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News, updates, and general rambling from the crew at Pixelscopic

Post-PAX Report (Part 3)

Delver's Drop & Rolling the DIce

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It’s been over a week now since we returned from PAX, and it feels like we’re all still recouper­at­ing (I slept through my alarm today). We are still learn­ing how to bet­ter run Pix­elscop­ic (we just set up Ven­tri­lo, which was a minor com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­through). And we are still catch­ing up with all of the great peo­ple we met, and stay­ing abreast of all of the great press we are get­ting on Delver’s Drop — which at this point I’ll just call DDrop for sim­plic­i­ty. The name’s not real­ly that dif­fi­cult to get out until you’ve said it about 500 times in 3 days.

Ryan Bak­er (far left) talk­ing to a hand­ful of our sev­er­al hun­dred booth-goers.

For all four of us on the team, there were moments lead­ing up to the con­fer­ence (per­haps quite a few) when we actu­al­ly thought about bail­ing out of the Mega­booth and not exhibit­ing, due to a lack of con­fi­dence in the game’s very ear­ly, incom­plete state. This may sur­prise you if you’ve seen any of the sev­er­al arti­cles that have been post­ed on Delver’s Drop recent­ly (like the ones here, here, and here), and the fact that Game Informer named it one of their 9 “Stand­out Titles of PAX’s Indie Mega Booth.” Out of over 30 games, that’s more than decent, con­sid­er­ing that DDrop had only been in full devel­op­ment for just under a month. But know­ing what we want­ed the game to be, and the fact that the PAX build as it stood was nowhere near this in the days lead­ing up to the show — even the day of the show — had put us all in one of the most dour states we had seen since we start­ed Pixelscopic.

I’m just not the kind of per­son who cuts cor­ners on any­thing. I know what a game announce­ment should look like — you have a nice trail­er, send out press releas­es, hit the social media, hope you get some­thing to go viral, increase mind-share, and all of the oth­er PR buzz-word con­cepts. They form a pret­ty sim­ple check­list of the things-you-should-do if you want peo­ple to know about your game. All we had was a quite hon­est­ly rushed demo and a cou­ple of vague tweets. There just sim­ply had­n’t been time to do every­thing we had want­ed or even need­ed to do after wrap­ping up our pre­vi­ous oblig­a­tions. We sim­ply showed up the day before PAX, plugged in the lap­top, which for all we knew could have been the only machine in the world that ran the game at full frame rate. Then we made sure it looked okay and ran in 1080p on the TV (kind­ly pro­vid­ed by Intel and Kel­ly Wal­lick­’s efforts), dis­cov­ered a UI bug that caused things to be cut off, and Coby, Ankur, and Bur­rell went back to the hotel to keep work­ing. I fin­ished set­ting up the booth, then went back to do the same. We were all either beyond the point of exhaus­tion where you no longer have the option of feel­ing stressed, or maybe in that moment even curs­ing the day we signed up for the Megabooth.

Coby and Ryan Bur­rell work­ing at the hotel. We even moved in an extra table and chair(s) from the oth­er room.

There were a lot of mis­takes along the way, but per­haps the biggest was this con­sis­tent feel­ing that not only would we find our­selves fluc­tu­at­ing between obscu­ri­ty and crit­i­cism when the expo opened the fol­low­ing day, but that we would be have actu­al­ly embar­rassed our­selves among our peers.

And our PAX expe­ri­ence proved us all wrong.

What we had was not a fin­ished game, a pol­ished ver­sion of a game, and in my often over­ly crit­i­cal eyes, bare­ly a pro­to­type of what is to come in the future. But what we did have on our hands was a short demo exud­ing a fla­vor for which a large por­tion of our gam­ing audi­ence seemed to be rav­en­ous. If 2‑D, top-down action games with more con­tem­po­rary trap­pings in physics, graph­ics, and sheer speed were the recipe, the minus­cule appe­tiz­er we brought to PAX left our patrons ask­ing for the entrée. Sor­ry, but it’s still got about 8–9 months of devel­op­ment to go!

I say this not with pride, but with humil­i­ty. One could also attribute our pre­vi­ous gloomi­ness to the you-are-your-own-worst-crit­ic phe­nom­e­non, which I will be the first to admit. But not only did we under­es­ti­mate that peo­ple would like it; we were afraid no one would give it a sec­ond look. We severe­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed what we had cre­at­ed, which is per­haps the worst kind of under­es­ti­ma­tion, since we knew every strength and weak­ness of the project. It could eas­i­ly be chalked up to igno­rance of the PAX dynam­ic, since even though we had attend­ed, we had nev­er run a booth any­where. As Ryan Bur­rell men­tioned, we even ran out of pins and post­cards. Twice.

Our cards and pins ran out & we had to rush a new order… at 3pm the first day.

I also found out things about myself that I did not pre­vi­ous­ly know; for instance, that despite being a pret­ty severe intro­vert, I actu­al­ly enjoy talk­ing to a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple a day about the project that I am most pas­sion­ate about. I got more com­pli­ments on the art style (or Ankur direct­ing peo­ple to me to talk about the art) than I even still feel like I deserved after only com­ing up with one char­ac­ter and one envi­ron­ment tile set. Maybe I got into a bit of a sales-pitch rut while talk­ing about the game (sor­ry if you were one of the few hun­dred and found it annoy­ing), but I did­n’t real­ize how excit­ed I was to tell every­one about our ideas for DDrop. After inter­act­ing with the first few peo­ple, I had gone from not want­i­ng to acknowl­edge the rough­ness of the demo to proud­ly telling peo­ple that we had been work­ing on it for less than a month. My favorite part of the run­ning the booth was lis­ten­ing to Ankur have peo­ple guess how long we had been in devel­op­ment. “18 months?” they would ask. “No, Low­er.” You get the idea.

[youtube width=“640” height=“360”]http://youtu.be/wjq0b96dFOw[/youtube]

Say­ing that PAX was unpre­dictably suc­cess­ful for us does not begin to describe the com­plete turn­around we expe­ri­enced — from the short-sight­ed dev-grind neg­a­tiv­i­ty to our cur­rent state of refreshed ener­gy and opti­mism, and rein­vig­o­rat­ed deter­mi­na­tion to live up to the praise we received at PAX. Back when we talk­ing about mak­ing this game and show­ing it at PAX this year (the details are now some­what fog­gy), I told Coby, who is my busi­ness part­ner and co-founder of Pix­elscop­ic, that we had to roll the dice this year. Mean­ing that if we were going to cre­ate the kind of stu­dio we want­ed, and cre­ate the kinds of games we want­ed, we had to take some huge gam­bles. These were gam­bles both in the sense of risk­ing our rep­u­ta­tions and in the sense of drop­ping mon­ey on some­thing like a PAX booth with no guar­an­tee that it could take us any­where. Oth­er than the obvi­ous pos­si­bil­i­ty of tak­ing us out of busi­ness. And while it did not imme­di­ate­ly land us a pile of mon­ey or diehard fans (let’s hope for those in the near future), it did breath new life into our pas­sion for what we do, and our goals for Delver’s Drop.

The night we got back from PAX, after flights back to humid Mis­souri, and a three hour dri­ve back to Spring­field, we were all pret­ty exhaust­ed. I think it was about 10 pm, but it felt like 3 am even though we had jumped ahead two time zones. We unloaded the last of our con­fer­ence gear from my car, and as he was leav­ing I shook Coby’s hand and said, “We rolled the dice.”

Pix­elscop­ic Team Post-PAX. Left to Right: Coby, Ryan Bur­rell, Ankur, Ryan Baker.

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