Tuesday, October 2, 2012

A little late.

    Well, sorry for the late follow up on what happened in PAX. Well, I can safely say that I really don't like flying during typhoon season. My family and I got stuck in Korea for 3 days while we waited for a new flight, to Vancouver. Needless to say, when I arrived in Vancouver instead of having 2 days to adjust, I had an hour before I jumped on a bus south bound to Seattle. I was nearly dead when I arrived in Seattle, but the important thing was  I arrived, and it was already 9:20pm. After walking 20 minutes from the bus stop to the convention center. When I arrived the show floor was closed. That didn't bother me too much, I wondered around till I found my friend, whom I was meeting. We talked for about 10 minutes and organized for tomorrows schedule.
    When we finally parted ways till tomorrow, I decided to watch a few panels about the game industry. As I sat in the small, hot room, I began to nod off and was abruptly awoken by  loud voices. Long story short, I remembered that I could use the internet in the center and found that, my favorite podcast was having a meet up just up the road. Well once I knew that, I was out of there. I rushed to the pub, and joined the Idle Thumbs meetup. This was the best part of my first night in Seattle. I met loads of game creators, and within 40 mins i was already drunk with joy and oversleep, so much so that I felt like I was floating. Lets see, I met Chris Remo (DoubleFine) Jake Rodkin/ Sean Vannamen (Tell Tale Games) Steve Gainer (Formally of 2K Marin) Branden Chung (Blendo Games) and many many more. After saying goodnight to everyone I left for my hotel, which wasn't a hotel, it was a youth hostel.
First Full Day of PAX
    Day One, I woke up early, and got ready for a long day of games talking, I stocked up on Monster and food, and then set off for the center. When I arrived, I met my friend and was taken, to the show hall, before everyone was allowed in. I set up myself with my friend and waited for the people to come. I didn't know what to expect, all I knew was that a lot of people were about to pure into the hall.
   As people came and left, some interested and others not, I felt happy to be a part of this. The efforts of last year, and this year had paid off for me. As the day went on I took a break and wondered around the show floor, saw some new games, played a few as well. In the two hour break, I saw all the other indie games, played a great deal of them. The triple "A" games that I could tryout, were Pikmen WiiU, World of Warplanes, Scrolls, Natural Selection 2, and Doom3 3D. All these games were good. Doom3 was still Doom just in 3D.  World of Warplanes was awesome. Played that for about 20 minutes, and killed 4 PAX guests. It's an awesome game. The games I just saw, were Far Cry 3, Resident Evil 6, WiiU Zombie Game, and Dishonored. The funny thing was, that when I saw the game Dishonored, I was talking with a Bethesda PR person and for some reason we ended up talking about my game, and again long story short got invited to a house party, that a lot of developers were invited to go too. So after, returning to my computers and discovering that my cell phone was stolen, I decided to go back to showcasing my game. Later that evening around 6:30 I left the building and headed up to the parties location. My friend said he would come later so, I started without him. Boy that was a good and bad idea. It was good because I could meet, people from the press. Bad in the way that only the press and regular people had to wait in line to get in and developers could go straight in without any problems.
   So after waiting for 2 hours, I could finally get into the party, but to my surprise my friend was already inside... the party was great, and I think I drank too much, while talking with people in the VIP room, because I don't remember much about who I talked with, all I remember was talking to Markus Pearson (Notch) and rubbing shoulders with Tod Howard (director of Fallout 3 and many other titles). The evening was great.

 The next and final day for me was Sunday. I had to pack up my stuff, in the hostel, and head out with everything on my back. That was fun! Sunday was my final day, and I decided to show off my game to other developers, I was a little reluctant to do this, because I was shy. After swallowing my nervousness I started showing off my game to developers, I showed my game off to several indie developers and got several, creative suggestions, as well as, keep up the good work, it looks good so far. I was really pleased and overjoyed that the newly redone version of my game was well received by, regular people and game developers alike.
I've put my name down on the list for the IndieMega Booth for next years PAX Prime and possibly PAX Australia. More updates soon, as we are coming close to the Oct 17th deadline for the IGF. Stay tuned.