A lot of you probably already know, but we were at gamescom in Cologne about two weeks ago and had a pre-alpha demo of Lost Ember in our bags! As part of the amazing Indie Arena Booth (www.indiearenabooth.de) we presented Lost Ember to about 350,000 visitors (well, maybe not all of them came to our booth…) and had an incredible time!
For us, gamescom was a huge success! We had a lot of fun and got amazing feedback from our players (and of course also found a few new bugs – hey, it’s pre-alpha, what did you expect? 😉 ).
But it also was an incredibly stressful time! Let me tell you, trade shows are awesome, but really, really exhausting! Our expectations on our demo were quite high, because we wanted to already give players a good idea of how the final game would look and feel. Granted, the demo still is a long way from where we want to go, but I think for now we’re quite happy with it 🙂 Additionally we were given the opportunity to present Lost Ember at the Social Media Stage to the people at gamescom and live to the whole world. For that, we planned to finally reveal our first official teaser trailer. That still wasn’t done, either. So with working on the demo, the teaser, some merchandise and planning the whole trip to Cologne, the last week before gamescom was a 90 hour week with little sleep and a lot junk food for us…
On Monday, the 15th of August, we finally had to pack everything up, squeeze it into a rental car and hit the road. We were thrilled!
But with a bit of a damper: neither the demo nor the teaser was finished and, like that wouldn’t be enough, Max started to get ill. So we didn’t have much choice but to keep working in our AirBnB.
Crunchtime still wasn’t over, and that on top of gamescom! While Pascal and Matthias started setting up our booth, Max and Tobias kept working on Lost Ember.
Finally (and last-minute) the demo was working! Important side note: Tobias slept for a total of 6 hours from Sunday until Wednesday.
Fortunately our demo ran pretty smoothly, but Max and Tobias still had to do a bit of a night shift to fix some bugs and work on the teaser.
After another 2 hours of sleep, we finally had everything ready on Thursday and could start to relax a little. Well, if you consider standing on your feet at your booth for 8 to 10 hours a day, answering questions and giving interviews relaxing… But hell, after that last week it felt like vacation for us!
Then, on Saturday, Will and Craig sent us the final version of the sound effects for the teaser and we still had to put that into the video. And because all our hardware was used at our booth, we had to do it right there in front of the players (sorry for blocking one of the game stations, guys 😀 ).
Then we started to get nervous before our 30 minutes on the Social Media Stage. We were incredible tense and excited about how people would react to our teaser! We didn’t have time to prepare a presentation before and so we just wrote down a few notes and some pictures and then it was 6.30pm, our time on the stage. We arrived and: nothing. Noone. The stage was empty, a handful of people sitting in front of it (probably mainly to rest and not because of anything happening behind them) and huge disappointment on our faces. Apparently the act before us was cancelled or finished early or something, anyway, the stage was empty for an hour and the viewers online left, so they already shut off the stream. This was our big moment… Not. They told us we could still present on the stage, but we decided to just go back to our booth and instead reveal the teaser at another live stream of a German magazine that wanted to interview us the next day.
And although that actually did happen, it was a lot smaller than we expected, too. I think there were like 15 viewers online and maybe half of that at the booth. So the release of the trailer wasn’t exactly what we thought it’d be and I think we had about 200 views in the evening. After we finally found some time to write a short newsletter to our subscribers, we packed our things and drove back to our flat in Cologne to at least celebrate an otherwise successful gamescom with a little pizza and beer.
And then came the next day. On the drive back to Hamburg, a few Youtubers and magazines wrote about our trailer and our Google Alerts didn’t stop buzzing! Around noon even huge magazines like PC Gamer wrote about us and the views on our teaser skyrocketed! At the moment (on August 29th) we got over 80,000 views and more than 1,600 likes, which we count as a huge success!
Our newsletter didn’t (and still doesn’t) stop growing as well and we managed to more than double our subscriber count from around 1,500 subscribers before gamescom to now 3,330. So we come closer and closer to our self-set goal of 5,000 subscribers for our kickstarter campaign (you can read more about that at lostember.com/#challenge if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
So that was our gamescom experience! 🙂 If you visited us at our booth and played Lost Ember, I hope you didn’t notice how stressed we all were and had a great time and maybe you can leave a comment on how you liked our demo! Also we want to thank the awesome team of the Indie Arena Booth, who made all this possible, and all the other indie devs who presented their games with us, especially our lovely neighbors KeokeN Interactive with their amazing UE4 game Deliver us the Moon and THREAKS with Beatbuddy! And of course all the others like Klonk with Shift Happens!, the Niche team, Far: Lone Sails and all the others we can’t mention, because well, it were 60 teams 😉
And in the shadow of gamescom and our new teaser, another important thing happened: we changed our logo! Some of you probably noticed our quick and silent changes to website and social media profiles. Although we liked the old logo, we didn’t really feel it represented us. It looked way too formal, serious and clean. And well, that ain’t us! We think the new logo is younger, fresher and friendlier and we just feel more comfortable with the new look than we did with the old one. What do you think?
