It was finally D-day! We were all prepped up and ready for some boothin’, but then I remembered a text from last night!
D: “The collateral might arrive the morning or noon of the event.”
I needed some coffee for that… WE MAY NOT HAVE OUR COLLATERAL ON THE FIRST DAY! Without freebies our booth may be just a plain ol’ booth, and heck people love their freebies! You just can’t live without em…
So we just did what we could and arrived by 7am for the event. We were allowed entry to setup our booth by 8am and the doors officially open by 10am. Being an hour earlier I decided to have breakfast as my Booth buddy was still on his way from Tarlac which is around at least 130km away.
After breakfast, I decided to head over to setup our booth and get to meet other devs around Indie Arena. After entering the Convention area lobby, a thought just came in…
“Where do I get my exhibitor badge!?”
I was not part of the ingress which was a day before D-day so I couldn’t get my badge there. Our contact person was not yet in the event so I couldn’t get it from her as well. I decided to just follow along with people from the Media and saw them getting their badges from the front desk. So, I got 4 badges from the front desk as we had 2 badges per booth and with us having 2 booths we were eligible for 4 badges. Problem 1 solved!
Arriving at the event hall, I was amazed at all these big shots and AAA booths showcasing games and what not.
This was a new high for ESGS especially for us who were part of the Indie Arena.
I finally arrived at our booth and hell, it was gorgeous…
The poster was as tall as me probably even taller! So after setting up my laptop, monitor, and the hard copies of the Mission Contracts this is what it looked like:
Pretty good considering we didn’t have much space for more and I was PROUD. (Prouder than our dev who made the Hello World poster...) So for those asking where Hello World was? It was beside Shots Fired but we were going to present it the next day as we had some problems.
Take note… It’s not blurred… It’s just a filter effect!
So my booth buddy arrived mid 8 am as well and we were prepped up! The only thing remaining was the COLLATERAL! Just as I was worrying about that, I received the text that the collateral were outside the event venue just awaiting pickup. I was all excited to see the work we made come to life! I got out and saw this queue of people lining up to enter the event. As proud and happy as I was to be part of the event, this made me even happier. We were part of an event that would be amazing!
I got the collateral and said thanks to the person handling it then left to prepare the final part of our amazing booth! With our collateral being limited we had to split it up for it to fit 3 days.
Look at it now and be amazed!
It was already 10am and the doors were now officially opened to the public. Iain Garner and Vlad from Lost Castle arrived as well, they were our booth neighbors and it was a ton of pleasure meeting these fine fellows!
Do check them out when you get the chance @Lost_Castle and @anotherindies.
We also got to meet James Bernard of Springloaded which was quite a doozy seeing their awesome pixel art games.
The Indie arena right then was starting to liven up with the booth people setting up and tons of people starting to walk over and test out the games by the developers.
We were starting to get people here and there asking about the game with some waiting to test it out. It started as a single person checking our game out then a few moments later it became a group of people with some checking out the monitor for the live game play of the current tester. It was such a rush knowing people were checking out your game and being really curious about it especially with our awesome Heart Sticker up for grabs upon finishing at least 2 missions.
The number of people who went to our booth exceeded what we expected for our game. We didn’t have that much of a status as we weren’t as famous as others in the Indie Arena such as Indigo Entertainment, Springloaded, Synergy 88's Spellstrike, and a lot more. So it came as quite a surprise for us to have that kind of visibility. The feedbacks we kept on receiving was and still is a tremendous boost to our morale.
As hours went by with no rest, we received notice that we were probably going to have our interview for indie[dot]xsplit today (Day 1) when we were supposedly scheduled for Day 2. So I had to get my game face on and be ready for any changes. It wasn’t just Xsplit doing the interviews that day, I was being dragged around for interviews here and there. It was tiring but it was an experience I would not want to forget.
It was almost the end of Day 1 and I had practically lost my voice with people still coming to our booth. By the end of the event at 6pm, our 2 man team was tired but it was such an awesome experience and it was still only our 1st day! We still had 2 more to go! I knew right then that this was going to be an experience we would never… ever… forget!
