unTied Games Sweeps Gamer’s Rhapsody 2015

In the final months of 2015, as fall leaves floated through the streets on the last breeze of autumn, I was scrambling to get ready for Gamer’s Rhapsody! Gamer’s Rhapsody is a local Minnesota convention, and this was its second year. It’s a blend of gaming-themed music events, exhibitors selling awesome swag, and indie developers like us showing off our cool new games. This was our second year at Gamer’s Rhapsody, so I had some idea of what to expect. The convention spanned two days. On the first day, the big event was the Composer Quest game jam. The second day was for demoing our game. Last year, we brought Star Reaction, and this year we brought our new game, Atmocopter!

The Composer Quest game jam was a fantastic experience. Charlie McCarron, our musician as well as the man behind Composer Quest, had the brilliant idea of combining a new quest with Gamer’s Rhapsody. Through Composer Quest, he issues “quests” to his following of musicians, who compose music to satisfy the requirements of the quests. This time, his quest was to pair up a musician with a composer and an artist, and create something bigger than just music: games! We proposed it and discussed it with Thomas Spargo, organizer of Gamer’s Rhapsody, and it was a go. Not only would there be a game jam uniting artists, programmers, and composers, but the finished games would be shown off at Gamer’s Rhapsody!

As a programmer and artist, I was happy to join in and make a game! I was paired up with Andrew Harmon, a superb musician. We met at the game jam’s opening party at Charlie’s place to discuss ideas and hang out. The theme of the game jam was “I barely survived that game jam.” It was this meta, self-referential theme that inspired JamBlaster, the game we created. Fast-forward to last Friday, the first day of Gamer’s Rhapsody. Finally, the day we can show it off in public was here! Unfortunately Andrew wasn’t able to make it, but I’m proud to say that JamBlaster stole the show. It was fun to see all the other games, and I’m definitely going to make time to play them all. Charlie’s got them all collected in a blog post. The cutscenes of JamBlaster were a big hit, and everyone enjoyed watching the gameplay and listening to the music too!

You can watch the JamBlaster playthrough for yourself here:

It wouldn’t be a game jam without some awards! I’m proud to say that not only was JamBlaster crowned best overall game, but Charlie’s game Pixels at an Exhibition was bestowed the honor of best art! This is a big deal for me because I donated my pixel art tilesets for Charlie to use in his game. Pretty cool!

All hail king JamBlaster!

Next, let’s move on to the second day, where Charlie and I showed off Atmocopter.

As you can see, everything went well! I’m on the left, and our musician Charlie is on the right. I think compared to last year, the volume of people was a little greater, which was good for us! A lot of people got a chance to try out Atmocopter, and they all had a blast! See for yourself…

Thanks to all these players, I was able to get a lot of testing done and glean tons of insight into how to make Atmocopter even better. The other indie devs also gave me a lot of good feedback!
Shoutouts to the indie devs who gave awesome feedback:
Andrew J. Adams (Unmatch)
Ryan Foss (IGDATC)
Tribe Games / Escape Industries (Fingeance)
Naming is Hard (Chimera Genesis)
Sati Bros (Astral Gunners)

As you can see in the pictures, there were a few kids present, and they loved the game! They kept coming back to play more. Out of all the games in the indie room, they kept coming back to Atmocopter! That really means something… like maybe I’ve got something good here. One of the kids said something that I now remember as the highlight of Gamer’s Rhapsody for me: “It’s like a flying Super Meat Boy.” Super Meat Boy is a very successful, very fun indie game, and to be casually compared to that by a young kid was just stunning to me.

So when can you expect to be playing Atmocopter? Well, there’s quite a lot of work to do before it turns into a full game, that’s for sure. I’d like to get an early version to my patrons soon. In fact, I had initially wanted to make a 3-level demo and release it to the public on Saturday for Gamer’s Rhapsody. There was so much work to do though to prepare for the convention, and that plan fell through. However, now I have a bigger and better plan. I’m going to keep working on Atmocopter, and make a really polished, solid demo with three or four levels. Nothing big, but I want it to look good and I want it to play good. Then I’m going to put that demo on Steam Greenlight, and judge interest there. If there’s a positive response, I’ll make it into a full game!

I’ll be working very hard on this in the coming weeks, but my pixel art tilesets will also resume this week. So you can expect a lot of very cool updates in the near future! (Especially if you’re a patron!)

To help our fans stay up to date on what we’re working on, I’ve also started a newsletter. We collected email addresses at Gamer’s Rhapsody both last year and this year, so we’re ready to launch it! You can subscribe below to join the fun!