Arriving in Thun. The weather is sooo nice, I don’t want to go insiiiide xD

Setting up our booth next to Splash Blast Panic

Other Swiss devs teams that were present:
> Black Monday
> Modsork
> No Rest for the Wicked Ones
> Crossbow Warrior – The Legend of William Tell

Walking around in the main hall was quite impressive. So many people! I was also surprised by the games they played which showed a richer variety than I had expected

In the evening we watched the cosplay contest. One of our fellow game design students (Sodiumcat) won the audience award

We ended up staying too long and had to run back to the train station (carrying our heavy monitors). What a day

We started using Mail Chimp for our newsletters, which made them a lot more professional

The Niche playtester group is growing rapidly lately, now featuring almost 200 members.
Our nature games collective Playful Oasis is also coming along well. We are 15 members currently. This week we switched over from Skype to Slack to improve our communication. Not yet sure if it’s working xD

Last week, we had a streaming session with Tower Offense in collaboration with gamerbase.ch. We played the game and responded to questions from gamebase.ch and the twitch chat. You can watch the recording on Youtube, but the comments are Swiss German

More insights coming soon

After giving a 30 minutes presentation about my master thesis, I got to playtest Niche and Tower Offense with the conference attendees 

I also got to play some of the other games together with Andrea. We had a great time

The Tower Offense team was kindly invited thanks to a collaboration between the EIGD and the Ludicious.
Also we were nominated for the EIGD best students game award.

I was a bit worried at first, because I had to give a talk just about an hour after my plane was supposed to arrive. And of course, my flight was delayed.

Made it to the EIGD just in time, pew! I entered the talk room reeeally quietly.
And there were a lot more people in there than expected! (The room looked smaller from the outside).

Talk time!

Even though we were not actually exhibiting, I still managed to show Tower Offense to quite a few people (by setting it up on a coffee table, muhaha)

But I also had plenty of free time to watch almost all the talks.

And to play all the exhibited games
There were some really cool ones, like Post Human War, Désiré and A Street Story.

And in the evening, the moment of truth had arrived. I had to pitch Tower Offense in a 5 minutes presentation. Aaaand….
We actually managed to win the students award :D!

The grand prize of the evening went to Blindflug Studios
As always, the event was over quick. But it was really worth attending, I made a lot of new friends

I’ll be back EIGD, I’ll be back.

The Swiss Games corner

During the last few events I learned that it is very useful to let people write down their mail addresses after trying the game. This way you can reach them again for sure. Whether it be for a playtester group invite or to inform them about your release.

The game dungeon filled up quickly.

And so did our game stations. It’s awesome to see dressed up people play your game xD

During my breaks I explored the rest of the festival. Plenty of stuff to buy around here.

My friend Jessica was there with a booth too. She makes cute little animal figures.

Oh and the food court. That was the best. Note to that Mochi I ate: You will never be forgotten!

Nice festival, would exhibit games and eat mochis again!

The first glance at the Respawn festival + awesome weather!

Strolling around. You can try out bow shooting here, awesome!

The talk system of this event is very interesting. There are multiple stages in a relatively small room. Each visitor gets an audio-transmittor with headphones. All the talkes form the different stages are streamed and the visitors can switch between them. So you can basically sit in one talk but listen to another.

We’re here for business! Tower Offense and Niche both pitched their projects in the “Treasure Cave”.
We also had a few pitch and match meeting with publishers and other indie devs.

And then the scary moment approached. I had signed up to give a talk about our nature game collective Playful Oasis. Talking has become a bit of a routine for me in the last few months BUT this talks was 45 minutes long, hadn’t done that before. So I worried whether I’d be able to fill the time. Did it work out? I’ll let you judge that yourself: https://voicerepublic.com/talks/playful-oasis-an-indie-collective-story

The Swiss delegations are setting up their booths in the business area. We’re right next to the Koreans

The Niche booth. Tower Offense is right behind us.

The place is filling up fast. We’re busy showing the games to all kinds of people.

Featuring in a few magazines! Mostly thanks to Pro Helvetia.

We brought sheets for people to stay in touch with us. They’re filling up qickly

In my spare time I walked around a bit. The Gamescom is so huuuuge.

The coolest spot? The Indie Arena booth!
  

Hi Johannes ^^

I even got to play judge for the “Best of Indie Arena” price sponsored by InnoGames. So I spent a lot of time there, trying out all the games. The quality was super high and it was almost improssible to choose.

Aaaand there was also an Indie Arena meetup with nice people and great food <3


Let’s stick with the food for a sek. The Swiss delegation went to a classical German Brauhaus for dinner. I had spareribs. So. Many. Spareribs.
Another day we sneaked into the Nordic Game party xD

The week was over in no time. And the question I like to ask in the end is: Satisfied?
Satisfied!

Satisfied!
A huge thanks to the Pro Helvetia for making this possible for us!


The next adventure is already waiting for me, cu around!

Making our way through this beautiful city, we approached the Théâtre du Passage.

We were just in time to watch the last two presentations of the morning.

After that it was our (the Pro Helvetia finalists) turn to show what we got
Andi presented Tower Offense and I talked about Niche. Alongside us we got Domdom with Schlicht, Janina & Sebi with Shiny, Laura with Matter and Mario with MIKMA.

We then headed to the festival tent to have dinner.

Andi and me booked an airbnb room near the station. It was quite cheap (30.- for each of us) and the hosts were very nice!

Day 2 of our trip to Neuchâtel: The match making day
We got to meet different experts and talked about our projects with them. The inputs varied greatly and gave us a lot to think about.

We spent our breaks outside at the super windy lake coast.
Thoughtful Andi is thoughtful

Lunch time!

In the evening we went to the VIP tent for some drinks and then took the train back home. Had a great time & got lots of inputs

Time jump!
When stepping out of the cool, climated train from Zurich to Milan a wave of heat washed over us. What a hot day!
First impression when entering the Expo: O my god this is HUGE! I never would have thought it would be this big.

We made it to the Swiss Pavillion without melting (but it was close) just in time for the opening presentation.

After the introduction the GameJam teams presented their works. Last but not least different studios and developers from Switzerland and Italy gave an overview of their projects. I talked about the ZHdK, Niche, Elarooh, Tower Offense and my work for the SGDA.

After lunch we had a panel discussion about the Swiss & Italien games industry.

The conference was over at around 15:00 and we had time to explore the Expo afterwards.

Dominiks top priority: Ice cream!

Silly David!

Adventures on the shaky bridge at the Brasilian pavillion *shake*

And LOTS of other cool attractions / pavillions

After a very enteraining trainride back to Zurich with Martin and Jan, I got home around 1 am.

It was a super fun day and I got to meet lots of nice people. Thank you very much for having me!

Wednesday:
I already told you about the ETH final presentations. Head over here if you missed it.

Thursday:
In the morning Andi, Mela, Stefan and me had to help build up the master exhibition for our senpais. We had to even-up the uneven ground with little plastic sticks so that the screens were standing straight. Luckily we made a great team and were done quickly which left me some time to go work at the Capsule Games office.

Friday:
Working meetup for Niche! I really enjoy working on the game again, together with Beat and Severin

In the evening I went to the Gross.Stadt.Jagd event to pick up Markus. There were sooo many people there, staring at a small screen to stay up to date with the games progress.