Gamescom Asia Round-Up!
With Gamescom Asia wrapped up, we have to share with you what happened there. Early spoiler alert – it was seriously good for us.
For this event, I am accompanied by my dad, and two of my friends residing in Singapore – 5outh and Keizou. I met both of these guys in the arcade when I was studying in Singapore. The two of them do help out with the game’s development – 5outh is a mod in our Discord server and Keizou makes the recent trailers, including the one for Gamescom. Have a look at it below if you haven’t done so!
Day 0 (19 Oct) was quite simple so I don’t need to dedicate a section for it. We took a look at our booth, set up the poster and did a little briefing. And yeah, that’s it really. 5outh will be available for Day 1 and 2, while Keizou is available for Day 2 and Day 3.
Before we proceed further – Big apologies for not taking pics. I simply don’t like taking pictures, but I probably… should, for an event like this?
Day 1 (20 Oct)
Sit down beside our booth, maybe someone comes playing every 15 minutes or so and roam around, yes?
That’s what I thought at the beginning, but turns out that was so far off the mark.
Despite the organizers saying to me that they expected about 3000 visitors throughout the 3 days… Our booth almost always got someone playing. At times, there are people playing for the sake of formality, but you know, their expressions when playing don’t lie. What I see from their faces (mostly) are people who believe we are making something good. And deary me, of course I am really happy with that! More than you believe I am so happy about that. I will elaborate on this more during the closing section of this blog, so please read until the end.
We have some pretty high-profile visitors for this day, including INSPION and YK music. From the media side… there are at least 2 or 3 today, I probably shouldn’t tell you exactly whom right now, but I do follow one of these media’s facebook page already prior to this event.
Unfortunately, as I made the normal charts on a rush, some of them ended up overcharted. For most of this day (and the next ones) we have to hear Free to be Falling and DIGITAL DIVER 20XX so many times because they have the two easiest charts to play. To add to that, we have to hear the crossfades for our 12 songs for almost the entire day.
Disclaimer! I believe all of the songs in our game are good, but even we may burn out if we have to listen to it the entire day.
Digital Diver’s chart in particular, even the people that obviously never played rhythm games before can FC it. But thanks to this experience, I now understand how easy should the easy charts be.
By this day alone, we are quite numb to the comparisons with a certain circle-clicking game. I am already numb from a while ago but 5outh now knows how I feel. But to be fair, we are quite okay with comparisons to Cytus and Jubeat, but as for the other one… it’s just part of the job.
At about 5:30PM, we packed up and go home. It was so fun, but so tiring at the same time. This is where it really got messy for me – I took the wrong bus home not once… but TWIIIIIIIICEEEE!!!!!! I was supposed to take bus number 157 home, but I took 154 instead, and by the time I realized it, it was too late. During the trip back, I did take the correct bus but I think they passed by my area, so yeah.
I should have been home by about 7PM, but instead it was almost 10PM. Never have I felt so lucky and so unlucky on the same day in my life.
Oh and one last thing for this day: We played Rift of the Necrodancer. I took a pic of the booth but it wasn’t a good pic, so this will have to do.
Really fun game. I was so surprised when I saw them in the exhibitor list. Turns out we are not the only rhythm game around here! Really guys nice too to chat with. My personal experience with the Necrodancer series were both Crypt and Cadence of Hyrule (the Zelda version). I really struggled against the dragon on the former but I got my groove on the latter because it’s a lot more forgiving.
And by the way, Rift is really fun. I am glad we got the opportunity to try it out.
Day 2 (21 Oct)
I still managed to get a proper sleep, despite the hiccups of yesterday. I woke up early at 6AM to nerf Light to Heed’s Normal chart. It’s our game’s theme song, and in the full game it will be the first song you’d play. So it has to be easy. By the way, here’s the song for you to listen to if you haven’t done so:
I would have liked to nerf more charts, but this will do for now. At least now we won’t be restricted to just the two aforementioned songs for the remaining days if we want the non-rhythm gamers to play it.
This is the only day where we got a full team with Keizou joining in too. It is relatively relaxing compared to day 1, but we still have a substantial amount of people coming in. The players coming in seem to have more varied prior experiences with rhythm games. There was one player that played DJMAX Technika, notably speaking about Son of Sun. And then there was one Japanese 3D Artist that played SDVX2 before she moved to the Philippines. We ended up talking about various Japanese rhythm game composers and yeah, it was a fun chat.
The Gumi guys that came were also very insightful. One of them was an old face in the arcades apparently, and the other one talked a lot about game designs, the discussion at some point delved into Zhongli from Genshin Impact.
Also, it didn’t take a lot of time for even Keizou to be numb to the comparisons too.
This time I didn’t take the wrong bus coming home, okay. I was already paranoid enough from the previous day’s debacles. And today we brought these home:
Day 3 aka the Faux B2C Day (22 Oct)
For this day, there were a lot of Polytechnic and University students coming around. While most of the other exhibitors remarked that they could talk to them in a comparatively relaxing manner, I feel like it’s the same for me. Maybe because I did give some sarcastic answers in the previous days, haha.
It’s really nice to see them being intrigued to the design process of the game. In this scenario they asked what are the steps required to put a song into the game. When I put out the steps like that, I think it ended up being more complex than they should have been. But I would say the process is generally quite smooth because we maintain good relationships with the people we commission.
With these guys around, it’s definitely quite hectic, but definitely fun too. While I was happy to wrap it up by 1PM, I wouldn’t mind if it went longer. In the end, without realizing it three days have passed. A lot of stuff to look back, and so much I could tell you that if I tell you everything, I wouldn’t finish it even in 3 days and 3 nights.
Our Objectives
Recall the previous post I made and you will know what we are looking for from this event. The extended bullet points are my takeaways from the event in regards to those objectives.
- Put our game on the media spotlight (actual news sites, youtubers, streamers, etc)
- There are a few media willing to write about us, including a pretty high profile one. However, I will not say we have achieved the objective yet until the posts are up on their sites. I still have to work on bringing the follow-ups to them too.
- Get some feedback on the game from people we don’t know before
- Yes, mostly on the hold notes. It certainly could be more intuitive. But overall, most of the players seem really enthused about the game! We really could breathe a sigh of relief, as it’s now not just us that believe it’s a good game.
- Networking (Meet up with fellow devs etc)
- Part of what makes this event so fun are the fellow exhibitors too! So many nice guys around, and it’s really nice to meet up with developers.
- And most importantly… to learn. Life is a never-ending journey of learning, my friend.
- Definitely! Just being out here was an eye-opener already.
Next Year, Closing Words, etc
Overall, with all our objectives achieved (or on the way to doing so in the case of media stuff), I believe the event was really successful for us! The reception was a lot more than I initially thought, and most of the people playing seemed to enjoy the game. I’m glad a LOT of people seem to like the artworks too, most notably the poster.
What I can say about Gamescom Asia is this, despite it just being concluded – we’ll definitely be here again next year if the opportunity allows! We also heard some really encouraging stuff from the organizers about their future plans, so I’m personally really looking forward to it!
Many thanks to everyone involved! The guys exhibiting around us, the organizers especially “teacher”, 5outh and Keizou and of course my dad that really functioned as the oil in our machine. I let my dad roam around to experience the con so that he can enjoy it. He bought a lot of food and drinks for us throughout the exhibition days to keep us energized.
I feel very lucky and honored to be able to participate in this event. A lot of stars also aligned to make this possible. To participate again the next year… Of course lah, it’s a no-brainer.
Soon, we’ll be back to reality (you can argue that writing this blog post IS exactly that) but let me enjoy the moment for now.
Next year is our year… and I’m an Arsenal fan, not Liverpool 🙂
Oh, and for you the guys that got to know us only recently, here’s our Discord server and our Newsletter to register to. You’ll even get a free mini album for registering to the latter. That’s it. Thanks so much for sticking all the way until the end of this post! Hope I didn’t miss anything.