MIGW 2023

Okay, I’ll admit it’s a little embarrassing to me to have written my weekly post about “AVCon went great, next stop PAX in two months” and then fail to update until after PAX. This is, simply, because my rough life scheduling has adjusted, and my writing habits haven’t adjusted to follow suit, so they kind of got lost in the merge. This is something I am working on resolving, for the sake of these posts and also a few other things.

So! At the start of this month, Towerpoint travelled interstate for Melbourne International Games Week, attending Game Connect Australia Pacific on the industry end and showing Anvilheart at PAX. It was one hell of a week, and honestly this post should have been last week but I spent the whole week napping on the couch, avoiding social interaction I was too burned out for, and not talking because my voice took days to recover. So instead, here we are two weeks after GCAP, and many weeks after my last post.

GCAP

GCAP is a three day long, games industry convention held in Melbourne. Three members of our team attended, for the first time as Towerpoint and for two of us for the first time ever. The convention is aimed at networking and development, with industry professional talks on a wide range of topics and support for organising meetings and social interactions with attendees from all over.

Our main goal at GCAP was mostly focused on the meeting people side; since we’re kind of tiny and new and living in Adelaide, we need to get to know people from outside our little bubble to more effectively grow as a studio. Our time at GCAP was full of meetings, and it was genuinely worth it in my mind–we got to meet a lot of really cool people, even if it meant we didn’t get to go to many of the talks and panels that I was interested to see.

GCAP was kind of a weird experience for me; I still struggle with the feeling that I am Not a Real Game Dev a lot, so when I go to events and meet people who are Real Game Devs, I expect it to go kind of poorly. I assume everyone will instantly recognise that I’m kind of just faking any right I have to be here, I’ll get ignored or thrown out or talked over or recruited to help get people drinks. But somehow that didn’t happen? We got to talk to game publishers who seemed genuinely interested in the game we were working on, we got to talk to game developers with years of experience in some of the skills we struggle with, and somehow all of those people recognised and respected us, and none of them realised I was secretly just a weird kid dressing up and pretending to be someone competent.

On the last night of GCAP we went to the Australian Game Developer Awards - mostly for a cool party with friends and free alcohol, but also because someone I work with Sean had been recruited to accept an award on behalf of another Adelaide dev who wasn’t able to attend. Seeing him up on stage felt pretty cool, even if it was as a proxy for someone else - it filled me with a weird mix of pride and determination to be up there on behalf of our own game one day.

Huge thanks to the South Australian Film Corporation, who supported a number of Adelaide studios to go to GCAP and basically funded my ticket - we’re still doing this on no income, so having help with expenses on a trip like this was very helpful to us, and we appreciate it a lot. And congratulations to Joakim "Chef" Lundström and Partum Artifex, award winner for Excellence in Emerging Games, without whom Sean wouldn’t have gotten to get up on stage for another year.

PAX

We had exactly one free day between GCAP and showing our game at PAX. I was hoping to dye my hair, but instead we ended up spending all day working on the game, trying frantically to polish off our little list of changes to make. We managed it before 4am, this time, but only barely.

And then on Friday morning we were setting up laptops before the massive crowds of PAX attendees were allowed in - the first person I spoke to from outside our team was actually a media person who wanted to interview me about Anvilheart, which

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I thought AVCon was exhausting when we did it, and I was damn right, but I was not prepared for PAX at all. Before that Friday I don’t think I had ever spoken to as many people in an 8 hour period before, and then the next day that record was immediately superseded. I don’t really do very well with lots of new people, large crowds, enclosed spaces, lots of noise… Honestly, I was kind of half dissociating for most of the time we were there, and I have to wonder how obvious it was to the people I was talking to. Maybe a bunch of strangers just think I am weirdly spaced out as a general person now, and I will never get to correct that for most of them because if anything, the next time I see them will be next year, when they recognise our game at PAX! And god, wouldn’t that be fun. “Hi, I promise I’m usually more of a person than this, you just caught me at a bad time twice.”

Maybe I should link people to these posts, so they can see how I talk when I am all alone and don’t have to half shout over the collective din of thousands of people.

Having done my complaining - PAX was an amazing experience! Even if the circumstances suck, meeting new people is pretty cool, and there’s something incredibly rewarding about seeing people enjoy the game that we’ve worked so hard to create. And from the sounds of it people genuinely enjoyed it- like really enjoyed it- like REALLY enjoyed it- which… it’s easy to lose sight of things, right? After hundreds of hours spent working on the same handful of screens and game mechanics and dialogue, there’s no way we can possibly look at Anvilheart with fresh eyes. I look at our work and the parts I was proud of have lost their shining newness, and the parts I want to fix get sharper every time I leave them for later. But to see people come in new, with none of those limitations but also no reason to care about what we’ve made for more than a moment, and find something they love… I guess it feels like this is actually worth doing, which is something I’d been struggling with in the weeks leading up to Melbourne.

And then, without even a day to rest, we got to drive home to Adelaide. THAT was fun. And then I barely left the house for a week because I was exhausted :)

In conclusion: PAX was hell! I had at least one panic attack per day, none of us got anywhere near enough sleep or quiet, I couldn’t talk right for a week afterwards, and it was a really cool experience and I am so glad we got to show our game there.

Massive thanks to the Adelaide Economic Development Agency for supporting Towerpoint Games to go to PAX; booths there are expensive, and we would have struggled to afford it without their support.

Where To Go Next

Well, the next step is international conventions, presumably.

Actually, no, I think I might die if we did that.

Right now, we’re shifting a little to work on getting our demo right, and hoping it’s good enough to help us finally get a bit of funding. If we can’t get anything for Anvilheart directly soon then we’ll have to start working on other things to cover costs, and that slows work on this project down, and no one wants to see that, least of all us. Theoretically, that process should be a little less intensive than getting up to speed for PAX was, but we’ll see how that goes in practice. There’s always more to do.

For these posts, I’m not really sure right now. I write these in my free time - right now I’m writing this paragraph while waiting for some friends to finish assignments so that we can play games - and honestly, that doesn’t work as well as it used to. Once upon a time I would have about an hour free most mornings to read, write, do various household tasks, but now I try to get into work before lunchtime (and sometimes it even works) and getting out of bed in time to do those kinds of things in the mornings has been getting harder and harder, so I just don’t. Which, quite honestly, sucks.

I could maybe start writing these at work, which is what I used to do back when I was a solo dev on my own project, but then it starts weighing against other things I do at work - and let’s be real, these posts are mostly for me to have fun with. The time I spend here doesn’t translate to efficient marketing or anything like that, and it’s certainly not contributing to development, so I struggle to justify spending time on these posts when I could, or should, be doing other things. But if I continue writing only in my own time, then… either I need to figure out a new space in my life to do that, or I guess the frequency with which I write them will continue to be weirdly dependent on when I manage to get out of bed in the morning. And thus, you all get your own little window into how my mental health is doing, and it’s called “did Emma get a blog post up on Wednesday this week?”

As a helpful reference point, this post was meant to be the weekly post for October 18th.