BFIG 2017

Last weekend I attended the Boston Festival of Indie Games, where our game Ruins of Glitterdeep was nominated for an award.  Spoiler alert – we didn’t win, but it was an honor just to be nominated and getting a free booth to show off our game was itself the best prize we could ask for.  Here are some photos from the show.

The show itself was both exhausting and fun.  I’ve been a part of booths for the day job before, and I love interacting with players, so that part of it was about what I expected.  As I told Mike, attending a show like this is the polar opposite of the forums in terms of engaging with your players.  Forums always go negative and attract a ton of complaints.  At a show everyone is super positive an encouraging and it’s just a delight.

That said, with just two of us running the booth it was brutal.  We clearly should have cajoled someone into helping us.  Around lunch time we each took about 30-40 minutes off to go get lunch leaving the other person solely in charge.  I went second and it was a terrible guilty pleasure sitting on a bench with a fresh cool breeze, eating my lunch, and not talking to anyone, knowing the chaos Mike was having to handle all on his own up there.  One more person would have allowed us to always have someone on break, which I think would have been huge.  And maybe we would have gotten to see some of the rest of the show.  The guy in the booth next to us ended up winning both our category and best in show, and I never saw his game.

Also, holy crap it was hot in there.  The location is an indoor track part of a big athletic center, and it was 77 degrees and sunny out.  I’m guessing the HVAC of that space is not meant to handle a massive crowd densely packed as we were.  So in addition to constantly standing and running my voice ragged, I was pouring sweat by the end of the day.

Despite all that, I was super glad we went.  The game got a nice influx of new users, and I just really enjoyed talking to folks that liked what we did.  And we got a ton of useful feedback on things to improve, so we’ll be working some of those fixes into the game pronto.  Sorry to say that all the effort required meant neglecting this blog for a little it, but I’m back now!