Chapter Clear: MAGfest 2025
Greetings, travelers, and happy 2025! Doug here after a few months without an Advent Blog - I hope everyone had some time to relax and have fun over the holidays! We had the great pleasure of showing off Advent of the Reaper at the MAGfest Indie Videogame Showcase - or MIVS - at Super MAGfest 2025 last month. Like our past show recap blogs, we wanted to take the opportunity to share our experience with everyone!
For those unfamiliar, Super MAGfest is an annual event held in National Harbor, Maryland! There's more to do than you could possibly desire across four days of con with concerts, panels, workshops, shopping, gaming, cosplay, and more! I've personally been attending the event since 2018, although at the time I had no ambitions of even making a game, much less showing it off there! MAGfest quickly became one of our favorite events of the year, and as Advent of the Reaper came into its own as an indie game project, getting accepted into MIVS was a dream come true! If you're even somewhat local to the DC area, I can't recommend checking out this event enough! Since I'm already gushing about it, I may as well take this opportunity to extend a heartfelt thanks to the MAGfest and MIVS staff, the fellow indies showcasing with us, and everyone who took the time to take a peek at Advent for making this our most memorable MAGfest ever! You can see ALL of the games that have a Steam presence from MIVS this year in this Steam Collection or in this Bluesky Starter Pack - show us and fellow indies some love! All right, onto the recap!
Setting up the booth on Wednesday night
Unlike many conventions which run Friday through Sunday, MAGfest is a four-day event which includes Thursday. As a result, we have always arrived Wednesday night, but this year had an added activity: booth setup! We arrived in the mid-evening, grabbed our badges, and headed to the MIVS hall. Since MAGfest was our biggest show yet, I wanted us to have a proper backdrop - and that meant a monstrous 8x10 foot banner! It turns out my own cielings aren't eight feet high, so we had the excitement of seeing it in its unfurled glory for the first time during setup! Fortunately, after a bit of fiddling with the hardware, it was towering above us without issue!
The front view of the Advent booth just before the hall opened Thursday afternoon!
In addition to the backdrop, we were blessed with a corner space for MIVS, which meant we had an entire extra "side" of the booth that was audience-facing! We used the main, front-facing table of the booth for our typical two-station demo setup, and the side-facing table featured a looping trailer that we ran 24 hours a day (oh yeah - MAGfest is also a 24-hour event!), a binder with lore and character art, and some treats for passerby. A funny note about the binder is that I originally had it on a little stand - no one wanted to pick it up. Eventually, I took it off the stand and laid it flat on the table - then people started flipping through it as they walked by!
The side view of the Advent booth, with our looping longform trailer
Speaking of that longform trailer, if you’d like to see it for yourself, here’s it is hosted on Youtube! It’s over five minutes of Advent goodness, including gameplay footage and character introductions!
I would be remiss not to mention a couple highlights of our awesome neighbors. During setup we got the opportunity to meet Sam, developer of Mech Tech! In a funny twist of fate, Yolie (who was featured in one of our previous blogs) makes pixel art for both of our games, so we were aware of each other prior to MAGfest! Mech Tech has a demo available on Steam, so please consider checking it out as well! I also want to make a quick plug for our indie dev neighbors on the opposite side of the row - Fine Work! They are making an awesome Visual Novel / Rhythm game with a loom theme for the rhythm component, and they are running a Kickstarter right now! I got an opportunity to try their game out Thursday morning, and as a fan of both Visual Novels and Rhythm games (I was a DDR kid in high school!), they have a very fun and engaging game in the works. Check out their active Kickstarter and consider backing; they have a demo to try out on Steam and have some great backer rewards to sweeten the deal!
One of the Fine Work team members cosplaying as a character from the game!
Once the con was properly underway and the MIVS hall opened Thursday afternoon, I have to admit that the details of any individual day all blurs together with the others. One thing was certain: Advent was a hit! Since we don't have a product for sale, we were planning on wrapping up each night right as "core hours" came to an end - usually around 7PM. Each night, interested players kept the seats occupied, and we were showing things off until 8 or 8:30 each day! We got the chance to talk with enthusiastic players - be they seasoned tactics veterans or newbies to the genre - and received lots of valuable feedback, as we always do with the live shows!
We had some very cool interactions as well. I had a really nice chat with one of the hosts of the HitPoint podcast. They gave us a really nice shoutout in one of their episodes following the event. I’ve timestamped it here, but please consider checking out their podcast writ large if you are a JRPG fan! I also did an interview on camera (terrifying) with a publisher/game studio that wanted to talk about Advent (I’m not sure if or when that footage is landing online so I’m not going to name them at the moment)!
Quite a crowd surrounding the booth!
So, what were the major takeaways from the show? We highlighted three major feedback items that we heard over and over throughout MAGfest to prioritize. Fortunately, each of them were already on our radar, but it’s incredibly valuable to hear from players what they are most interested in seeing in a future iteration:
Fast Forward: Players have time and time again told us that we need to incorporate a way to speed up (and/or skip) combat scenes, map movement, cutscenes, etc. While this is feedback I was initially resistant to earlier in development (skip through seeing all our hard work on pixel art and story!? Absolutely not!), I’ve come to find common ground with our players here. While not a singular point in my shift of opinion, a few months ago I played through the Tactics RPG Unicorn Overlord (and I loved it - highly recommend). This game featured some of what I consider to be the most beautiful 2D animated combat animations in recent memory - and even I started skipping and/or fast-forwarding them after a while. So I’ve fully come around on us needing to respect the players’ wishes to at least have the option to keep things moving a bit faster when desired. We’re exploring the best way(s) to implement some game pacing features in Advent!
Status Screens: Players want a way to more closely examine units! In the current build, the only way to really glimpse what is going on under the hood with Unit stats is through the Combat Forecast windows, meaning the player needs to have already selected a Unit, confirmed a 0+ tile movement, selected a Combat Action, and selected an applicable opposing Unit to attack before they get insight into how the numbers could shake out after battle. We actually have a mockup of the status screen (it was modified to be used in the long trailer we were playing on the TV throughout the event), but it still needs a little work before we implement it into the game.
Visual Improvements to Menus: Something that we have heard more and more (probably a result of the demo getting longer and players interacting with the menus more often) is that our menu system makes it difficult to tell which item is actually being selected, leading to additional time scrutinizing the screen and the occasional unintended selection. I recently realized that one of the reason this might not have been high on our personal radars is that when we do quick gameplay tests on our home computers, we can use the mouse for input - leaving no ambiguity as to what menu items are being selected. There are a few ways we can easily improve this for players and it will be addressed in the near future!
To wrap things up for this post, here’s a few fun tidbits about what else happened during MAGfest and some additional pictures from my personal experience! The Advent team would be thrilled to return to MIVS in 2026, but we’ll be at MAGfest either way!
What’s next for Advent of the Reaper? Well, we don’t have any upcoming shows on the docket right now. We’d like to take some time to focus on game dev without show prep, but we’ll certainly be keeping our eyes open for local opportunities. Stay tuned, and until next time!
So long and thanks for all the memories! Until next time!
P.S. If you didn’t know - Advent of the Reaper now has a store page on Steam! Please consider adding it to your wishlist!