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Ohayocon IGS and GDEX 2023

(Jul 18th, 2023 at 06:52:35 PM)

Hey there!

More exciting news on the game development front! In January I had a booth at the Ohayocon Indie Gaming Showcase. Ohayocon was a blast and I was lucky enough to leave with the "Judge's Choice (Digital)" award for The Boundary Condition!

The Boundary Condition also now has a Steam page. Please go wishlist it, if you haven't already!

Following Ohayocon, my wife and I had a baby girl in February! Everything went well and we've been taking time to appreciate it. But, between a newborn, a 4 year old, and work, things have been busy and I haven't been able to work on games as much.

That brings me to GDEX. This year I made sure to set aside additional time to enter the GDEX Game Jam. The game jam lasted 9 days and started about three weeks before GDEX itself. I decided to try to put together a small team for the jam (my first time doing that as well!) which went really well. I reached out to someone I met at a COGG meetup that does sound effects, and he pulled in a musician friend of his. Halfway through the jam we also found an artist through the GDEX Discord. All of them were amazing to work with!

The theme for the jam was "Outdoors", so we made a puzzle game called Overgrow (try it out!) where you help plants grow over various man-made objects in the level. People seemed to respond really well to the game and it ultimately ended up being selected as the winner of the jam, which was announced during the GDEX awards ceremony.

Also at the awards ceremony, The Boundary Condition was the runner-up for Best ISE (independent, student, and experimental) game, so it was an amazing weekend overall. I had thought the game was pretty solid going in, but it's truly amazing how quickly ideas can add up while you watch people play your game and hear what they have to say about it. I've already made a bunch of changes based on that feedback and I think things are hopefully getting more streamlined in terms of teaching the mechanics and controls. I'll be posting an update to itch.io soon and then probably looking to set up a Steam demo after that.

Coming up next, I'll be headed to the Cleveland Gaming Classic in September where I'm looking forward to meeting new people and getting even more great feedback. Hope to see you there!

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