Talking with Eddy Walda was a pleasant surprise. I was on my way to meet and exhibitor I talked to on Friday about doing an interview at the Playcrafting booth and on Sunday I ended up with an entirely different person and game. THat’s partially the beauty of Playcrafting, one of the many cheaper alternatives to getting your own booth at PAX East.
Eddy is interestingly enough a student, like myself, at Harvard, very much unlike myself. Here’s a widely known fact that somehow people keep forgetting, students don’t have money. I spend most of my yearly earnings outside of food and living expenses on attending these types of cons; I can’t imagine dropping twenty-times my usual amount on showcasing solo. That’s where Playcrafting swoops in like a majestic hawk of bureaucracy and you fill out several forms to attend and gain valuable feedback(that thing Momin was raving about, kind of totally necessary).
While the booth strives to be consistent, some applicants can only stay a couple days or sometimes even just one. In that case it’s just a matter of rotating out a laptop and a couple banners to accommodate you better. Playcrafting not only helps smaller devs showcase at big cons but also host classes in Unity and design little bootcamps to walk newbies through the whole process of game development. Stuido Studios, who we talked to previously, actually participates in teaching these week-long programs. You can start to see from interview to interview the connections between devs that are intertwined, something that Momin Khan was, again, raving about.
It’s hard to not feel… nostalgic? Something to that effect, when writing these articles and editing these interviews together. Something about the conversations we had sticks with me and I yearn to do even more, maybe see some old faces and/or meet someone new. I want to provide a resource for small indie devs scared of all the big buzzwords and steps one needs to go through in order to get their game in front of players. Sure, itch.io and newgrounds.com have public portals to dump your work into, but there’s a stark difference between faceless downloads/viewcount and receiving a paycheck based on copies sold, watching twitch streams of your product(I watch every stream of TSGO I can find) or better yet seeing someone play just a couple feet from you for the first time. I want to go back again this year to conduct more interviews, but even still I really want to showcase our own games one day, bring the three of us around the world together talking shop with players. Maybe something like Playcrafting can help.
Sorry Eddy, I would talk about your game Hexile, but nothing quite explains this title so much as playing it. There’s a demo available on their site, as always click on the Dystrophic logo to travel there and play it. The first few minutes is very simple but stick with it(and for the love of me turn of motion blur) and you ay have a good time. It’s not for everyone, but I enjoyed it.
