Burning Sky Games had the incredible opportunity to participate in their first convention this past fall. The Boston Festival of Indie Games celebrates indie game developers in the New England area. You can explore anything, from table-top to 2D platformers to 3D shooters, in the lovely town of Boston. We borrowed a lot from this Gamasutra article in the lead-up to the event; it helped immensely to ensure everything went as smoothly as possible. It was a great experience for Burning Sky Games. We were well received by the community and met a lot of great aspiring games. Up and coming, we were excited to see that an attendee wrote about us! Read it here, and check out the above video we were also a part of!
Our booth setup at BostonFIG 2018
As our first experience taking the game out of Philly, we learned a lot. For one thing, we realized just how loud these events are; our game’s sounds couldn’t compete with the noise around us, so we bought an emergency speaker from GoPuff about half an hour into the festival. Speaking of, we also learned that GoPuff sells speakers! We also discovered just how useful it was having three separate laptops with us. The company laptop (connected to the monitor) gave us a nice, big screen for people to play Runaway on. We had a couple of controllers connected, letting two people play. Thing is, a lot more people wanted to play, so we actually threw the build onto Josh’s personal laptop and hooked up a third controller so another person could play. As you can see below, we certainly got use out of the second computer. I kept my personal laptop for debugging, which proved helpful for the occasional hotfix.
As suggested in the Gamasutra article, we also brought disinfectant wipes and cough drops (not menthol). We tried to keep the controllers clean, which I like to think our players appreciated. And I certainly appreciated the cough drops! I ate them like candy and did what I could to keep hydrated.
All in all, BostonFIG was incredible! We had a lot of fun showing Runaway and checking out what other people are working on. Special shout-out to Minilith Games, working on a detective noir game with a TON of personality! Now with BostonFIG behind us, we’ve been acting on all the feedback we got to make Runaway as approachable, enjoyable, and rewarding as possible. We’ve also submitted the Round 2 application for MAGFest 2019! (more info coming soon) Thank you all for reading, and we can’t wait to show you what’s next for Runaway and for Burning Sky Games!