I really didn’t think PR would be such a time-consuming job over the last 8 months, but I’m confident that it’s all been worth it and particularly now since I’m just starting out. In the space of a month, I attended three more festivals in different cities across North America. And then a bonus one here at home.
- Sept 14 – Boston FIG
Sept 19-22 – [I really didn’t think PR would be such a time-consuming job over the last 8 months, but I’m confident that it’s all been worth it and particularly now since I’m just starting out. In the space of a month, I attended three more festivals in different cities across North America. And then a bonus one here at home.
Sept 14 – Boston FIG
- Sept 19-22 – ](http://2013.xoxofest.com/) in Portland, OR
Oct 3-6 – [I really didn’t think PR would be such a time-consuming job over the last 8 months, but I’m confident that it’s all been worth it and particularly now since I’m just starting out. In the space of a month, I attended three more festivals in different cities across North America. And then a bonus one here at home.
Sept 14 – Boston FIG
Sept 19-22 – [I really didn’t think PR would be such a time-consuming job over the last 8 months, but I’m confident that it’s all been worth it and particularly now since I’m just starting out. In the space of a month, I attended three more festivals in different cities across North America. And then a bonus one here at home.
Sept 14 – Boston FIG
- Sept 19-22 – ](http://2013.xoxofest.com/) in Portland, OR
- Oct 3-6 – ](http://indiecade.com/) in Los Angeles
- Nov 11-12 – MIGS in Montréal
Boston FIG
Much smaller than PAX, GDC, or E3 and only one day long. Low-key, relaxed.
Roughly 80% of people who came to the booth already knew Spaceteam! Maybe I’ve just saturated the Boston indie-gamer market :)
XOXO
Very well organized. XOXO celebrates music, film, makers/hackers, video games and board games, and has a TED-style single track conference. There were a lot of web developers and designers, and not a lot of game folks, which was a refreshing change. The talks were all pretty interesting and you can watch a few of them online here.
I met Tim Schafer and shook his hand but I was a bit starstruck so I barely said anything!
Spaceteam had a space with bean bag chairs and a giant monitor for spectators.
I spoke to some Kickstarter folks about my unorthodox upcoming campaign which you’ll hear more about soon. I still might have to go with IndieGogo.
The Portland food trucks were amazing. I also visited the jaw-dropping Wieden & Kennedy offices, the OMSI science museum, and a great board game store called Guardian Games.
But the highlight of my trip was hanging out with Doug Wilson & Bennett Foddy. We shared an Airbnb, went bowling, and played 3D Blacklight Pirate Mini-Golf! (I lost)
IndieCade
Indie game dev mecca. So many friendly people from all over the scene together in one place. Great games, events, and talks. In the opening ceremony they couldn’t get the video/projector to work properly, and then John and Brenda Romero came on stage to awkwardly MC without having prepared anything. This just made me feel more at home :)
I shared an Airbnb with the Extrasolar team. Extrasolar is a awesome unique concept for a game and I highly recommend it.
I also won the Interaction Award. All the trophies were hand-crafted custom robots made of salvaged metal with interchangeable magnetic face parts!
MIGS
Even though MIGS happens in my own city I wasn’t planning to go since it’s a bit expensive and I wasn’t showing Spaceteam. But then I got invited to give a 5-minute rant, which came with a free pass (I should try to do this more often!), and now I’m really glad I went.
I got to actually attend sessions instead of being on my feet for 6 hours a day at a booth, and I got to complain to thousands of people on stage :)
I ranted about big companies not letting people work on side-projects (which I think is damaging, but the effects are hard to measure). I urged the industry to stop competing and start cooperating by sharing ideas, technology, resources, everything basically. And I spoke about how I’m personally trying not to fail by setting realistic goals for myself (that don’t always involve making money).
Home
And with that my festival tour is at an end. I don’t think there are many conferences over the winter, and frankly I’m exhausted from so much travelling.
I can now get back to doing what I thought I’d be doing all this time: programming!