Today, me and a colleague who is also showcasing something at the festival visited the venue; a large, indoor atrium at Chalmers, the university where I studied. We had a look at what types of materials we had to work with, got key cards with access to related spaces and talked about various other things with the planners and project leaders.
Most of the day went into scooping out the space, and there isn’t much time left. But it’s still doable. : )
The annual indie arcade and game party Automat is returning this fall. It’s in the planning, it will probably happen pretty soon and I’m planning to bring PickaBoog, RAGE and Enbarr.
Last year I brought Enbarr as well, but I didn’t manage to get it working as well as I wanted. So this year I will make sure the tech is holding up. : )
Automat’s official page: automatarkad.tumblr.com
The local university of technologies, Chalmers, is arranging a sort of ispiration, playfullness, multimedia festival which they call the AHA Festival.
It will take place on the 19th to 21th of November and I have decided to participate with an updated version of Enbarr mac Lir and PickaBoog. Looking forward. : )
Got word that these beauties were available at a local cheap brand store from a partner in crime of some of my projects. I instantly felt they would make for the perfect upgrade of the sneezing effect and bought one per nostril. :)
Wohoo! What a great event RSM 2018 was, although hot… I went to the venue early in the morning, bringing the last of the cabinets and other things with the help of my brother. The indie games, arcades and other interactive exhibitions had been moved to their own building, dedicating the main hall to just game and game merch plus concert hall. At some point I was afraid that people wouldn’t find their way over to out space, but my fears were soon gone. We had lots of visitors and while it was super hot I had brought a fan and we made sure to have beverages behind the stand to stay alive.
While PickaBoog may have proven to be a little hard to understand without a helping hand, I got a lot of positive energy from visitors and am more than happy to participate next year as well. The RAGE arcade gun stole the show a bit, but more on that in its own blog. : )
So it’s the day before the grand event, RSM the retro game fair. Finally, it’s time to put all that positive energy into celebrating games from all sorts of perspectives; as history, art form, technology, valuable items and other crazy words I can come up with. At any rate, I have used some of the feedback and testing from the GDL event earlier this week an have performed some upgrades to both hardware and software of PickaBoog. We have also helped each other out in the other creations that are going to the fair.
Sadly, we miscalculated the time a bit and were not able to bring all the things we wanted to the site this evening. Luckily, my brother is in town and will help me out in bringing the final pieces, early tomorrow. Everything is awesome, peace out. : )
I somehow managed to drag the entire PickaBoog rig to the local game dev community event GDL, Game developers’ lounge, carrying it and taking a ferry to the venue. While it was it was a bit awkward to brave a tight bar queue with three something huge plastic bags, it was well worth it. Super fun to see everyone and have people play my game. Also fun to have Valve sponsor me with two hotdogs and beers, cheers!
Tomorrow is GDL, a meetup for local game developers. I have signed up to showcase games and games I will show. I’m bringing the RAGE arcade gun along with the PickaBoog cabinet, both as is. They are by no means very polished pieces, but they are functional and I feel it will be super much fun if I can just manage to drag them there. I don’t really have a car to take them in, but I think it might work out with a bunch of large plastic bags and sheer grit.
Had a ton of things done today, mostly on the cabinet. Firstly I finally had the materials and design to make it look much more like a nose with minimum effort and a robust build. Secondly I found some great fans and hooked them up and finally I spray painted the nose parts. There is an event called GDL, game developers lounge coming up this week and I’d love to test and showcase PickaBoog. Then, next weekend, it’s showtime…. RSM, the retro game fair. Hype!
So I have taken a few steps back regarding the nose look of the cabinet and realized that human snots look nothing like what I have been doing so far. So for this weekends build evening I did a bit more of body storming, trying different looks for the cabinet. I think I’m onto something now, but I realized first after having cut up most of the boxes I had stashed so far. I’ll have to hog some more boxes before I can continue on what seems to be the right track. Looking very promising though, and more cardboard box and less hacks with duct tape and hot glue and what not.