Rage 2013 - My thoughts
I’m writing this on a plane back to Cape Town, feeling somewhat like a zombie, but I thought it would be best for me to write my thoughts down while I still had the buzz from an amazing event.
This was the first time that Make Games SA has officially attended rAge, and for my part, I was a bit skeptical on what value it would present to the association, and you our members. Overall I think we can safely call rAge 2013 a success. From the associations perspective we have managed to receive a great deal of solid press coverage, and there isn't a report on rAge that doesn't mention our stand. There has been an inflow of new members as a result and the site has been receiving quite a bit of traffic. The stand was never quiet and all the games where being played pretty much non-stop. I was also very pleasing to see people coming back to the stand after visiting the rest of the expo (some people basically lived at our stand either sinking hours into the games or playing many games of Joust), which I think shows the quality of the games we had on offer, but also the desire from the general public to see something more than just the usual AAA titles.
Joust and Ninja were huge draws, and we often had people coming back to the stand just to play. The only downside being when I dislocated a journalists shoulder during a joust match (luckily they are not going sue, and it worked out in the end).
The Winner
Undoubtedly the winner of rAge 2013 was Pixelboy, Dom and David networked like pros and had all the major console developers fighting over who would be getting the exclusive!
Honorable mentions
While everything went well, there were some technical hitches that we will need to improve on for next year. One major thing that I think we really need to do next year is to ensure that at least one Dev for each game is present. People absolutely loved chatting to the Devs and getting insight into how and why design choices were made. Most of the devs present also got some really good feedback so I think, from that perspective at least, it could be quite valuable.
A more formal report back from the committee will happen soon and you can all expect some awesome discussion at this months meetups
Nick
This was the first time that Make Games SA has officially attended rAge, and for my part, I was a bit skeptical on what value it would present to the association, and you our members. Overall I think we can safely call rAge 2013 a success. From the associations perspective we have managed to receive a great deal of solid press coverage, and there isn't a report on rAge that doesn't mention our stand. There has been an inflow of new members as a result and the site has been receiving quite a bit of traffic. The stand was never quiet and all the games where being played pretty much non-stop. I was also very pleasing to see people coming back to the stand after visiting the rest of the expo (some people basically lived at our stand either sinking hours into the games or playing many games of Joust), which I think shows the quality of the games we had on offer, but also the desire from the general public to see something more than just the usual AAA titles.
Joust and Ninja were huge draws, and we often had people coming back to the stand just to play. The only downside being when I dislocated a journalists shoulder during a joust match (luckily they are not going sue, and it worked out in the end).
The Winner
Undoubtedly the winner of rAge 2013 was Pixelboy, Dom and David networked like pros and had all the major console developers fighting over who would be getting the exclusive!
Honorable mentions
- Viscera Cleanup Detail was (unsurprisingly) a massive hit. It was very popular amongst parents who couldn’t help but crack jokes like “How come you don’t mind cleaning this mess up, but I can’t get you to clean up your room? Hurr hurr hurr”
- Day in the Woods was also very popular, especially with younger audiences and we had many people asking where they could buy it (Guys, you need to port this to Mac, like now…).
- Silhouette was very popular once we explained how it worked (An important thing I learned was that people do not read, ever). I saw a couple of the gamers in the lan playing this throughout the expo, which I think is a testimony to its design.
- Broforce and Deathsmashers proved very popular, and where very good at drawing in the crowds to the stand.
- Wang Commander proved less controversial than I thought and had a lot of people giggling at the absurdity of it all, Richard also managed to sell most (if not all) of his Wang Commander shirts!
- Cadence was a bit of a surprise hit. It’s “toy box” like design drew people in and they just kept playing and playing and playing. This needs to be ported for touch devises immediately!
- A four (!) year old girl playing Desktop Dungeons and exclaiming with delight every time she killed a monster.
- A father and his two sons all playing Wang Commander
- The guy who played Death Smashers for 4 hours straight until he eventually beat it (and claimed Richards Death Smashers shirt as a prize)
- Joust, just all of the joust
- Bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear, bear bear, chuck, chuck
While everything went well, there were some technical hitches that we will need to improve on for next year. One major thing that I think we really need to do next year is to ensure that at least one Dev for each game is present. People absolutely loved chatting to the Devs and getting insight into how and why design choices were made. Most of the devs present also got some really good feedback so I think, from that perspective at least, it could be quite valuable.
A more formal report back from the committee will happen soon and you can all expect some awesome discussion at this months meetups
Nick
Comments
But, thanks to everyone for helping out! :)
I hope that our monthly meetups can capture some of this atmosphere, where people are able to come and play a bunch of games and prototypes and chat to the devs about them.
and and and and JOUST! <3
Thanks @LexAquillia for the report back. It's a bit frustrating that lots of people didn't read the instructions for Silhouette. I know they're a bit long, but it's a relatively small investment, especially since the game does have an unusual mechanic. You'd be amazed at how many people post let's plays without having read the instructions beforehand. It often results in the two players just running into one another like a bunch of drunks in the dark :P
So I suppose that's a useful lesson to have learned re: the instructions. Anyway, thanks so much to all you guys helping out there, explaining how the game worked where necessary. Really awesome that the lanners were playing it too. I would've loved to hear the cries of "LOL die faget!" as players hunted one another down :D j/k
Seriously nice one on all our games drawing such crowds. This community is really producing some amazing stuff!
This is a huge lesson in game design. I know I've spoken about it before, but it's much harder to practice than to put together slides of it :P
A non-dumb tutorial is what it'll probably take to get people from looking at a screen to playing for any game that's not just run, jump and shoot. And also why Broforce kicked so much in general :)
I would say there's a big difference between making a game for an expo environment, and making a game for general consumption.
Masters of Orion 2 is probably one of my all time favourite games, but I wouldnt play it at an expo.
WangCommander was super entertaining at the expo, but not really something I'd play by myself (keep your double entendres to yourself :P )
@LexAquillia you know, I totally understand that, and whenever I was by my stand and I could show people how to play, they were definitely more engaged - or at least appear more engaged. A part of me just wanted to stand back and observe and see what their default actions were and learn from that, rather than "cheat" the gaps of my game design with my explanations... You know?
Though in that case, it would seem that my goals were clearly different from PixelBoy's - they had a product that was ready to go, so that was their goal - to market - and they did it superbly. I had an experiment that I needed to learn from, and I had gotten to that goal too :)
On that note we had spent the past 3 weeks working on the first 15 minutes of game play in order to make it "expo friendly" :) This helped hugely as if a game is expo friendly it also means anybody can explain the game to a friend in a short period of time.
An expo friendly Demo can be hugely helpful for your design process (As it teaches you to convey ideas as simply as possible) as well as your marketing campaign, just look at the emphasis Phil Fish put(s) on having his games (Fez) expo reading.
Well done to everyone involved.