Adventure Gaming in London
Now that we primarily work from home, it's important that we don’t forget how to interact with real people. There's only so much chatting the postman wants to do after all. So, with that in mind, last Sunday we had a studio outing and traveled down to London to attend Day 2 of the AdventureX Conference. We'd backed it on Kickstarter a while ago and were pretty excited to check it out!
Sadly we couldn’t make it on Saturday, but by all accounts the show was a victim of its own success and had to turn people away because they were popular! Fortunately for us, Sunday was a bit quieter and we managed to get in. Otherwise, we'd have spent the day wandering around London with only pigeons for company... :(
For those of you that don’t know, AdventureX is a non-profit, crowd funded conference exclusively for Adventure Games. The net result of that is you get to go to and see a bunch of cool games, watch talks by some great speakers, all for free.
Not bad huh?
Here's Tom looking excited (weird) about arriving after a jaunt across the captial:
The show is a combination of playable demos on the show floor, and a range of talks by developers.
Here are some of the highlights:
Du Lac and Fey:
Points to Salix Games for some awesome swag. The comic is especially impressive. Their game is (and I quote) ‘a thrilling narrative adventure game, steeped in mystery, magic and murder.’ The fact that it’s set in Victorian London, with you trying to track down Jack The Ripper only adds to the appeal. I particularly enjoyed the authenticity of the Cockney slang in the demo! Check it out on Kickstarter here.
Some pages from The Du Lac and Fey comic which we picked up :)
Four Last Things:
Made by the one man army that is Joe Richardson, this game is beautifully unique. Everything from the game world has been extracted from different Renaissance paintings and recombined to create a vibrant, quirky game world. (Think Terry Gilliam & Monty Python). It’s already available to play, so go and buy it!
Unforeseen Incidents
Another one to watch, particularly because of some lovely illustrative artwork. Made by Backwoods Entertainment, this is a classic interactive mystery game. Read more about it here.
All of the talks we went to were great as well. A really high standard in all of them. Inkle's Jon Ingold delivered a passionate rant about colonial America, the stories that define us and why there should be more games about archaeology. Fortunately for us, his studio are making one called Heaven's Vault - check it out.
Jon getting ready for his talk
Another one we really enjoyed was Zak Garris the lead writer of Life is Strange: Before the Storm, talking about how he sets up his writers room. This image sums it up nicely:
And on a more positive note....
Overall the day was also a chance for us to meet and chat to other devs. One of the nicest things about indie development is how friendly and willing to share everyone is. So all in all a fantastic day. We even got to go to lunch at a cafe with airplane doors on the walls o_0. Thanks to Danny Wadeson for taking us there!
Alex showing the door off with as little enthusiasm as possible.