2014 is now upon us, and the time soon comes to make more great games.
I have been more absent from Smiling Cat than expected, due to some family circumstances over the past couple of months. I don’t want to go into details, suffice to say that things have been so crazy that I have not even had time to post any sort of follow up from the game expo. Wait, that was less than a month ago? To Gill and I, it seems like ages past.
The Ohio Game Dev Expo was really awesome. It was great being there with everybody, and meeting lots of new folks looking to help create a gaming industry here in Ohio. My fleet of tablets got an extensive workout from everyone taking a turn trying out Prepare for Warp, and I received lots of positive feedback about the game. The booth was a big hit, as Phil from Dioram Games put it, it was the “most pimped out booth” in the expo. Hopefully I have inspired others to “go big” next year.
And it seems there definitely will be a next year. The attendance numbers were far better than we ever could have hoped for in a first-year expo. Talking with the organizers, we estimated that there were anywhere between 500 and 750 attendees, and all 30-odd showcase spaces were occupied; even the one that had a last-minute cancellation was re-booked. Hats off to all of the staff, especially Steve Castro, Chris Volpe, and Wesley Adams, who all went far above and beyond to make sure this was the best expo possible. They even secured some coffee for my wife when we arrived and found coffee to be strangely scarce at 7am in the OSU Student Union. As far as I could tell, everything was executed flawlessly.
Here you can see the Smiling Cat booth in all of its glory. The first shot is a side view. As a sponsor, we were in one of the larger showcase areas near the stage. As you walked down the rightmost aisle, right in front of you at the end of the aisle was a three-foot-high smiling cat head. It was really awesome.
The second photo shows inside of the booth itself, on the left are the Android demo tablets for the mobile showcase, in the back is the PC showcase kiosk, and the table in the front had most of the literature and swag. This was definitely a step up from our table at GMX earlier this year, and I hope to get many years of use out of this setup. I got a big surprise later in the day. The manager of my department in my day job was at the Union for another event, and stopped by my booth! He was very impressed by the setup.
So, lots of big plans for 2014 to follow on the successes of 2013. Vintage Pachinko has been resurgent in the past month, and there are plans for some enhancements to that plus a strong possibility of a second pachinko game featuring a more modern “fever” pachinko machine. Dehoarder has also been a pretty big success. It is my most played game on Kongregate, so it is highly likely that there will be a follow-up for that as well. Unlike the Earl’s Warehouse expansion, the Dehoarder upgrade is more likely to be a sequel.
Also, I plan to bring my growing mobile library of games to the iOS platform this year, as this has been a number one query at both the expo and at the COGG prototype and play events.
Finally, I hope to release a couple of new mobile titles this year. I’d like to release at least one free mobile title, and use it as a platform to market my paid mobile games, as well as possibly incorporating some form of minimally-intrusive external advertising. What form these new mobile titles will take is anyone’s guess, as I still don’t know.
It will probably be a couple more weeks before matters in my personal life fully settle out and allow me to resume moving at full speed on Smiling Cat. Once that happens, this blog will be back to regular weekly updates.