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PlayStation Experience Post-Mortem – Part 3

Day 2

The hours for Sunday was 10 AM to 6 PM. It was nice to have a much shorter day, and as expected, the crowd was smaller than on Saturday.

One of the highlights on Sunday was I got to try Luis Antonio’s Twelve Minutes. This is a game I’ve been excited about for quite a while. I had a similar idea for some time, after watching the film Source Code. During SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, I was telling Brendon Chung of Blendo Games about this idea, and the next day, Rock, Paper, Shotgun published a preview of the game.

The game wasn’t officially being shown at PSX. Luis is the artist on The Witness, and showed the game to me during one of his breaks. It’s really fascinating, and has a lot of interesting design challenges. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the game develops.

Also, a redditor from /r/PS4 stopped by and we did an awkward high-five, as originally planned:

redditor

I am responsible for about 90% of the awkwardness in that picture.

Here is a much better picture of me:

ME_PSX

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

All in all, PSX was a lot of fun, and a really great event to show at. It was my first time showing the game in the context of PlayStation, and the crowd seemed to be quite different from those at past events.

A lot of the people who came by hadn’t heard of the game before, so it was great to see the game reaching new people. Several people would walk by the booth and check out the game on account of the art style, only to completely finish the demo, which takes around 30 minutes, and walk away really excited. That was an awesome feeling and an indication for me that the tweaks and iterations I’ve made this past year have worked.

I was a little disappointed with the lack of press I got. I had emailed about 20 journalists from major outlets who were going to be there, but none of them stopped by, and the game didn’t get a single mention in the media. This is not the journalists’ fault – I think because it’s the first PSX, a lot of outlets only sent 1 or 2 people to cover the event, and most of their time was spent on the new reveals and announcements from larger titles.

Still, I was quite disappointed. Going to these events is a ton of work and quite expensive, especially as a one-man team. Sony covered the cost of hotel, but I still had to pay for flight, food, etc, and Las Vegas is not cheap.

I was flying back to Chicago on Tuesday morning, so had an extra day in town. On Monday night, I was feeling a little depressed about the lack of press I got, and went for a walk around town to try to clear my head and plan out what I’m going to do next in development. I ended up at Denny’s, and had just ordered some food, when I got a text from my friend Kevin:

“Check your Twitted feed!!”

I took out my phone, and I couldn’t believe my eyes:

jon_blow_twitter

Jonathan Blow just tweeted about my game. Holy shit.

I know this may not sound like a big deal. After all, it’s just a tweet. But if you’ve been following this devlog or me on twitter, you’ll know that Jon’s work has had the most influence on my own work and approach to game development. Braid was a huge inspiration, and RELATIVITY is very much a work along the same lines of philosophy. I see games as a way to uncover truth through exploration of a system, and I want to make deep and profound experiences. I’ve watched almost all of Jon’s talks and interviews, and had studied his work very closely.

For the past two years of development, I had been wanting to get the game to a state that was ready to show him. I met Jon briefly at PRACTICE last month, and sent him a build of the game afterwards. Even though it’s still an early build of the game, the fact that he played through it and liked it enough to share about it (and he doesn’t share about too many games), was a huge milestone for me and meant a tremendous amount.

It was the best exposure that I could have gotten for the game, and to have it come at a time when I was feeling pretty down about the lack of press attention… I almost broke down at Denny’s.

vegas

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