We'll I've fully recovered from an awesome weekend at PAX. What an experience! Mike's Plumbing and Tile: Media Arts Division laid some pipe where no one has before haha. PAX was bigger than ever this year. So big infact that they had to move the PAX 10 up to the sixth floor of the Seattle convention center. At first I thought this might mean we were not going to get much traffic...boy was I wrong!
The team went into setup mode early Thursday morning, setting up the booth in the best possible location. Our booth was literally across the aisle from the Minecraft booth, and in the other direction was the Mega 64 booth. Needless to say, we got a ton of traffic over the course of the weekend. Digipen trucked our game cabinet out to Seattle Thursday morning. Our programmer/artist extraordinaire, with the help of others, did such an amazing custom paint job on our game cabinet. It was the highlight of the PAX 10 booths, grabbing praise from all of our visitors.
Friday rolled around and it was time for the show. Xplay stopped by and interviewed Ken our Producer. Over the course of the weekend we were also interviewed by Machinima, Destructoid, and GiantBomb. I'll be posting links to the videos and articles as soon as they go up around the web. Ryan handled an impromptu podcast interview. After the expo halls closed on Saturday it was time for Richard to be thrown to the wolves at the PAX 10 panel. 6 of the PAX 10 games were represented on the panel. They were peppered with questions from the public about their games. Bryan Bishop had Richard sweating in his seat before he asked the question, "What is the one thing about your game that you feel made it succeed?" Richard nailed the answer with the reply of "focusing on what made the gameplay fun".Come Sunday, everyone was exhausted and felt like they may lose all feeling in their feet at any moment. It was a great day though, highlighted for me by a few moments from those playing our game. First, we had a fan revisit the booth saying he had worked his way up to the final two levels at home the night before. We decided to give him a shot at our final challenge level just for kicks. A huge crowd gathered to cheer him on as he gave the final challenge level his best shot. After 250+ deaths and 30 mins he was able to claim the title of being the only visitor to our booth to beat the final level of our game that weekend.
At the other end of the spectrum, towards closing time. We had a very cute little 6 year girl sit down to play our game with her mom. With very minimal help from her Mom, she was able to play through our beginning levels and have a lot of fun. Seeing these two very different types of fans come play our game, be challenged by it, and enjoy their experience, really hammered home to me that we had nailed the goal we had set out for as a team at the beginning of this project. We had made a game that appealed to many types of players, accessible by all, fun to play, and hard to put down.
On behalf of the whole team, I'd like to thank everyone that stopped by our booth. It was an absolute pleasure to have the chance to showcase our game in front of so many people. And it was a huge honor to be included in the PAX 10 among so many innovative and outstanding indie games. Thank you PAX for such an awesome experience and opportunity!
More pictures and links will be sure to follow!
