The Indie Series: Moving Forward with M+Dev
This year I took the plunge and showed off Advent at the M+Dev Indie Showcase. M+Dev is a smaller conference for folks in the gamedev industry where I live (Lucas) — Madison, WI. We have a few smaller offices for some of the bigger players — Respawn, PUBG, Raven — as well as smaller contracting studios that are growing quickly.
My wife, Leigh, and I hosted the booth on and off from about 8:30 am until 8:30 at night, with some breaks to attend the morning keynote and grab food from the excellent taco bar — it was a long day! We had a steady stream of visitors the entire time, not quite as popular as our neighbors with IVOR (which was a super fun throwback to a quake arena style shooter) but strong consistent traffic.
I fielded compliments all day on the artwork! Almost every single person mentioned how cool the art was. Honestly it was getting awkward for me to accept so many compliments on behalf of the art team :D "Absolutely stunning" is one that I remember :smile: This twitter callout will go in our digital scrapbook, courtesy of the Mole Maiden team (who have a promising platformer in the works with unique gameplay mechanics and a demo on steam already)!
We received some useful critical feedback too. Many suggestions that have been on our radar, and several good ideas that we haven't thought of yet. One recurring theme was pacing — we don't want to lose people early if the gameplay is too slow. What worked for the GBA era may not work in 2023. Games are faster paced these days, and it's a more crowded market with very addictive attention grabbers at one's fingertips. On the other hand, our story is important which means getting the lore in place early on. We'll need to be mindful to balance action and storytelling the first few chapters, and give players the controls to speed up the tactical combat sections a tad.
The other big takeaway was — folks want to play more :) So I'm gonna sign off on this recap to get back to dev work, haha!
The day after M+Dev — officially nap day
