Mass Digi

wow...

What a weekend. Mike, Marguerite, and got up super early met at the studio to grab last minute things and hit the road at about 7:00 AM. Three hours later we were at the Microsoft NERD (yes its really called that) Center in Cambridge Boston with about 200 other people waiting for the event to start.

The event, now in its second year, was setup as a mix between mentor meetings and various industry seminars. Over the course of Friday we met with four different mentors, ranging from an independent developer, to a representative from adobe to an industry veteran.

From my view, our first two presentations went ok, not great by any means. We were having difficulty breaking into a good "conversation" about the game. We tried opening straight off from the slides, but they didn't do a good enough job in getting people into the mindset of what the game was. At around noon that day we had a lengthy break between sessions and came up with "Pathogen is Words with Friends for people who want to take over the world... at least on a cellular level"

And what this kinda lame sentence did was two fold.

1. It broke the ice, got a small laugh and eased them into the conversation at hand.

2. It functioned as a High Concept, this film industry term is used to give the general idea as quickly as possible by giving the audience two or more facets to mash together, ie: the film speed is essentially Die Hard on a Bus.

After we came up with that, everything fell into place. Our last two mentor meets went exceedingly well and we came away feeling pretty good about the game.

Saturday!

Of the forty teams that entered, a full 20 of them had entered the independent category (we didn't find out these stats until much later). We met with three judges during the morning, and again it was a pretty varied group of industry individuals, from a CEO of a social gaming company, to a serious gaming developer.

Armed with our little opening phrase we ended up doing pretty well i think. Every time we stepped away from the judging table we saw that we had successfully captured their attention, and thanks to having the game on the iPad had them actually get hands on with the demo.

And then, it was out of our hands. A few anxious hours later and the finalists were announced. We were 1 of 4 independent finalists, which meant that we were then going to present again in front of the who assembled audience (200+) people as well as in front of the other judges who had yet to even see the game.

The presentation went over smoothly, I had built the presentation directly into the game and launched the SWF through a web browser. It worked like butter thankfully, despite many other groups having some serious problems being able to show videos of their gameplay. Go Flash!

And then, right after us the big guns came out... The team that created Girls Like Robots, a matching tile game published by Adult Swim took the stage. I felt like that was it... Just how the college teams were a step above the high school teams, and we (the independents) were a step above them quality wise, these guys were another step above us. Their art and music was another tier above anything we presented.  They are the professionals in the independent space.

And then the judges came back... And that team was an honorable mention. Wow.

Well, we won two prizes. Best Online game and 2nd place finisher in the independent category. The weekend was a huge experience for us, we met a lot of great people from the industry and gained some invaluable knowledge in how to pitch a game.