Hello wonderful people from the internet!
This week, we’re taking a slightly broader approach with the blog. We’ll be recapping the events of the past few weeks, bringing you up to speed on the game’s progress, and sharing a look at what’s been happening behind the scenes.
Dev- & Gamescom
As every year, Devcom and Gamescom took place in Cologne in August and we were there! From Saturday evening to Wednesday evening, there was plenty of networking, lots of games, and plenty of new knowledge to be gained. In this post, we’ll briefly share what we experienced during those days: what went well, what didn’t, and what our future plans are regarding Gamescom and Devcom.
A few months ago, our plan was still to look for publishers at Devcom and Gamescom. However, we decided to postpone this step because the game has grown in scope and we need more time to build a playable prototype/vertical slice that can truly convince a publisher. While this delayed our original goal, it also gave us more time to focus on other important things like eating at this amazing restaurant (Saman).
Devcom
We arrived in Cologne on Saturday evening, giving us a full day on Sunday to relax and enjoy the city and we cannot emphasize enough how well we ate … and no we´re not sponsored sadly.
On Monday, the event officially kicked off, and we attended our first talks. Topics ranged from community-building strategies to environmental level design and new UI animation tools like Rive. There were many exciting presentations, but since we’ve already learned a lot in recent months (especially thanks to Developer Boost), some of the talks ended up being more of a refresher than new insights. Still, it was reassuring to see that we are on the right track, now it’s all about keeping up the hard work and making a great game. In the evening, there was a small party where we caught up with old acquaintances and met many new people. Conversations ranged from the latest game releases to the challenges of founding an indie studio. And there was free beer, which we happily took advantage of.
The second day followed a similar pattern: more great talks, more friendly faces, and… another party with free beer. This closing party marked the end of Devcom and the beginning of Gamescom, a big networking event where we once again had the chance to meet lots of new people.
This was at the Party with our fellow student Ashraf Lehvani
Gamescom
The day after the celebration and Devcom, we headed to Gamescom, but things didn’t go quite as planned at first. We accidentally bought the wrong tickets. Instead of trade visitor passes, we ended up with regular ones, which meant we couldn’t get in until later in the day. Once inside, though, we had a chance to look around and even met up with SWR, who were covering Gamescom and invited us to take part in an interview (link to the article).
After the interview, we wandered around a few more booths and got to try out some games. Sadly, our ticket mishap meant we couldn’t check out the business areas and had to head out a bit earlier than planned. Still, these were fun days with plenty of inspiration and cool impressions to take home.
SRH-Werkschau
On Saturday, 20 September, our university hosted its annual exhibition, where all student teams got the chance to showcase their projects. We were excited to present our prototype and have it tested, and to our surprise, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. It’s not that we don’t believe in the game, but with the demands of university and the start of our bachelor’s theses, we had very limited time to prepare. In fact, most of the work happened the day before, during a 17-hour sprint (you can catch a lot of that on Twitch).
Despite some technical and artistic rough edges, and a pretty ugly exhibition stand (we didn’t really have time to decorate), people connected with the vision behind the game and were able to look past the flaws. That alone made the effort worthwhile.
We’ll be uploading this prototype build to our Discord on Monday, 29 September, so you’ll be able to test it yourselves. In the meantime, this week’s focus will be on squashing the most critical bugs to make the experience smoother.
Whats next ?
As mentioned, this week we’ll focus on fixing the bugs in our current build so it’s ready to be tested next week. After that, we’re setting our sights on a new milestone: December. By then, we want this prototype to be in an extremely polished state, polished enough to submit it to the DCP (Deutscher Computerspiel Preis – Category: Prototype from young teams).
It’s an ambitious goal, but we believe it’s worth aiming for and don’t want to miss the opportunity. The exact tasks on the road to December will be outlined in the upcoming blogs, and of course, the build we submit will also be made available for testing. Along the way, there may be additional test builds so we can gather more feedback.
That’s a wrap for this week’s chapter! From Gamescom impressions to exhibiting our prototype at the university, it’s been a busy and rewarding stretch. Seeing people play and enjoy Enu gives us the motivation to push even harder toward our December milestone. Thanks for sticking with us on this journey, we can’t wait to share the polished build with you soon!
