Paperbox Studios

We aspire to make games that we can enjoy making as well as playing.

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Paperbox @ PAX 2015

That’s right! We were at PAX Aus this year. A booth at the indie pavilion was hired out over the weekend, and we got a chance to showcase Shapeway to the attendees.

PAX has by far been the largest convention that we have had a chance to showcase our games at. The experience was amazing, but at the same time tiring. There is no way that we would have been able to receive the exposure from any other event in Australia that we did from PAX. So it was well worth by the end of it.

We definitely could’ve done a better job when it came to preparing for PAX Aus. Only a week before the event, we were putting together our final build. The orders for flyers and badges were put through, and we hadn’t really planned our setup as we should’ve. Social media was neglected, and therefore we lacked a marketing campaign both before PAX, and before the release of Shapeway. 

If we end up going to PAX again next year, bringing along a 3rd person to help run the booth will probably be on the top of our list. 3 days of talking to people and standing up can really take a toll. Besides our lunch breaks we didn’t really have a chance to stop for a moment. 

Giveaways are a huge attraction. This is probably the obvious. But at PAX this is more than just the obvious, because most attendees know that almost every booth will have something to give away. We were lucky that our graphic designer was more than happy to make about 40 of these paper craft box dudes.     

All in all PAX Aus was a great event. Although it didn’t go as smoothly as it could’ve, and our inexperience showed. We met some amazing people and made some great contacts that will definitely come in handy.      

[paperboxstudios]

Freeplay 2015

So it’s been a while since our last blog post, but now we’re back here to talk about what we did during Freeplay and Mini Make Day. 

Freeplay is a games festival that runs for ten days. We were unable attend for most of the events unfortunately due to other commitments, but were still able to showcase our game ShapeWay at the Freeplay fete which was held at Carlton Connect.

During this period we also found enough time to exhibit ShapeWay at another event which wasn't a part of Freeplay called Mini Make Day. MMD is an event that is run by Library at the Docks, this wasn't a game developer specific showcase, instead it allowed anyone with anything creative to show off to come down and exhibit their product. 

Freeplay fete was really awesome in terms of the feedback and the exposure, it was also really cool being able to see all the other games that people were working on. It was good to see people getting hooked onto ShapeWay, as usual we received comments on how we can improve the game which we noted down and have been tweaking ShapeWay since in order to make it a better game. 

If you want to find out more about Freeplay and the other awesome games that were there, then checkout this article from Another Dungeon.

Mini Make Day was also really cool but different. Where as the Freeplay audience mostly consisted of people who were well versed in video games, MMD on the other hand only had a small portion of gamers and the majority were people who were just interested in coming along to a tech event. This made it even better because we were able to get feedback on ShapeWay from a completely different perspective and our most recent discovery of children being absolutely addicted to ShapeWay was further reinforced during this event.   

Thanks for checking out our blog, we’ll be back with more hopefully in not too long, and keep an eye out for our next post because we've got a big announcement to make.

[paperboxstudios]

iFest Melbourne

On Sunday we showcased ShapeWay at an event called iFest. It was an independent games developers festival which was held at Federation square and was open to the public. This was our first officially organised event where we've had a chance to get some public play testing going. 

It was a great experience overall, the feedback we got was invaluable. The biggest revelation for us though was to find out that children really like ShapeWay, to the point where their parents were having to take them away from our table.    

We met some great people throughout the day, we had a journalist from IGM come up to us for an interview here’s a link to the article. We had other developers play our game, students, parents, children, it was just a fantastic opportunity for us to have our game played by people from all walks of life. 

The support of our friends was amazing, you really start to realise being in this industry how important it is to have friends and family that are willing to support you through thick and thin. Knowing that they’re their to back you up both as a developer and a friend really does help. 

Overall iFest turned out to be a great first exhibition for us, the people we met and the feedback we got will definitely help us out in the near future. It was great to see Melbourne come out and embrace the gaming culture.  

[paperboxstudios]

Just Jammin

A few days ago we finished up at Global Game Jam, it was great fun creating Office Bash '15, this was our first GGJ which meant we came out of it learning a lot in terms of the do's and don'ts for next time.

Prior to the GGJ we met Duncan Rabone and Jarrod Funnell whom we jammed with, they were great to work with and it wasn't just because of the awesome work that they had produced but also because they were just great people to have around. 

The theme this year was What do we do now? There was a lot of build up before the announcement of the theme, but when it was announced we were all just asking the question 'so what do we do now?'

We spent day one putting an idea together that was scoped to fit into a 48 hour timeline, we also wanted a game which was both fun to make and play and was somewhat unique.

Day two we went straight into development it was important that we spent a full day designing the game on day one so that during day two we wouldn't have to worry about any design issues and could spend the whole day in development.

Day three just came down to submitting the game, making sure everything was working and that all the assets were there. We did manage to submit the game in time and were happy with it but unfortunately we just didn't end up having enough time to add in sound or music to the game, so for the next GGJ we'll definitely try and bring a sound and music designer onto the team.  

All in all it was a great first Global Game Jam and we're definitely looking forward to GGJ 2016.  

[paperboxstudios]

A Bit Of Polish

So we've made some changes to our game ShapeWay. There are some sprites which we have either changed or added recently. The UI has also received a face lift. At the moment ShapeWay is almost in a finished state, we are basically just adding the final details and are polishing up the game.

After showing our game off at heaps of local developer events it became apparent to us that we needed to change our UI so that it was more intuitive and obvious for players. One of the major additions for the UI is the visual feedback which players will now receive when placing blocks in edit mode.

Another addition which we are planning on making is to vectorise the backgrounds and menu buttons, so those assets can have sharp edges and sleek lines which will hopefully increase the visual quality of ShapeWay. We also decided instead of having consistent colours we should have contrasting colours for different types of blocks so that they stand out and players won't get confused as to which blocks they should avoid.

Hopefully in the near future we'll be blogging more often and consistently, we've also been trying to juggle development with company set up, it’s something neither of us are familiar with but we've been doing a lot of research as we go along making sure that we choose the best option for the studio.

ShapeWay is still going strong for a late January/early February release for Android and IOS. We hope you guys are excited as we are for the release of ShapeWay and Paperbox Studios’ first multiplatform release, enjoy the rest of the holiday season and we’ll see you all next year. 

[paperboxstudios]

Melbourne Digital Games Week

PAX was the main part of the second half of the week, PAX is quite different from GCAP, the event is much more focused on promotion and the larger publishers like Ubisoft and Riot Games put on a huge spectacle. It's good to see the Australian gaming community growing both in terms of the player base and the number of growing local developers.

An after party was held on Sunday night. This was a great way to finish the week, it was a chill event with catering and drinks. It gave the developers a chance to just relax after an intense week of conferences and conventions. As the night was coming to an end and we were about to leave, there was a sense of sadness, but at the same time everyone was excited to get back home and get started on that new game idea or make those final changes to their almost finished game. 

These are exciting times for the games industry so much talent floating around and so much potential. Well, I guess it's time to get back to work.