This could be the big time!
For the last few weeks I've been bouncing off the walls and coding like mad. Why? My team and I's August Hectic Jam game - Broken Dolls - was chosen by the people at GDC China, and we're off to Shanghai to present it to gaming industry leaders and the world! We even get a booth to showcase our stuff there! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH THIS IS HOW IT STARTS!
We've been arranging merchandise and adjusting the scope of the game, and clearly decided that we're going to release this game, for sure. We've set the development schedule so that we'll have a working demo ready for GDC China. We don't know what sort of opportunities may present themselves there, but we're trying to prepare for some. For example, we're shooting for an offer from XBOX and Playstation to release the game on their online stores. We're hoping for publishers to take an interest so we can weigh up that option. A bit of media or journalistic attention definitely wouldn't hurt. Not to mention simply popping up on the radar of the industry is a huge plus. I'm going to do whatever I can to stand out and make our team and our game memorable.
While we're there, it's also occurred to us that we'll be representing Australia in the games industry! Australia hasn't been doing great in any games but mobile lately, with the closing of every last AAA studio we had. The loss of Pandemic games was a tragedy, and Team Bondi did a spectacular job with L.A. Noire before they tripped over in the dark and banged their head on something sharp. While we're at GDC, we need to make a bloody stand, and say "Hey world! We ain't dead yet! Yeah we've been screwed over by larger companies, yeah games are twice as expensive to purchase here for no reason at all, yeah we've had nothing but mobile games since April, yeah our government is STILL censoring our games by refusing classification, and YEAH the Abbott administration pulled the game developing grant out from under us, but god damn it we are not giving up! We still attend game jams in droves, we still play games in our spare time, our gaming culture is still healthy and full and by god we're gonna rise again!" So ya know, no pressure.
On a selfish note, I'm also really hoping to meet some people from my favourite studios. That'd just make my day, seeing Gabe Newell (praise be) or Todd Howard, or a founder of Telltale Games, or another artist on my list of heros! I'm ordering the booth banners now and I can barely contain myself! We've got a lot of work ahead of us, but a chance like this doesn't come often!