Turn Down for What
There were some news in the trip to Zaragoza which we didn’t include in our last entry. The fact is that one of the nights, bored as we were in the hotel room, we received a collaboration offer from Barcelonian publisher Talking About Media, with whom we already talked in the past.
Alongside the publishing agreement, they offered us to take Rest in Jelly to Gamelab. The message was received in the room in a mood that only can be described as “Turn Down for What”.
Two days after we arrived to Barcelona we meet them to concretize services and mutual interests. After some paperwork, we formalized our relation. For us, that means essentially leaving most marketing and communication tasks to a professional company.
Preparing Gamelab
With a new goal in mind we started crunching to finish more or less half of the game. Overall, we designed the same amount of levels we had by the end of May, added a bunch of characters, tuned up the code and interface… and decided to give Jack a real body.
As crazy as you hear. Jack popped out of the screen and we gave him a plushy shape to let him wander the exhibition and take selfies with everyone. But this wasn’t the only surprise we brought with us: we created a gamepad with only a button and the shape of a jelly using a MakeyMakey. That way, attendees could play with a classic gamepad or could hit a jelly to make Jack jump… and it worked very well.
There were hard days before GameLab, which took place between the 29th of June and the 1st of July: we had to finalize details while we tried to add all the content we could and even more. For us, Gamelab was not a place to show experiments and see how they performed with the general public: we wanted to showcase a polished version of the game where all the components worked flawlessly and could give the best general idea about the product to the public, to potential collaborators and to the media.
The event
After a crunchy month, some members of the team saw themselves at 6:30 AM finishing the last build with an alarming case of sleep deprivation. At 7:30 we were already driving to arrive at the exhibition before 9:00. With a lot of suffering, the objective was reached: a quarter of the game done in one month. A total craziness.
The first day was the toughest one, surely due to the lack of sleep, but everything fade away the same moment we started to set up the booth, dress up with the studio t-shirt and Jack took the first photos of his three-day-long session.
People started to came to the booth to play, to have fun, to ask. And we asked too, obviously. It’s great to be advised and to get feedback from people who understand how a game is made and, in a lot of cases, who have a wider experience than us. In Gamelab, one of our goals was to get as much feedback as possible from professionals. We do not fear criticism: we want to create the best game possible, not just receiving compliments for what we do.
The second day, Jack had his minute of fame. In the ‘Premios Nacionales de la Industria del videojuego’ award ceremony, celebrated as a part of Gamelab, our little friend took the scenery to receive a prize. Sadly it wasn’t us who won, but Arturo Monedero, from Delirium Studios: he took home three awards for ‘The Delusions of Von Sottendorff and His Squared Mind’, and he carried Jack when he received the third. At least our beloved devil will be able to say he’s been near a “Flea” (that’s how they call the awards, because of their shape) when he’s asked about it.
