Tuesday, April 15, 2014

April Post

Anyone else watch the Blood Moon last night?  I’d never seen one before.  I think I probably watched it for an hour or so.  Basically, the moon kept getting darker until it looked just like a huge beach ball a couple hundred feet, frozen in the middle of the sky with only the pale lights form the strip mall across the street to light it.  I kept thinking that it looked more gray with a slight brownish tone.  Then it started getting lighter again and more and more red in color.  Odd and surreal to look at.

That aside, so Indie Arcade happened.  There were a lot more people there than I anticipated.  Which was good.  There were a lot of things that I wasn't really happy with.  For one, I built a booth from black curtains and pvc pipes.  And despite the fact that I had a whole booth to construct, they weren't letting developers in early to set up.  Everyone got in the same time, meaning I got to haul armfuls of pvc pipe through the crowd.  As we were setting up, another developer set up on our table.  We were like, “Um, hello?  McFly?”  But they just ignored us.  So we got to be further back on the side, with another developer in front of us, blocking us.  We were also ready to put our games Raygun Rocketship and Granny Wars on the arcade machines.  Um, where were they?  I asked Gabe and he told me that he decided that morning not to bring them.  Yeah, that would have been nice to have some warning on.  So one of the programmers brought his computer.  I don’t know why he did, but it gave us something to show off one of the games on--Raygun.  All the tables were gone other than some tiny two foot wide wire patio table that I think someone grabbed from outside.  Since you can’t really play Raygun without a controller, we had someone on the team go out to Gamestop and buy one.  Three hours later, we were finally able to show off the game, but most the crowd was gone by then.

We did get some feedback from people that stopped by and played it.  That was cool.  We get “This totally reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoon,” comment about every time we show off the game, followed by suggestions to put the Roadrunner characters in the game.

Towards the end of the day, I had several people I didn't know, that wanted to talk to me.  There are no pics of me on our website (at least not right now), so I asked this one guy how he knew I was the owner of Stigma Games.  He said he’d done research on us and felt like I just had an aura of leadership.  Quite a few other people wanted to talk to me--one guy bought me a beer in exchange for being able to pick my brain.  Two others offered to buy me dinner for the same reason.  It’s pretty flattering that people think I’m important enough for that kind of attention, though another guy I don’t know who meets me at a bar and wants to take me out to dinner makes me a little uncomfortable.  I was a little close to saying, “Sure, but I have to warn you.  I don’t put out on a first date,” just to see what he’d say, but decided to pass.  I mean, I was flattered he asked so I didn't want to make it potentially more awkward, even if it sort of took me by surprise at first.  If anyone has questions about the game industry at all, I’m happy to help with what little experience I have.

But yeah, an aura of leadership?  Man, that so wasn't me two and a half years ago before Stigma Games started.  It’s a position I had to morph into.  I've always been able to make people laugh and perform in front of a crowd, but I guess I just get more and more confident.  That comes from failing and getting back up.  The more things you survive, the less things scare you.

Let’s see, what else?  The next day, I bought enough food, soda, and beer for about 40 people for the first Stigma Games Company BBQ.  You know, I’d never bought beer in a store before that day?  About 10 people actually showed, but it’s always good to have too much food than too little.  I’m going to be eating hamburgers, hotdogs, and jalapeno poppers for the next couple months though.  About half the group left, so by 5pm, we started playing drinking games.  Renee mentioned that she was really competitive.  We played about 6 games, and she won every one of them.  Like, every single one.  When I pointed it out, she was all, “Did I?” all innocently.  Anyways, it was a fun weekend.