The Indie Series: First Steps with Hashtagcon
Held during the final weekend of October at the Hashtag Gaming Arena in Herndon, VA, the Hashtagcon Indie Series was a single-day event that featured 19 indie games in addition to student capstone projects from the George Mason University's Game Development department. Beyond the opportunity to play the indie games on display, the event featured several talks from presenters with industry experience and helpful advice to impart on the crowd.
This was our first ever public showing of Advent of the Reaper, so my wife Lisa (who is the Advent character designer!) and I were a combination of nervous and excited to be taking part! Fortunately, we were met with overwhelming support, kindness, and excitement from the wonderful folks who gave our demo a spin. We were originally worried that our single-level demo wouldn't be "enough game" to get people excited, but we were quite wrong! The "full playthrough" (including Visual Novel scenes) was a 10~15 minute experience, and while some players definitely would have liked to keep going, everyone was able to get a solid feel for what we were offering, provide positive reinforcement on what they liked, and friendly criticism of what they didn't.
Learning As We Go
We wrapped up the event with a new perspective on what players expected from the experience, and where we either were or were not (yet!) meeting those expectations. This was clear from the player's first turn — we suggest in the dialogue that they use a tree tile for a terrain bonus, but in doing so, they're out of combat range and have to pass their first turn without a battle. That's kind of boring, so most players ignored our advice and jumped right into battle, bonus be damned! We're planning to tweak this in a future build so that the player can always attack an enemy unit on the first turn, from either a 'normal' or a terrain-bonus tile — their choice, but always an exciting one. Additionally, we now know (and suspected going in) that we need to make the terrain bonus tile(s) more obvious to the player.
We received so much praise for the art and animation, and the tightness of the overall controls and game system. Considering that we hadn't even 100% finished the level the players were going through, this was exciting and promising to hear! We also learned a thing or two about how we can improve our future physical setups for public demos, although overall we were very pleased with how that aspect went. For example — we have an awesome table runner with the Advent Logo that hangs over the front edge of the table. However, in the (hopefully frequent) event that both of our gameplay stations have people sitting down to the game — you can barely see the table runner at all! As a result, we're working on ways to introduce more signage visible from a standing height in future events.
Overall, this was a wonderful first public demo experience and we are so glad we were able to participate. As this was the last weekend of October, my wife and I thought we'd have the energy to go to a Halloween party when we got home from the event, but we were both exhausted and passed out instead! Just a few days after wrapping up the Hashtagcon event, I shipped our signage off to Lucas for M+DEV!
