And suddenly there was action

Within a week I showed SerpenTiles at the local gamedev meetup and in the indiearea at the Vienna ComicCon, which was (and is (because its the middle of the exhibition weekend)) a blast. Usually I still show Project: KNOSSOS at conventions, which is several years old by now, but provides a lot of fun for up to 8 visitors at once. So firstly I wanted to show something new I made and secondly the booths at ComicCon do not fit 8 people. But you'll get a printed booth, do not have to supervise it yourself and can pretty much observe and relax, which is great!

Showing the game at the Meetup:

I sneakely started the presentation with a joke, that SerpenTiles is a fictional game you can play in this other game I am currently devloping; Resistance Racing 2k97...

...which was a kind of white lie, because I actually do show the ad for SerpenTiles in the game and through the power of HTML you can just click the ad ingame and it brings you to my SerpenTiles itch page. You couln't do that easily with a game on steam without braking the wall / facade of being ingame^^ I talked about the great collaboration with Victor on the games music and why I developed SerpenTiles in the first place.

Why did I develop SerpenTiles in the first Place?

I wanted to do a very small game and riffed on ideas of how to connect dots. With that kind of basic limitation I turned a 3 day trainride into my own gamejam and did Star Eater, which has my usual pixelated optic, some color themes to switch around, but is overall very very minimalistic. It already has the idea of a seed as the base of the game, giving you basically endless puzzle configurations and an option to compare score with your friends if you all use the same seed. I added a lot of visual fluff and interaction feedback to make this little thing as fun as possible to use. Which turned out ok, but it went virtually unnoticed. Several months later I tried again, this time with SerpenTiles and the reception was good from the get go. For months now since the release I have a little trickle of daily pageviews and plays. Still I had my work to do (I am a gamedesigner for educational games and lectorer for newsgames) so, I did not do much further for SerpenTiles. Also talking about the game or the recent steam release of KNOSSOS was on the table, but alas no time to have the talk, do the work etc. So on a whim I filled the seat for a spot on the meetup, talked about the game and the echo was very positive. I forgot that this game is actually liked and if I put in the work for marketing it stands on its own feet quite well.

Showing the game at ComicCon

At the same time the opportunity arose, to show the game at ComicCon for free. Usually that space would cost quite some money. And I love standing back, observe the players and see how much fun they are having. There is not much space to stand at you booth and do the usual salesman thing; bring people in, explain the game and then hand out your card - manage their fun.

And I can totally recommend to do so if you show your games somewhere. Stand back, take notes. Only jump in if there is clear frustration, but also go up to them when they clearly have a lot of fun to remind them to take a card from the table, to get the game at home. I had a wide range of players; old, young, male and female. The ones who searched for something to shoot (or fortnite) are quickly sorted out because they click once and move on, but the others stay for a long time and search for a good solution to the puzzles. And, what I am particulary happy about, the ones who use the headphones, dont put them away - they play with the music, enjoy how it reacts to their player inputs and go into meditation mode.