Happy Spring! We’re back and recovered from PAX, and already planning our closed mini playtest next week (keep scrolling for details). Here’s the latest from our crew:
PAX East
Hey all, Matthew here. This year was my first PAX East since 2020, our last show before the pandemic, so I’m going to take a moment to reminisce a little. It was a week before NYC locked down, and a week before we shuttered our offices, and we went full remote. Our 2020 show was just two months before we brought Embr into Early Access, my first project as a Director, and our first time showing it off in its own booth. We really couldn’t have known what the next six years would bring at that point. I’d been going to PAX East every year since I was in high school. That PAX feels like a lifetime ago.
With all that on my mind, I was a bit nervous this time around. A lot has changed since my last PAX. The Indie Megabooth, our longtime home at PAX, didn’t make it through Covid. The games industry has seen at least 2 or 3 major tidal shifts. PAX East itself, I’d been told, felt different. I wasn’t quite sure what I was in for.
Setting up for any show is tough. It’s a lot of equipment to haul, demo builds to prep, and logistics to plan. Setting up multiplayer, doubly so. And a double size 10’ X 20’ booth with 10 player stations? Setup went extremely long, with a couple near disasters that set us back hours. (And it would have been totally impossible without the 10x monitors, keyboards, and mice from the Razer team, so huge shoutouts to them!) The team went to bed exhausted, and pretty far from our best. Moods were sour. It was looking like a long 4 day show.
Thursday morning coffee certainly helped a little. You don’t really get a chance to see the sights working a show. So seeing a few local coffee shops while I’m somewhere new is one of the few bits of local culture I get to catch. Latte in hand, I get to the booth and start booting stations. We chat with our booth neighbors a bit, lovely people over at the Do A Crime and Cat Secretary booths next to us. At least we’d have good company. Thursdays at shows are pretty quiet, so maybe we’d hang out with them a bit and try their games out, wander the hall a little… but I really wasn’t ready for the kind of show we were about to have.
Shortly after the show floor opened we saw our first attendees. And then we saw more… and more, and before long, we were having the busiest Thursday I’ve ever seen at a show. And even crazier, is how many people mentioned their love of Guns of Icarus. Group after group of friends wandered past and froze, like they weren’t quite sure what they were seeing was real. When they realized they could play, I saw a joy on their faces that reminded me again why I love making multiplayer games. And I realized, this was definitely the PAX East I remembered. I didn’t have much time to wander the floor, but what I did see was the same brilliant indie energy I remember. I met solo devs working on their first games, to other game directors working on their series for 30 years!
The rest of the weekend was a blur. We were absolutely packed. We were running demos nonstop (and discovered a fun little crash bug after about 6 hours straight of demos :P). We had over a thousand people stop by the booth, and even more grab a postcard as they walked past. Hundreds of people told us about their time playing Guns of Icarus. Just like we hoped, the work we’ve done to support drop in/drop out play, and more adaptability to groups of every size, made the booth run like a well oiled spaceship. All the work on making 6 Degree of Freedom spaceflight accessible to new audiences was paying off. A few quick notes on controls and people we’re off flying and shooting.
It took till the last hour of Sunday for us to really get a break. We were completely exhausted. We’re still not fully recovered. But it was great. It’s been hard in the past few years to really get a sense of who our audience really is. We see brief glimpses, internet comments and statistics, streamers who play our games, but it’s just a tiny glimpse, and paints a distorted picture. The internet has consolidated and fragmented multiple times since we’ve last been here. But our real audience, it’s truly the same story as ever. People from all walks of life. Our existing fans, new fans, family and friends. People still want to jump on a ship with their friends. And we’re happy to make it happen.
Closed Community Playtest
Last bit of news for you folks, we’re holding a closed community playtest between April 16th-19th. To get involved you firstly need to be part of the Discord and then sign up with our form. This is a small tight test where we’re looking to collect gameplay highlights and try out a few features. Anyone who does share their highlights will also potentially be featured in a community trailer too! More details on Discord.
Next dev update, we’ll be talking a bit more about a new game mode we’ve been working on, as well as some other behind the scenes updates that have taken place. In the meantime, follow us on TikTok, Instagram or join the Discord to keep up to date with us.
See you in the Stars,
Matthew and the Muse Games Team