Macguffin Games

Post-PAX Report – State of the Beta and Everything Else

March 31st, 2010 by Macguffin in News

Been a bit of a crazy last week.  This is the first real chance I’ve had to blog about things – and I’ll have to do it quickly, since there are a bunch of threads from our players in the forums that I need to answer.  (Side note – being able to write the last sentence was incredibly exciting to me.)

In the interests of just getting this damn thing up, I’m going to just get the whole Beta and PAX story out in one post.  This might make it a bit long, we’ll see.

Given that, I’ll tell you the upshot right here:

• PAX itself was an amazing validation of the game we’re trying to create.  We were received with open arms by lots of gamers that think this is an awesome idea.  Many have since shelled out an electronic Abraham Lincoln and snagged the beta!
• The other non-game highlights of the week were that I was on NPR (around 25 minutes in) with Mike Dornbrook of Harmonix, and that I and other area devs Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games), Damián Isla (Moonshot Games), and Eitan Glinert (Fire Hose Games) were on a PAX Panel called, “Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees”, which apparently went over like gangbusters at the conference.
• We intend to get our our first update this Friday, with a pile of bug fixes, at least one new piece of event art, and several new events.

Also – pics by fellow Boston Indies crony Mike Carriere.  There’s some of me later in the set.  I look like I’ve been awake for years.  Good times!

So, on with the show!

Thursday Night

Thursday night was the “Made in MA” party, held at Microsoft’s NERD (New England R&D) Center at Kendall Square.   The party was organized by the Mass. Tech. Learning Council, a non-profit that does a lot for the tech sectors here in MA.¹ For a while, MA companies have wanted to make sure people know how much there is going on here in MA in games – this party was part of that effort.  A big shout out to my buddy Darius Kazemi for heading up a lot of the effort in organizing the thing, as well.

Prior to the party Whitney, Graham, and I were all working feverishly on the game.  We wanted to hit Beta that night, and I needed a build to show at the party.  I’ll admit, by the time the party was starting, I was freaking out.  It felt to me like we were in an endless sea of bugs.  It’s always hard for me to see past all the things that are wrong, or do not yet work in the game, and that always gets worse when we’re near a big deadline.  By the time I left for the party, I was kind of a mess.

The party turned out to be the start of what ended up being a whole weekend of people seeing the best things the game promises – something that blew me away.  It’s one thing to think the game is awesome when you’re working on it – it’s another thing entirely to have complete strangers think the same thing.  Special shout-out to Naomi Hinchen, an  undergrad student at MIT’s GAMBIT lab that I had to keep kicking off the game so I could show it to people.  You rock.

The party did a lot to steady my nerves, and it helped even more to get back to the office and find that Graham and Whitney were calm, collected, and fixing bugs at an astounding rate.  Graham sat me down, pointed me to the Wave he was writing with all our bugs to fix for the night, and told me to get cracking.  I did.

At about 3am, we were done with the first build.  We still had bugs left, but we’d gotten the most egregious stuff out of the way.

Friday Morning

Friday morning consisted of me levering myself out of bed, quickly getting the build up to Plimus, our transactions provider for selling the game.  Exchanged some IMs and emails with our top notch web designer K. Adam White to get some stuff sorted out – this was the first time we were using Plimus in a serious way, and there were all sorts of little issues to work out.  Then I ran out of the house and off to Hynes Convention Center and PAX.

The first thought I had once on the Expo floor was, “Oh, it’s E3 all over again.”  It had that feel, although everything was a good bit less berserk.  The expo floor was a complete maze of boothes – very few long lines of sight.  I staggered around half-asleep until I ran into Tovah from Fire Hose, who pointed me over to the GAMBIT booth where we’d be exhibiting.

The GAMBIT booth was something else.  Half way to the hall’s ceiling, they had a huge circular GAMBIT sign, beneath which there were enough lights for a small theater.  GAMBIT folks were running around in white lab coats, and the union folks were wiring lights and running around as well.   I hooked up with Gene and Rik, the two (also fantastic) GAMBIT staffers running things, and got the build loaded onto the computer.  I realized I still hadn’t eaten breakfast, but by then Graham had shown up to spot me, and I was off to NPR.

NPR

So, due to the grace of God and a timely plug from Darius, I was going to be on Radio Boston with Mike Dornbrook, the COO of Harmonix.  We were to be interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti on the eve of PAX about the state of the local games industry.

They asked me to get there at 1pm for a 1:35 segment.  I got there about 1:10 because I had to wait 20 minutes for a B line train to show up – typical B line shenanigans!  I ran in, completely out of breath, but was told that everything was fine.  They brought me in to the control room next to the recording booth, and I sat and chatted with Mike and Steph from the HMX Community Team.  Little known item – Mike and Steve Meretzky roomed together in college, where they both ended up working for Infocom.  I told Mike that they both actually have a lot of the same speech patterns – if I closed my eyes, it’s almost hard not to confuse them.

The show went well!  You can listen to it here if you are so inclined – Mike and I are on around 25 minutes in.  Overall, I’m really pleased that, given the lack of sleep and food, I didn’t break down into, “bluh bluh bluh” at any point.  Afterwards, Stephanie and I went to Upper Crust next door and I inhaled two huge slices of pizza.  Then we were both back off to the Hynes.

The rest of the day from there until the hall closed was somewhat a blur – it consisted mostly of me talking about the game to anyone who came near me.  As at the Made in MA party, I was incredibly psyched to see people look at the game, understand the point we are at with it, and then concentrate on the possibilities of what we are constructing.  It was amazing.

Friday Night

When the floor closed, I staggered over to Ichiro and asked if they wanted to get food – we only had an hour until we did our PAX Panel.  He bowed out, but noted to me that there was a vendor social hour now, and it had some food.  So I hopped in line, snagged two pieces of roast beef, a roll, some raw carrots to make this all sound vaguely healthy.  At that point I got a text from my friend and fellow Boston Indie Kevin to let me know the line was waaay out the door for our panel.  I had a thought similar to, “Oh crap, now we have to really not suck,” as I headed over.

I ended up plunking down at our talk table in there – the room was already packed with people sitting on the floors, and they had dispersed the rest of the line – and finally got going on my roast beef.

The talk went really well.  We had the idea to take questions from the audience, both on Twitter via a hash tag and via scribbled notes, and that worked out extremely well – like we figured, those were some of the best questions of the night.  Eitan did a great job of moderating the panel, and I think all three of Ichiro, Damián, and I did a good job of giving people our varied takes on things.  Afterwards, I got to talk with several people either contemplating going indie or who were in the middle of doing so, and it was awesome to have been able to help them in some small way.  As I’ve found out from some GDC talks, it’s often great to be confirmed that you are doing some of the right things, even if you didn’t learn anything new in the talk.

Then I went out, drank a lot, and crashed at a friend’s house for 8 hours.

Saturday and Sunday

Saturday and Sunday were a lot more of similar awesomeness.  Two big notable things…

The first is the continued interest we received from people we showed the game to.  Without going over the top any more than I already have, it was fantastic.

The second was that I got to have dinner with a bunch of fellow indies, including the great folks at Klei and Hello Games, Lively Ivy, and I was really, really pleased to finally meet Wadjet Eye Games’ Dave Gilbert.  His “you must be crazy” move into making adventure games for a living was a key event that helped give me confidence that our own craziness could work.  These folks are all amazing – all of them are taking big risks every day making games they believe in.  As Graham would say, rock on, you rockers.

Future Plans

This week, we’ve gotten right back on the job and are working like hell.  If you’re interested, you can follow our development (with a side dish of inane chatter) on the All Heroes Die Twitter account.

Our current plan is to get a build out this Friday with a bunch of bug fixes (including the infamous Frost Giant Diplomacy crash), a new piece of event art, and several new game events.  I’m also working on our longer-term plan for what features and content we’ll have and when, but I don’t think I’ll have that presentable by Friday.

Once again – thank you very much to everyone who has supported us – all of you who’ve been pulling for us for a long time, and all of you who have just joined in.  It’s an incredible relief to be at the end-of-the-beginning, and we’re all looking forward to what’s ahead.

1 – I have hope that some day I will be able to leverage MassTLC’s connections to the robotics and bio-sciences community to create some sort of awful 90 foot tall cyborg that… plays games?  I’m going to have to think on this one a bit more.

Tags: All Heroes Die, indie, NPR, PAX