It’s a little late, but I wanted to post a brief postmortem on our Demo at SXSW Gaming 2019. It was nice to get out and show the game again!

The Good:

We were very fortunate to have free booth space in the middle of the day on Saturday and passes thanks to Austin Game Devs and Bob Bryant who runs the St. Edward’s University Video Game Development Program.

We had a new touchscreen monitor at our booth, so we were no longer hampered by showing the game on a tiny, aging iPad.

Mark had added to and edited the content in the demo, so it was longer and better. He had also added a significant improvement to the text display.

Mark has also been adding features to our game engine/authoring tool.

Many of our students from St. Edward’s were at SXSW Gaming, so we got to see them and talk, and they got to play the demo.  Everyone’s reaction as quite positive.

We made some new friends, including some very cool folks from an indie game company in the Netherlands that’s also working on a narrative-driven game. The company is Rusty Lake and their game is called Cube Escape: Paradox. It’s a very cool concept that combines a puzzle game with a short film. What happens in the puzzles doesn’t affect the film but what happens in the film can affect how you might solve the puzzles. There are two chapters in the story, each with multiple endings.

We had a lot of enthusiastic visitors to our booth. Mark initiated every conversation with a question to help gauge each visitor’s potential interest in our style of game: “Do you like Choose Your Own Adventure or Dungeons & Dragons? …Our game is a hybrid of the two.” One visitor, upon hearing this question, unzipped his sweatshirt to reveal he was wearing a Dungeons & Dragons t-shirt underneath. He and his friend were both very excited about our game concept, and it was very encouraging to see that our game elicited so much enthusiasm among our target audience.

The Not-as-Good:

Now that we’ve moved to using a touch-screen monitor, we have a mess of cables running across our demo table. 

I was up until 4 AM trying to get a new feature working at the last minute, which I didn’t manage to do. It was disappointing to get so close and not have it for the demo, but ultimately it wasn’t a big deal.

We only had a couple of hours of demo time on one day of the convention and it was the first two hours of the day, when people were still trickling in.

It was a real pain to get into the Austin Convention Center and set up before the doors opened. Ultimately, we weren’t able to, and got in right after, so we missed a little demo time.

We need to remember to bring an electrical extension along in the future.

We ended up leaving a power cable behind, which Mark had to fetch later.

The day got off to a slow start because we demoed during the first 2 hours that the expo was open on Saturday, but by noon the crowd had picked up considerably, so much so that you could hardly even walk down the aisle where our booth was.

We still have our old sign, which has served us well, but we need to upgrade to something a little bigger and more transportable.

Moving Forward:

We’re going to get the demo finished and polished and put it online.

We’re working on in-game art.

We need something to spruce up our booth and hide the cabling. We have to figure out what that is.

We also need a build that can most effectively utilize our new setup with the touchscreen monitor. That should be a minor change.

We need a bigger sign. Which just means that I need to lay one out and get it made.

Finally, we need to keep working hard!