What an amazing weekend. This was our first year at Momocon and it was a great experience. The Gaming team was great, engaged and actively trying to make sure con-goers had an awesome time. It was so cool to work with them to highlight Fractured Kingdom at Momocon. So what happened? We were scheduled for two games and two panels.
Adventure Seeds: Succession and Botanical Uncooperative were featured at Momocon.
The Gaming staff helped to find players and introduce them to the setting of Fractured Kingdom allowing us to jump right into the games and bring on the craziness. There were several requests for local demos coming out of the games so, if you are in the Extended-Greater-Expanded-Super Duper-Big-Metro Atlanta Area and want to see a Fractured Kingdom demo in your next of the woods, leave a comment for follow up.
Onto The Panels…
I had the opportunity to speak on two panels, World Building and Game Mechanics, and RPG Publishing. With me on both panels was the brilliant game developer Eloy Lasanta, founder and all round get everything done guy from Third Eye Games.
World Building and Game Mechanics
So this was our first panel, and I couldn’t find the room. So of course I ran late, and there is something to say about walking into a room of like a hundred people and have them all look at you. In fairness, I spent the rest of the hour sitting in front of them so there wasn’t a lot of time to be embarrassed.
The panel was great, and there were a lot of interesting discussions around where to start, the importance of originality and how the labels one uses to define characters influences how players perceive the setting. Seeing so many people working on different projects was reassuring, and I hope that something we said helps inspiring writers.
RPG Publishing
Our second panel was on Sunday, at noon and had around twenty or thirty participants. Having found the room the day before, this time I was there early.
Within a few minutes of opening the floor to questions, which was really just a few minutes of explaining who we are, it was clear we had an audience of potential game publishers. From supplements to existing systems to original worlds or new game engines and settings.
A lot of time was spent discussing Kickstarter. Starting with a primer of what Kickstarter is, we talked about how it was used to fund several Third Eye Game titles and Fractured Kingdom, along with some of the pitfalls developers experience. There was also a fair amount of discussion on how to promote your work, and how to receive feedback.
One question that resonated with me was what feedback from reviews of Fractured Kingdom have I really internalized and incorporated into game design. To answer that question here, one thing I’ve heard fairly consistently is that character generation has so many options it can be daunting. This is something I’ve focused on heavily with the development of Glass Shadows, a Post-Human cyberpunk game I’m currently developing with Paul Caughell.
Other Events
In between the panels and games, we did manage to sneak in some play time. This included sitting in on the tail end of a game of Wu Xing run by Eloy, the game’s creator, King of Tokyo, and Splendor.
All of them were awesome games.
Oh, and I should mention that they played King of Tokyo a little bit differently at Momocon!
