibly grateful to the Edmonton Screen Industries Office (ESIO) for sponsoring Only By Midnight alongside other 5 awesome Edmonton development studios. We not only got to travel internationally and share our game with the world, but we also got to do so shoulder to shoulder with our game dev friends, sharing a much bigger and more comfortable booth. This also made it far more fun to forage for beer and schnitzel at the end of the long days!
The booth was a marathon. Five eleven-hour days, standing on thin carpet over concrete. We broke things into shifts, but even then, it’s a lot of standing. It’s also a lot of shouting at people, as the floor is so very loud. All our voices were wrecked by the end of the week. Thankfully we managed to find every source of hydration possible, maximizing the free coffee, water, and lemonade from various booths and business hubs.
We vastly underestimated the amount of swag we needed! We thought 1000 postcards and 500 pins would be enough. We managed to burn through all 1000 postcards with only a little rationing, but easily could have used at least 500 more. As for pins, everyone seemed to love pins. We figured we could go through 500 a day if we left them on the swag table. (in fairness, they are awesome pins).
We had two stations, and the demos themselves were amazing. We had 298 completed playthroughs, which meant that both laptops were occupied almost the entire time. I’ve personally been part of many awkward playtests, but these were smooth.
Players got the concept, and really seemed to engage in the game, the writing, and what we were trying to share with the world. We had many compliments on the art, the concept, the writing, and the gameplay. It’s easy to get so bogged down in what you’re working on that you can’t step back and see what you’ve made. That’s what Gamescom was to me: a chance to step back, and not just see what we’ve made but witness hundreds of people see it the same way, and get excited to see more!
Left to Right: Alison, Jen, and Gerry