Chapter Clear: RetroGameCon 2024!
Hello everyone! Doug here, checking in with another event report! Earlier this month, Advent hit the road and was available to demo at RetroGameCon 2024 in Syracuse, New York! We had our biggest email sign-up batch at the event yet, so allow me to extend a big, friendly welcome to all the new readers!
RetroGameCon landed on our radar after a suggestion from a pair of our local Maryland-area convention attending friends, who also serve as the co-heads of RGC's Cosplay Department! We got the opportunity to chat with additional con staff at MAGfest 2024, applied as an Indie Game Exhibitor earlier this year, and that was that! Syracuse was on the books!
A RetroGameCon Retrospective
The Advent booth in all of its RetroGameCon glory!
While I was very excited to experience a new city and a new convention, I’ll admit I was not looking forward to the roughly six-hour drive up to Syracuse, but with all of our equipment for the booth, flying was not a good option. A big thanks to my friend Dexter who helped me run the booth throughout the weekend. We packed up my car Thursday morning, and arrived in Syracuse in the late afternoon. After checking into the hotel, we made our way to the OnCenter, an expo venue where RetroGameCon was being held.
Set up went pretty smoothly, and our booth had a couple fun additions for this show. For starters, we finally got a standing banner for the game - which really makes a tremendous impact to the vertical visibility of our setup. We also added a "Lore Binder" to the table, which was a collection of artwork and lore tidbits on the various characters. This didn't get as much attention as I was hoping, but it was very useful to be able to flip to the pages on Angel characters as we talked with prospective players about what was yet to come!
Dexter setting up the booth while I help by taking pictures..
Any Baldur's Gate 3 fans out there? RetroGameCon had quite a draw this year with it's special guests roster containing a large amount of voice talent from the game, and we just just happened to be set up across the aisle from fan-favorite Astarion's voice actor, Neil Newbon!
No, we did not get the opportunity to chat with him.. his lines were bonkers!
RetroGameCon itself ran from Friday afternoon through late Sunday afternoon, with this year being the first time they offered Friday as part of the event. I think our placement was a little bit awkward which reduced some potential players discovering our booth (we were in between two college/college esports booths - I would have preferred if all of the indie games were tightly coupled together), but we had a pretty consistent flow of interested people. As I mentioned previously, we had our highest density of email signups for an event this weekend (breaking our previous record from Midwest Gaming Classic), so I was pleased that the people who were checking us out were interested.
Dexter chatting with players while I, again, help by taking pictures.
As with every event, we received a plethora of valuable feedback, discovered some new bugs to squash, and overall had a wonderful time introducing new people to the world of Advent! Here's some of the “fun” bugs we encountered throughout the show:
We discovered that when a character Ascends, the free HP healing we give them is not reverted if Ascend is cancelled. So we sorta-kinda have a free infinite healing bug right now... oops. We actually discovered several bugs surrounding the Ascend action and its associated state-tracking; we are moving in the direction of making the "Ascend" action - currently a menu option - a distinct button/key, decoupling it from the rest of the menu choices and vastly reducing the complexity on the programming side with managing it during an individual Unit's turn.
The devs (myself included) tend to test the game with a combination of mouse/keyboard, or game controller using the D-Pad. Very little testing was done using the analog stick - turns out it's extremely sensitive and players were jumping around menus in an undesirable manner when they opted for that method of input. We are toning down the sensitivity of the analog stick and will make sure it feels "right" to use that when playing.
Someone encountered a crazy bug that we haven't been able to replicate. The game got really confused, text was double-displaying on the screen, the title screen was displaying behind other mid-game assets - it was absolutely wacky! This was one of those one-off bugs we hadn't seen before and haven't seen since. We'll be keeping an eye out for this one..!
What in the heck is going on here!? We are still scratching our heads…
Overall, players were excited about the game and ready for more Advent! We are taking the feedback we received and continuing to improve the game as we continue to incorporate additional content. Thanks to everyone at RetroGameCon who gave Advent of the Reaper a try! That just about wraps it up for this dev blog! Except, oh yeah, one last tiny thing...
Next Event: Super MAGfest 2025
Gotta go fast!!
Advent of the Reaper was accepted into the MAGfest Indie Videogame Showcase (MIVS) for Super MAGfest 2025! This is one of the largest local events with a dedicated Indie Game focus, typically exceeding 20,000 attendees, and we couldn't be more excited! We are hard at work to get our next iteration of the game demo prepared for the show, which takes place from January 23-26, 2025 (yes, a four day event!) in National Harbor, Maryland! We'd be thrilled to see you there!