GDC and PAX Awesomeness

Hiya! As you might know, we recently came back from both GDC and PAX. GDC (Game Developer's Conference) is a week-long event that takes place in San Francisco, and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a massive consumer-facing weekend event that takes place in Boston. This year, the two were about a week apart, and we're rested up and back to our routine... if you can call it a routine. 

GDC is a great opportunity to learn, get inspired, do business, and meet other great devs. The conference involves going to lectures, meeting cool people, going to eat, meeting more cool people, going to parties, and meeting even more cool people. We were also nominated for an Indie Game Festival award for design, which was a great honour, and we got to go to the award show which was a ton of fun.

The award ceremony was hosted by the lovely Nina Freedman, and then the Game Developer Choice awards were hosted by Tim Schafer, who was funny as ever. We got to feel fancy and have little (kinda big actually) meatball hors d'oeuvres and wine and stuff. That was just one of the many, many, many parties where we met a ton of great people.

We went to some great talks as well, and we were able to share the knowledge within the team at dinner one night as well as in a meeting that took place here at our office. The most interesting thing about the talks is not only that they teach great things, but also that they inspire you to think of things beyond what was covered in the talk, and talk about those ideas at parties (which further accelerates the creativity).

The next step was PAX East, which is a game expo which sees over 150,000 people over three days (my source on this isn't reliable, but I think it's close to that). As you can imagine, the show was pretty crazy. 

It was really great to hear people come up to us and tell us how much they loved the game, as well as introduce it to new people who hadn't seen the game yet. We also had some press interviews and had some streamers pop by to play the game. 

It was a great two weeks full of team bonding, lots of beer, knowledge gathering, and gaming (though we didn't actually get to play much...) and we're looking forward to the next event.

:)

We're Coming to Console with Expanded Free Play Mode!

You may have seen this coming based on the fact that we've been talking about console development for a little while, but we can now proudly say that we're officially coming to console! 

Check out the trailer below.

We won't announce a release date until we've gone through the full certification process and we know that everything works perfectly... right now stuff is still a little bit wonky. 

We're also going to be adding a mega expansion to Free Play Mode, which involves using set pieces of different colours and permanently attached blocks to make crazy levels, as well as placing the start and end zones in the level. With this new set of tools, players can truly make their own Ultimate Chicken Horse levels that we hope will become as popular as the main ones in the game.

We're really excited to see what players come up with, and we look forward to being able to feature more levels in the game in future updates.

Slowly Gearing Up for GDC and PAX

This year we'll be going to both GDC and PAX, and thankfully they didn't schedule them at the same time like a couple of years ago...

We had to book things like hotels (hostels actually) and flights a looong time ago to make sure they weren't insanely expensive, but this week and last week we've been doing a bunch of setup stuff for the two events.

Part of that involves setting up meeting with potential partners, other game developers, and console platform holders, and another part involves scheduling our time and figuring out which parties to go to. You'd think that going to parties is simple, but first you need to bug the right people for the right invites, then you need to decide which one(s) you're going to out of the billion parties that exist at GDC.

This year we're going with the whole team, including our newest member, Ben! In the past we've always sent two people to shows, but this time we thought we'd give ourselves a little gift and bring the whole team. This will make manning the IGF booth easier, and let us get to meetings and the expo floor and talks and such.

That's all for this week, more updates next week!