Last week, I was one of 24 indie game developers who showed off their games in the Indie/Tentacle Zone, part of the Insomnia Gaming Festival (i65) at the Birmingham NEC. Over a four day period, thousands of gamers got an opportunity to try our games, some in development for platforms, others being in early access or recent release. For me, it was an opportunity to show Gemstone Keeper for the Nintendo Switch, to see what bugs people would find in the port running on proper hardware for an extended period of time.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived on the first day was the stands were great! When I last went to Insomnia back at i61, the Indie Zone had the blank, cubicle-like, walls with one table, which had been used as far back as the Indie Zone’s introduction around i52 back in 2014. It was an acceptable setup considering that Indie Zone spaces were free to those who applied and PC setups were provided. Last year however, the Indie Zone was being operated by Payload Studios, the developer of the game TerraTech and managers of the Tentacle Zone at EGX and Rezzed, they managed to deliver by replacing the plan walls with backdrops that featured banners of our games! (we provided the poster art for them to print)

That didn’t stop some developers going the extra mile: Space Lizard Studio created a cardboard scenery around their table to match the theme of their Papercraft Horror game, Paper Cut Mansion. The developer told me that it took them two weeks in their spare time to create it and it looks impressive! Rhys510 on the otherhand, didn’t bother with a table with a monitor, system and controller, as their game was on a fully functional arcade cabinet!

On each day, the doors opened to attendees at 10am for priority attendees, and 10:30am for everyone else. What appeared to be a surprise to most of the indie devs was the amount of people who turned up on Friday, particularly in the morning. It was anticipated that Saturday and Sunday would be the busiest days, with Friday and Monday being the least due to it being near the end of the school holidays and a bank holiday respectively. The morning was espected to be quiet in general because that would be time people would explore the whole event and jump into the other areas that required queues, such as the Borderlands and MediEvil stands, or the Ubisoft Experience. This wasn’t the case, Friday morning had attendees trying out each indie game. While the crowds wouldn’t compare to Saturday, it was still a good first day.

This was the crowd on the Saturday.

While having more people to keep an eye on and try your work is more hectic, it does make the work of showcasing go a lot quicker. Retro Revival was a decent showing, but not many people turned up to its indie section, which made the whole event feel a lot longer. Plenty of people managed to try out the game, both the standard single player mode and the multiplayer survival mode, I ended up making a procedure where if I see an individual or a single child with parents approach, I’d let them try out the single player mode, but when a group approached the table, I’d ask if they wanted to play multiplayer, and set up the controllers if they said yes. This ended up being a good strategy, as groups might lose interest if only one person plays at a time (although I noticed pairs who went straight into the single player mode took turns at each level).

There were some technical hiccups though, as before the first day I had technical issues that prevented me from creating new builds for the Switch (lesson for the future: never update the SDK or firmware before your big events). I was fortunate to have a working demo build from a week before that I could use, but even then it had slowdowns and it even crashed at one point, which required a force restart. This was the case for both the Friday and Saturday, fortunately on Saturday evening I was able to fix two main issues that were causing crashes, and with my notebook that had an entire page filled with minor bugs in it I was able to get through and create new builds for both Sunday and Monday.

Overall, I’d say I had a great time. I got to try out a number of the games such as “Bubbles the Cat” from Team Cats N Bears, Velocity G by Repixel8, Robot Champions and many others, and hung out with a group of them on the Sunday (sadly I missed out on the pub quiz that took place on the Friday).

The next event I plan to show Gemstone Keeper will be at EGX in London in October, so I hope to see as many (if not more) players there!