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

It was an exiting week. Being part of the organization team as well as being an exhibitor can make events rather busy. After setting up everything on the first day, we were ready for the grand opening in the evening.

As it is tradition for this event, we were located in the basement of our cooperation partner, the Stuttgart Stadtbibliothek. The Stadtbibliothek has an average of 5000 visitors per day, which filled up our exhibition plentifully. It also has awesome architecture and a very friendly staff

The audience was quite wide-ranging, consisting of people of different cultures from children to couples to seniors. Some of them were hard-core gamers, others had never held a controller before. This gave of some very valuable feedback for our project Niche.

Additionally to the constantly open exhibition, we had a hall for talks and panel discussions. The program varied daily, featuring game mechanic and narration insights from successful studios like Studio Fizbin and Bits&Beasts, introductions of game schools and short pitches of student projects. 

From the perspective of an exhibitor, the festival worked out pretty well. The only downside I could mention is that the exhibition room was quite empty during the talk sessions. The atmosphere was cozy and even none-gamers felt save enough to try out something new. The guided tours through the exhibition helped them to relate to the new medium and made everyone curious.

The play gameZ was definitely worth participating in, I’d do it again any time.
Also, my birthday was on the 28.11 so we all celebrated together

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 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!

Ok, all set! The calm before the storm.

The Niche booth is also ready!

Friday morning: Time to open the doors. We were lucky with the weather.

This years festival was a bit special since it was not just a festival, but also a conference. Initially the two events were planed to take place on different dates but then we decided to put them together. So on Friday and Saturday morning, we hosted the gameZ & ruleZ conference about game mechanics.

Booth the conference and the festival (including the exhibition) were completely free of charge and open to everyone.

On Friday evening we opened our exhibition “RuleZ for the magic circle”. All the exhibited games are unique due to their special mechanics.
The floor was full of strange, red circles. These respresented the magic circle in games (like a football field) where special rules are in place. So to get into the exhibition everyone had to talk through the “Move in slow motion” circle. It took a while until they were all inside xD

The exhibition makers

If you played the ZHdK student games (on the white tables) and want to get in touch:
- Panda Lost in space
– Niche – a genetics survival game
– Panakeia
– FAR
– Monocular
– Violet – Pale Noise

Yay, people playing the new version of Niche

Luke Whittaker (Lumino City) playing Journey of a Roach by Kobold Games with his son.

My hands down favorite game of this exhibiton: Some strange Tetris thing that insults you when you fail.

After all talks had ended we played Bigscreen Games on Airconsole

And we got some cool DJing by Dragica on Saturday evening

Saturday and Sunday continued with talks & panels from local and international speakers.

The two highlights of the show: Jesper Juul about The Art of Failure in Games and Phillip Weber about the Quest Design of The Witcher.

At the open mic (short 5 minute talks) Patrick from indiegames.ch presented our collaboration project Indiecouch

I moderated the talk of Luke Whittaker about Lumio City

As well as the screening of the Swiss Games 2014/2015 Trailer, which you can watch here

Livio, our sponsor Lukas and me announced the winner of the new GameZfestival Creative Award for “Most innovative Game Mechanics”. The finalists were:
– The Swapper
– Life is strange
– This war of mine
– Cadence
– Perspective
– The Floor is Jelly
– Blek
– Line Wobbler
– There is no Game

And the winner is: Line Wobbler!
This game managed to come up with great level design and different game elements despite the very limited space.
Robin Baumgartner, the creator of Line Wobbler will be invited to the next GameZfestival!
Nerdilicious GmbH (who organize the JapAniManga Night and the Beaumode) will sponsor his travelling and accommodation cost.

On Sunday we hosted another award. The “Junior Swiss Game Award” by the SGDA.
Both finalists received 500.- price money. Well desevered, the projects are awesome!
– Continent Conquest
– The Glove

More SGDA work
Getting people to sign the “Volksinitiative Film-, Game- und Medienförderung”

And then suddenly, it was over.

After dismantling everything the team discussed the past days.

We’re super happy with how everything went
Thanks to everyone who helped making the GameZfestival possible and to everyone who paid us a visit!
Cu next year

Ahhh sweet sweet home. Finally back in my “office” after two weeks.

The start of the new semester approached quickly. In the meantime I visited a few events:
“Swiss Game Academy” in Fribourg. A week to learn how to make videogames.
I gave a short SGDA introduction and took a look at the projects in the making.

Fantoche in Baden.
Another SGDA job: Moderating the game talks.
I also checked out the adventure games exhibition and went to the industry talk.

The SGDA Pop Quiz

Isa invited me to the Swiss Emex marketing fair

And lots of other things…

All in all the lecture free summer months were spread like this:
45% Niche
20% Master Thesis
10% SGDA
10% Tower Offense
5% Playful Oasis

Aaaand we’re back to school.

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