Tag «gamescom»

Forest Poems

The Climate Change Jam we hosted on Alakajam has ended, and we actually managed to submit an entry too. Our idea was to bring the need for our planet's reforestation to people's attention. Ultimately, Forest Poems became less of a game but a collaborative forest where participants can create and add their own small soil patches with trees which also form a poem.

The texts are semi-randomly generated from a list of words, chosen from five different nature-themed poems by five different authors (you can find the credits in the game). Prominently on Forest Poems' start screen are three links to various sites concerned about planting trees.

We like how players are have to place their trees in a pleasant composition while also thinking of a somewhat meaningful poem. And afterwards it has to fit to the already existing patches, slightly challenging creativity a third time. And of course, seeing the virtual forest grow over time is a joy to watch.

Ten projects were submitted to the Climate Change Jam - more than we expected! Mostly because the theme is hard and does not spark "fun"; which is the reason we wanted to do it. Game jams are awesome, and we think they could be inspiration for "more" than just throw-away projects. In any case we want to thank all the participants (and those who tried)!

By the way, this week the gamescom in Cologne starts. Jana will be there for a few days - if you see her, say hi!

Rat King at the Gamescom 2017

In the last full week of August we not only visited the Gamescom, which is the biggest gaming convention in Europe - we actually went there to showcase our current project, Behind Stars and Under Hills, at the Indie Arena Booth. As Jana is part of the orga team of this 'convention within the convention' we took the opportunity to present the game on 9m² and get some feedback by gamers. (Of course, the 'game' itself still is a prototype, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung.)

Behind Stars and Under Hills is very much pre-alpha (which means nothing is set in stone, everything is a placeholder, and anything can change) and won't be finished for at least a year. But it's important to let people see and feel a project early enough, so you don't develop a game eventually nobody wants to play. This is why this time, in contrast to our Gamescom presence 3 years ago (with TRI), we offered sheets of paper and felt-tip pens so players could write down their feedback. Quite an impressive amount of colorful text was produced this way, filled with criticism, wishes and comments.

So, to say it loud and clear: thanks to all our players! While for me just standing around and talking all the time quickly became tiring, and the whole experience was stressful and even annoying sometimes (thanks to loud presentations by some hardware vendor, offering t-shirts to the cheering masses), meeting so many cool, polite and interested gamers was a blast and made up for any inconveniences. Personally I was a bit surprised that most visitors of our booth were delighted by the design of our game and of the dialogs. To be honest, I expected people to be less patient - but here it shows the benefit of being part of a site dedicated to indies only, as the expectations of the visitors coming by are different.

During the five days of Gamescom the most common gripes with the game were the lack of a button for sprinting and a missing (auto-)map. Of course we already planned some kind of map, but are not sure yet how to implement it exactly. We'd like some kind of 'cartography skill', to make the maps more meaningful and part of the gameplay. Or maybe we'll just distribute hand-drawn maps in the game's world, to support the lore and the immersion.

On the other hand, sprinting is a different thing. We never planned to have it, as we actually want to make a "slower" game with a certain atmosphere to convey. (If you remember the development of TRI, you will feel like having a deja vu.) And maybe such a sprint mechanic could even lead to new problems especially for people with short attention spans, where they wouldn't process the environment anymore and just rush through, and find their way even less. So it's possible not the lack of running is the problem, but the amount of backtracking (e.g. having to go back to familiar place because of a quest with an NPC there). Maybe having a map already fixes this particular problem; thus adding maps has a higher priority for us. In any case, something like teleporters between the levels (anchored in the background story) are definitely planned.

A bug found during the gamescom: sometimes an NPC can stand on their head

I regret a bit that I wasn't able (physically and mentally) to play some of the other games, not even at the Indie Arena Booth. Behind Stars and Under Hills is so unfinished, fragile even, that I couldn't bear leaving it alone to the masses for too long. I mean, it was the first time the game was playable for the public!

But of course it never really was alone, as we had help by our wonderful volunteers - here's a shoutout to Björn, Jacky, Ludwig and Max! Not only did they explain the game to interested bystanders and answered questions, or helped players who got stuck, they also handed out flyers and made the whole experience much less of a hassle than it could've been. Here's hoping the Gamescom, loud and chaotic as it was, has been a wonderfully crazy experience for them, too.

Our next plans are to develop Behind Stars and Under Hills further of course, and refine it a bit - for example, the whole storyline still is too hazy so we need to work on it a lot more. More gameplay has to be implemented, more characters created, more levels built... Also coming up is the Poznan Game Arena in October, but it's much too soon, i.e. that we probably won't have much new to show. Still, if you happen to be around, come by and try to find crazy old Willard in our small game demo!

Making-of video 5, Artbook, Honorable Mention

Yes, updates seem to become rarer and rarer. The main reason for this is that we still do not have a new project. Yes, we do have plans, but as usual nothing is set in stone yet, and nothing drove us into a development frenzy. Since the release of TRI we created a few internal prototypes and game jam games, some of them I wrote about on my personal blog. We also update our Facebook page more often than this blog, as some news are tiny.

And while we planned and created ideas and abandoned them every month, we were also giving interviews for local radio and TV broadcasts and local newspapers - so it's all in German. Press came when they heard that we won "Best Youth Game" at the German Computer Game Award 2015, so this is a nice side effect. Jana also created a booklet for German indies, which you can grab at the upcoming Gamescom 2015, or just read it online thanks to Martin Nerurkar. (Yes, we will be at the Gamescom, but mostly as visitors only.)

Another thing we did was filming my brother Ludwig Hanisch in his basement, where he created the music for TRI. It's an interview of around 15 minutes about family, inspirations and instruments. Watch it now - it even has English subtitles!

(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)

In order to create a more extensive, more interesting post-mortem of TRI, we made a digital artbook. Even though I already wrote a short retrospective about TRI's development, I felt it was necessary to close this chapter in a much cooler way. Thus there is the artbook now, which exists in two versions:

The full edition (94 pages) contains it all, background information, WIP screenshots, concept art, scribbles, etc. - everybody who bought the deluxe edition of TRI has it.
The lite edition is free to download for everybody - it contains the first 51 pages of the full edition and is only missing the transcript of the developers' commentary; the very same commentary you can also unlock in the game.

Oh, and one last thing: to our surprise TRI got an Honorable Mention at the 2015 Geekie Awards, which is pretty crazy if you consider the high-quality competitors. Thanks to the judges for the mention!

geekie awards

That's it for today. Hopefully we have more news sooner next time!

How to bring your game to the Gamescom – a MEGABOOTH diary

podcast_gamescom

In August, 13^th to 17^th, the world's largest games fair for players was held - the Gamescom. 335,000 players, business attendees and developers visited Cologne from 88 different countries. For a whole week we were guests in a wild mix of games, Let's play shows and character cosplay. Moreover we have been part of the famous Indie MEGABOOTH. Here are my thoughts on this amazing experience of our two-headed team Rat King and what it took to showcase our game. A diary:

How to get to the Gamescom?

Because I was asked quite often how to get in, let's answer the first question right away: how can you show your game at the MEGABOOTH?

First you should subscribe to the newsletter and wait for the announcement of the convention you want to take part in as an exhibitor. Former MEGABOOTH exhibitors and the team around Kelly Wallick and Christopher Floyd playtest all games and look for a nice mix in genre, visuals and gameplay.

For the Gamescom in Germany 34 teams were chosen who presented 36 games on 362 m². Since we had the go since July to be part of the MEGABOOTH debut in Germany and the necessary backup from our publisher to stem the weight of costs, our planning started.

Preparations

The best thing about the MEGABOOTH is that you don't have to think of all the unpleasant parts of an exhibition, like how to build the booth and where to rent the hardware. Instead you can nicely concentrate on all the visual and physical materials necessary to present your game's beauty.

We had the naive idea to finish our game TRI punctually for the Gamescom, then go there and present a finished game. Right ... Keep in mind that taking part in an exhibition will take at least two weeks upfront of your time. And believe me when I say all the mail communication and design for and production of buttons, postcards and posters will consume all of your time - except if you are a multi-tasking genius or have a bigger team.

I thought about nice stuff to hand out, like buttons (150 pieces), postcards (1000, could have been more!) and hand-crafted press kits (30, too few), and also the XXL-poster for the booth itself. Eventually we received large character displays and stickers from Friedrich's amazing parents.
Meanwhile Friedrich finished the current build of our game TRI, with some cheats for us and to prevent people from shutting down the PC. We also discussed which part of the game we want people to play. Is it better to have a demo that could be finished within a short timespan or would we like to let people play as long as they wish, to see for how long they are actually interested? We decided to make this a huge playtest to find out what people really think of the game. In addition we cut out the second level, which we both love but is too much of a filler. We didn't find it appropriate for an exhibition where you want people to directly head for the main gameplay: building triangles as platforms and to walking on the walls)

Press

In the weeks before GC I contacted mostly the German and Austrian press. For international press contacts it was quite hard to find out which magazines or sites would do the trip to Germany and who they are going to send. It was also kind of weird to write everybody for TRI in my name, then the German press in the name of the Megabooth and after that all my contacts about Süpergute Indies - an initiative of German, Austrian and Swiss indies to make sure you can reach all of us in their places. But I guess you just did the job right if it felt like spamming everybody three times ...

My learning: don't do the press work two weeks before the Gamescom as most journos will already be booked with appointments. Although I'm super-happy with the response this time and that most of the invited journalists at least agreed on coming by if they found some time. Starting everything earlier is my big goal for the next convention, now that I have so many contacts readily collected.

What I didn't do was contacting Let's Players. After attending the Rezzed in March this year, which was 100% devoted to showcasing games via Twitch or YouTube, it was weird to see so few people documenting the GC with their phones and camera. On the other hand the professional and bigger YouTubers couldn't take two steps in the halls without meeting their fans who demand photos with them. We were lucky to get invited by the Game One team to their livestreams, nonetheless, which was a crazy experience.

The MEGABOOTH

The Gamescom had different halls that hosted the business area (4 and 5), the entertainment area (6-9) and the hardware and comic market with the cosplayers - that was where the MEGABOOTH has been placed (hall 10). A really great thing about the assemblance: it doesn't matter how big your name or how famous your game is - all our booths had the same size in space and XXL-posters. You get a table, two chairs, a PC, monitor and a large TV. More hardware or furniture could have been ordered or brought along by yourself. Logitech sponsored mouse, keyboard, controllers and headphones, which we could keep after the show. Nice.

We arrived at the GC on Tuesday to prepare our booth. Arranging a table and the large flatscreen shouldn't be a problem when you decide to go for minimalism as it suited our game and wallet best. We just tried to put everything in a way to make everything visible from every angle and didn't create a psychological border that kept people from trying out our game. By adding some stickers while setting up fox and monk we were quickly finished, while we could see what the others did with their space. I think Armello with their superb characters and fake ivy and moreover Dex with the Cyberpunk-fluids-and-cables construction should be mentioned for bringing up the greatest designs for their spaces.

Gamescom starts with the business day on Wednesday

In theory on Wednesday only exhibitors and press can access the whole area. In practice it's already a run for the big players as many exhibitors tend to bring their families over and the under-aged business men turned out to be winners of the Wildcards that people without press or exhibition passes could have applied for on the internet.

My advise after this year is: use this day and make some handshakes in the business area to get contacts. The business area is stuffed with publishers, platform holders (Steam, gog.com) and hardware developers (Oculus, Nvidia). Even without an appointment you might get a business card or introduce yourself.

Instead we mostly stood at our booth because it was just the two of us, and we seldomly took turns. We rather refined psychological tactics to guide people to play our game. Especially helpful was Thorsten Wiedemann's (director of the Amaze festival) INDEPENDENCE AMAZING, a large 20-pages old-school newspaper packed with interviews and articles that needed to be held wide-armed for reading. We gave them out to by-passers to stop them in their rush through the hardware hall.

You will observe an interesting effect: if you gather a group of people, even more will follow and your viewers soon will crowd the little space and raise even more attention. But if nobody stands there it gets harder to persuade people to take a look to the left or right instead of walking straight out of the hall. So it's wise to guide interested sidewalkers to your game.

Talking to people at the GC must be strange for foreigners as most people will be from Germany and therefore prefer the German language to talk in. Which was an awesome feeling for us as we are used to talk about TRI in English to reach a wider audience. But for the first time it was a home match and we needed to develop the game's pitch in German as well. While of course a lot of people will come from all over Europe to celebrate games and hope for some words in English, too. So you will get an interesting demographic and very European slice of players from here.

A week of madness - Consumer Days from Thursday to Sunday

Over the week we learned to guide people to our booth and even asked press to get to us after finished filming at nearby booths. One thing is clear: don't be shy but also don't be too pushy. Watching the people standing at your booth more closely, you will also learn that some of them need to be asked to try your game. A lot of the visitors are too shy to just make the step themselves (so much about psychological border). It was also a pleasure to get direct feedback for the game, as most folks watched our trailers on the TV and outspoke quite honest and loud what they thought. On the graphical part and also showcasing the interaction we can be fully happy with our work, as our overall look&feel set itself apart from other games and was rewarded with so many compliments.

Therefore we added our laptop to the playable devices on the second day. While Friedrich used it to instantly fix bugs and give new builds to our one playable device on Wednesday, we realized that one PC just isn't enough. We decided to have only one station in the first place because we couldn't estimate the interest for TRI. Having too much PCs might have led to orphaned and sad-looking stations, but with a fair of 335,000 attendees that won't be the case. Especially as soon as people heard that you can play games in hall 10 without waiting in line!

I only wish we could have spread the word a bit more to people interested into smaller games by handing them some MEGABOOTH cards at the exits of the other halls to guide them directly to hall 10. I still wonder if it was either perfect that we were in our 'own' hall among the creative bunch of cosplayers and Magic cards while still being able to talk to each other because of not being constantly surrounded by over-powered bass. Or would it be better not to separate indies (let's get rid of the name!) from AAA games, but risk that the player's heads might be already filled up with the blockbusters they know instead of looking for fresh titles in an assembled collection.

I would like to see an entertainment area where people can decide on their own if they want to play smaller titles instead of needing to search for them. Not to forget that there already was the Indie Arena booth (assemblance of mostly German and Austrian indie games like Schein or Team Indie) placed between Nintendo and Bethesda. Their booth was mostly overcrowded with indie fans but also filled with bad acoustics surrounding them in return.

What would have been better? No idea. Instead we enjoyed to talk to our visitors in person, get criticism and find some time to meet with who came by to say hello. We also handed postcards only to people that at least took a closer look at TRI, because we felt just smashing random people with cards doesn't make any sense. Going for personal communication instead of mass amusement seemed to work out for us.

Is indie still cool

While "Are games art?" was last year's interviewer's most favourite question, this year we got mostly asked if it is still cool to be called 'indie'. The MEGABOOTH landed in Cologne with an amazing reputation they got from the PAX shows since their debut in 2012. Being part in this fresh, beautiful and extremely diverse collection did celebrate the term indie in a lot of ways. Although with no doubt without a publisher we couldn't have spend money for the show. On the other hand 'indie' only means something to just a few German players and the press, therefore the MEGABOOTH needed to build their reputation in Germany anew.

When I took a break to spend my time standing in queue for an hour to see the Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt live-gameplay I talked a lot to the people standing in line. Against any speculation about waiting for a game (if it doesn't take you eight hours like for Call of Duty) it is really fun to speak to the fans of a game you like as well and socialize a bit. I exchanged some of my TRI postcards for sweets and talked about indie games. Standing at the big players' booths and hearing that normal people haven't heard of indie games before and are not really interested in unknown stuff can be pretty humbling.

I guess that answers the question whether indie 'still' is cool in another way. While it served as a quality signet for games like World of Goo or Braid it has worn off since then or never really arrived here with the same impact as it did in America (or did I mistake that from the games press?). As most games are too diverse and the 'genre' (was it ever one?) has become the business model of choice without necessarily representing a certain type of game.

Or is there still a difference, as we all receive good credit for our games at the MEGABOOTH as being the most interesting and surprising bunch of teams showcasing their games at the GC. Presented by the developers themselves!

Was it worth it?

We got asked quite often if attending the very own booth and standing there for a whole week was worth our time and money. I guess you can't compensate that in money or sold copies. But being able to present our nearly finished game to an audience consisting of an extremely diverse range of players and also other developers who came by – that was extremely important for us. Especially as we were attending the Gamescom (back then known as the Games Convention in Leipzig) since we were students. But it's a whole different world if you present your university prototypes just for fun, being able to stroll off any time you want, in comparison to having your first real big game out there. I guess I just shouldn't wear other games' shirts as I got asked if I work on the Witcher too many times.

Meeting other devs and sharing this great event with all the feet aches and losing your voice over the week while trying to party a bit in the evenings is an immense experience for us. Especially with a huge assembly like the MEGABOOTH helping you with all above mentioned stuff. Having your own booth not only helps you with getting a lot more confidence with your game (instead of sitting in your cave while working nearly three years on it with just very few recognition), but also with getting in contact to press and people interested in your kind of game more easily. And as a player, it was pretty awesome to meet the nice guys behind games like The Talos Principle, Armello, Renowned Explorers: International Society, Tengami, Ghost of a Tale, Dungeon of the Endless and many, many more!

Thanks for the great time, everybody!

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Want to hear more of the Gamescom from us?

Listen to our podcast (In German)

Read Friedrich's impressions

TRI at the Gamescom 2014

Last week was Gamescom week. It was very exhausting, and a great experience overall. My feet are burning, and my voice got lost somewhere between Thursday and Friday, but a lot of people played TRI - and best of all, most of those even liked it! My favorite visitors were two girls who came with their mother, and they got so excited while playing that they visited our booth half an hour later again, just to ask if there is a possibility to find out when the game will be released! (There is, just subscribe to our newsletter.)

Yes, we had a booth to showcase TRI. We were part of the Indie MEGABOOTH, and so we exhibited together with more than 30 other developers in individual smaller sub-booths. We met a lot of cool people which was one of the greatest things about this. Because I don't really think showing the game to (a fraction of) 335,000 visitors actually would have a significant effect on sales or overall popularity - we were located in a less prominent hall and most visitors still didn't care about indie games or could identify them as games at all ... This is why we gave our flyers only to those who stopped to have a look at TRI.

Despite of the AAA preference of most visitors we got some valuable feedback again, and some of it not so valuable. One person didn't think a price of $15 would be justified and told us to lower it to $10 maximum; but other than that almost all feedback was positive. Of course, one reason might be that players who disliked TRI didn't care about telling us why, haha.

I will make the sprinting (via Shift key) less restrictive even though I didn't want it in the game in the first place. In the end it doesn't really matter and if it makes some players happier it shall be - thus the fatigue bar will cease to exist. I guess a valuable lesson in this regard is that most times TRI is played for the first time anyway. Sure, some people might play it more than once, but this will be only a fraction of total plays. A game like TRI should be designed foremost for first-time players. It's not a roguelike after all.

Some people even asked what we planned for our next game. We don't really have a concrete idea yet, all we know is that we want to make a smaller game which should potentially be able to run on consoles and maybe even mobile. Perhaps we do something with local multiplayer. It's just that you need to invest some time into TRI before you "get" it, and the controls are restricted to mouse and keyboard because of the necessary precision for the triangles. Both are factors that makes it hard to generate a hype about the game for the broader masses, which is very unfortunate for us and something we really want to do better next time.

It helped a lot that I took out the second level for the demonstration on the Gamescom; so basically you would start in the Tower of Nowhere as soon as you beat the tutorial before the temple. This way players reached the main gameplay (the triangles) within five minutes instead of 15. It was also interesting to see that some persistent visitors even got to the regions where you walk on the walls and ceilings. One very brave soul directly started a later level, Glimpse of Light, and only a few hints were needed for him to beat it; but of course he needed longer as he didn't have the knowledge of the former levels - he didn't even do the tutorial. It's great to see that people can easily spend an hour casting triangles everywhere.

One of my personal highlights of that week was that Sos Sosowski lured Alexander Bruce to our booth - and he actually played it for a while. Some people even compare TRI to Antichamber (among other games), but this is farfetched in my opinion - TRI is much more conservative in its game design and visuals. On the other hand some people will always find comparisons, because that's how the brain works, and those comparisons might be strange in your own perspective. Though I don't really understand at all how anyone could think of Shadow of the Colossus when seeing TRI.