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

Well, I wouldn’t call this a party, but nice anyways. We walked through the huge hall and then went back to the hotel.

On the next day, there was the Game Connection award show. No prizes for Swiss Games this time

I had a few meeting and checked out the other games and services.

This was the Swiss booth

In the evening of the second day there was another party. While we were on our way there, I discovered this awesome street sign xD
(German joke, saufen means to drink alcohol)

The party was ok, but I had been expecting more dancing
Also I really don’t like parties that are about talking, but you can’t do so because the music is so loud!

So we decided to go for a walk instead, which was really nice ^^

Enjoying a last drink aaaand back home again.

I have to say that 3 days of Game Connection were definitely too much for me. It was kind of like the Gamescom, but smaller and with less things to do.

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 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

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

Oh look, it’s Niche in a boat!
Also note: Running on a tablets fot the first time ever.

This girl played for 3 hours straight. Until her mom came and dragged here away

While listening to lots of talks, I worked on my pitch for the “Best of Quo Vadis” show in the evening.
We got nominated with Niche.
There were also various cool indie exhibitions spread all over the festival.

And so it started. There were over 300 people in that room!
I know one thing: Niche was never shown on such a HUGE screen before
The highlight of the day: We won 2. place! I never would have thought that.

Shorty after, I met up with Martin Egger, former executive producer at Shardline. I’m really interested in the experience he gained during the build-up of their game company and so we chatted on the roof-deck. I invited him to join the Advisory Board I’m currently building up for my master thesis. He agreed and I’m super happy about it  \ ^_^ /

The evening was spent supporting indiegames.ch with organisation/marketing for their screening of “Game Loading – Rise of the indies” on the coming weekend. And SGDA stuff, mostly preparing news letters and Fantasy Basel planning.

So, the plan was to get there and exhibit Tower Offense, two games made by Kobold Games and Niche who are all part of my “Game Promotion” master thesis. There was a mail floating around that invited indie game developers to the event. I signed up for it, because Tower Offense has a strong E-Sports aspect and Switzerlands biggest LAN is definetly the place to be!
We arrived at the infodesk and were immediately welcomed warmhearted with: “Ah yes, the developers, so nice that you’re here”. First impression: This event is bigger than we expected and the people are really nice!

Stéphane (who is organizing the PolyLAN together with Niels) showed us our exhibition space. It was pretty much in the heart of the event and there was a HUGE TV standing there, waiting for us. Overwhelmed we started setting up the games. People started gathering around our booth and asked us lots of questions about the games and what being an indie game developer is like. A lot of people joined our Tower Offense Alpha Tester base.

Stéphane hurried to and fro to assist us in every possible way and also offered us to join the PolyLAN tournament system. We wanted to run a little Tower Offense tournament anyways so this was perfect! The tournament was quickly added to the schedule and players could compete to earn points. All the points from all tournaments are added up in the end and the winner gets a big price.
And so it started!

The battles where fierce and fun! And here we have our winners! Congrats!!
From left to right:
2. ZabZab
3. Blueur
1. Torrix
4. 69th

The PolyLAN even sponsored prices for them. Sooo nice

Well, let’s come to a conclusion:
The PolyLAN is totally, absolutely, incredibly AWESOME! If I had known what a great day was waiting for me, I would have jumped out of bed in the morning.  Thank you so much for having us and all your time and effort to help us!
We will definitely be back and hope that we can build up a whole “Swiss Games corner” next year.

Good news: The PolyLAN is still running!
You can head over and exhibit your games until MO, 06.04.2015.
Let me know if you’d like to get the contact email