Preaching the good word of Fringe Planet – Dev Blog 43
I’m currently writing this blog post from the train, as I zoom back towards home. This week I’ve been in the beautiful city of Groningen, working from the Indietopia offices and attending a press event where I got to talk about Fringe Planet to some very interesting people.
The event was the first one where I have been exhibiting Fringe Planet. It was quite the learning experience. I had a couple of stands professionally printed (everyone likes eye candy) . However, I had completely forgotten to include both the website URL and social details on these sta ds. Quite the oversight on my part. So the day before I left I spent quite a while perfecting a technique for aging paper (helped by a childhood of making fake treasure maps). Once I’d got that done (and laminated it) at least all the relevant information about the game would be visible.
(Best technique I found was soaking a bit of paper in a strong coffee mix in a tray, and then drying it in the at a high temperature on a clean baking tray – in case you ever need to age paper rapidly!)
Getting to the venue early allowed me to set up – which at this stage of things were placing out the printed materials, playing a video full screen on the laptop and arranging the business cards artistically. I did learn a very important lesson here though – make sure you know exactly what to expect when getting exhibition space. The tables that were provided were a lot smaller than I’d imagined, meaning that there wasn’t room to actually fit everything on the table. Thankfully I managed to liberate another table in order to have everything set up. This will be something I will always check in the future!
The event started with a presentation which spoke about the accelerator program, it’s successes and a brief intro about the studios in it. After that the people who attended got to look at all the games and talk to the studios. I had a lot of interested folks come visit my stand and ask questions about the game – it was incredibly awesome to see the excitement and enthusiasm concerning Fringe Planet. The video that I had put together was about 10 minutes long, and was a mixture of trailer footage, gameplay footage, concept art and screenshots. It was incredibly handy while talking about things, to be able to refer to the video and point out something on the screen, or to move the video to a bookmark to show an example of something I was talking about.
It was a great experience, and on a personal note, it was a fantastic way of experiencing a low pressure exhibition situation. It was great talking in such depth about the game to so many different people, as well as allowing my passion for gamedev (and various games that inspired Fringe Planet) to come out.
In other news, the new UI is very much underway, and the assets are started to be imported into the game. I’m very much hoping to be able to start revealing the new UI to you all next week. It’s coming together beautifully!
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: