Openwest 2015 Recap
So the conference is officially over. After months of preparation, planning, coding and other interesting or not so interesting tasks, everything came together for the event. So here’s a quick recap of how everything went.
On the first day, we started our BOCO tournament. For those of you that don’t know, BOCO is a turn based strategy game. We used this conference as a launch event it and had a smartwatch for the winner. We tried to schedule the tourney games between sessions, but next year, we’ll likely need to do something else. There simply wasn’t enough time between sessions to do things as nicely as we wanted. That being said, it al l still went exceptionally well. People seemed to really enjoy it, with many people giving us excellent feedback. We hope to have a version that integrates this feedback released within a few weeks.
As the BOCO tourney continued forward, people began to learn more about the strategies and began trying different approaches to win. The final set of games were very well played with the players staying after the set was finished to continue playing against each other. There are few things more rewarding than seeing people really enjoying a game that you’ve had a part in creating.
Throughout the conference, we had our arcade cabinet set up to show off Collider. This was also a huge hit, especially since we could have four people playing at once. We have a lot of things we’re needing to do to finish it, but we’ve gotten some votes on our Greenlight page and some great feedback. We’ll be moving forward with launching it within a few months on Steam!
So until the next Open West conference we will be hunkering down to develop some really cool games! Vikings is also still in the pipe to be delivered sometime this year we hope. We have our fingers and toes crossed that Stephen will learn how to build 3D assets in Blender to produce 2D sprite sheets. This should make the game look pseudo 3D and set it apart from our other games artistically, but in an awesome way. We should have some art put up here soon so keep checking back for some Blender goodness mixed with Tiled Map Editor! Until then let us reflect on the good times, party hard, and code away.
