Wednesday 18 October 2017

Making Berth in Manchester: Bullion comes to Play Expo

When Replay Events announced about a month before their flagship Play Expo Manchester event that there were a number of indie zone spaces available, it presented us with a difficult decision. On one hand, Play Manchester is huge, with great possibilities for getting both feedback and exposure for the game, and thanks to our previous titles we have a great relationship with the Replay team; but on the other hand, it was at short notice - organisation with team members and families aside, the new build absolutely had to be ready - or we would be falling back our old demo from GEEK which we knew to have bugs and missing a lot of functionality...


"Indie Alley" at Play Manchester
Bullion alpha v2 ready to go at Play Expo Manchester
All ship-shape and ready to sail...

As ever, the Replay team were superb. On the whole, communications were above and beyond the call of duty, which was pretty much the deciding factor in our going - a few days later and we would not have had the new demo ready in time! The only issue was the late release of the exhibitor packs, leaving us almost no time to organise logistics. The indie zone itself was located in a prime position, right opposite where the people queuing to enter would come in - once again, Replay Events following up on their commitment to indies, so a big thumbs-up there. Unfortunately, the venue impacts the atmosphere - Event City is essentially a huge metal box with bright lights for the most part, and despite the Replay team's best efforts, it is difficult to evoke that grungy retro-arcade feel. At least the public wi-fi was working this time!

Due to the eleventh-hour exhibitor packs, we had to set up on the Saturday morning before the show. Not content with committing to a new, relatively untried demo, we decided to really push the boat out and run on our old budget Lenovo laptop - we did have other hardware available, but we figured that a bit of initial humiliation was better than an accident with a newer box! At ten o'clock, the doors opened and we took a deep breath as a small horde of people flooded in...


There were a few more people at this one...

... and the new demo performed almost flawlessly! None of the crashes or "oh god, that's embarrassing!" bugs (cough-teleporting bulls!-cough) that had popped up in its earlier counterpart. In fact, the vast majority of the issues we came across were design related, and mostly in the placeholder-heavy areas, and by the end of the event there was not one single post-it note on the back of the pop-up banner! Once again, visuals and audio received high praise; it was just a shame that Matthew and Ben H could not be with us to hear it. Ah well, there's always next year...

Thanks to the great positioning of both the indie zone and our booth within it (second from the entrance end - score!) we were consistently busy, with the jewel in the crown for the event being when indie legend Jeff Minter, whose games we had grown up with, came over to play. We also had plenty of press contact, loads of great feedback, and some absolutely corking ideas as to how we could polish the game up. As ever, it was both hugely satisfying and fun to watch people playing, and how they play... for some reason, it feels like there is a ritual that the mums of families can do to become absolutely awesome at Bullion - by hesitating and protesting that "they are no good at games" before picking up a controller, they suddenly gain mad gaming skills...


Mums have mad skillz!

Achievement unlocked - play with a legend!

To sum up - a great event, hugely positive and progressive, and re-affirming that the game is moving in the right direction. However, we now need to up our game as best as possible in the development process as the question we got asked the most was the one that we could not answer: "When will this be released?"


Keep 'em alive, Paul!

Jupiter takes the bull by the horns...