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PAX East: Day 2

PAX East: Day 2
I'm back! YEAH! Sorry about the big delay but I've been super busy with Snapshot ever since I got home from PAX East, but I'm taking a quick break to do this write up of the magical Day 2 of PAX East! This is going to be pretty jumbled as I try to piece together what happened, so I apologize in advance.

The beginning of this day felt absolutely awful. Why the hell did we stay out until half passed midnight for some concerts? I mean, I slept on the floor for a couple hours, but that didn't seem to help me out at all. We didn't get back the night before until really late, and my alarm went off at 6:45am which meant that I only got a couple hours of sleep. Waking up was a strange mix of extreme tiredness and adrenaline. I mean, my body was completely destroyed from lack of sleep, but the feeling of going to PAX for another day of showing off the game had me really excited.

I think I made at least to the car before I passed out. We were heading in a little early again so that Dave could fix more bugs with the demo and so that we could be in the expo hall at 9am. The expo hall opened to the public at 10am, but on the 2nd day they secretly open the expo hall to members of the press at 9am.

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Day 2 was a special day, oh yes. We had big plans for the extra table that was sitting in the booth. With the extra table set up at the outer edge of the booth, we could easily print Snapshot T-shirts for all the boys and girls at PAX. See, all the other booths were giving out a crap load of free stuff. Posters, hats, bags, buttons, CDs, video cards, ram, and T-Shirts. We didn't have T-shirts of our own to give out, but we did have access to the materials to screen print t-shirts on the fly.

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Awhile back Pete got the materials together to screen print Snapshot t-shirts, so that we could sort of home brew our own shirts instead of bulk ordering a bunch of t-shirts and then try to resell them. Since his parents were going to be stopping by the expo hall that day, they were going to bring us all the materials we'd need to print Snapshot shirts... except for the shirts themselves.

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So we set up a table on the edge of the booth with a sign explaining the situation. If anyone brought us a t-shirt, we would print the Snapshot logo on it for free. We had a lot of people check out the table, but only printed 2 or 3 shirts... however a lot of people did stop by and say that they would be back the next day with a blank shirt.

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I wish I could remember Day 2 a little bit better, but I was totally exhausted. I had lunch around 11:30am in the food court, and then I came back and sat in a chair behind the TVs and proceeded to fall asleep for about an hour just sitting in a chair. I talked to a lot of people... so many people, I can't possibly remember them all because the expo hall was a mad house. For a good while in the afternoon all I wanted to do was somehow find a bed and fall asleep. I was even considering laying down underneath one of our tables that was covered with a black table cloth and taking a nap in there for awhile, but luckily I never had to resort to that.

I do want to mention that it was on Day 2 that we received the notable "Best Chair Award" from a Castle Crasher. It was a illustrious award drawn upon a sheet of paper torn from a small notebook. Each letter was hand crafted by the flowing movements of the gods themselves. So whoever that was that gave us the Best Chair Award, thanks.

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By the end of Day 2 we realized that we had a slight problem on our hands. At the beginning of the day we decided to run two playable demos instead of having one playable demo and the other computer playing trailers. This was working out really well and we had a lot of people coming by to play, but some people were staying a little bit too long. There were 14 levels in the demo, and people were very determined to go through the entire thing, which is about a 20 minute session. Some people were playing a lot more than that though. At one point we had someone playing for about 45 minutes, constantly trying the very last level in the demo.

It was pretty clear that we needed to implement some sort of timer into the demo, so we asked one of the enforcers how late the room was going to be open and we heard two answers: midnight, or 10pm. So after grabbing some food, we went back to the expo hall so that Dave could wave his magical C++ wand and get a timer implemented. At first another enforcer came out to yell at us, but then we were like "It's cool bro, we're just working on our game." and he was like "Oh wow that's super awesome, I will hang out with you cool dudes then." and so he did. So awhile Dave was crunching to get the demo updated, the enforcer that was hanging out with us played through the demo on the other station.

Around 9pm I think is the time in which the demo was completely updated and we were able to take off for the day. After waking up that morning we decided it would probably be best to just the hell out of there and go to sleep as fast as possible. When we arrived safely in our beds that night though we realized that something dreadful would be happening at 2am the next morning... so stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of my PAX East recap in "PAX East: Day 3!" Coming soon!
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