I decided to purposely take a lot of time off after PAX, and this included posting on my blogosphere. I think I can still hit my goal of 12 posts of something or other this month, but four straight days of PAX ended up being more draining than I thought. I think I'm back and ready to rock for real though, so I'll start with a quick recap of PAX.

So I was able to set up a small demo station of Super Sky Sisters at PAX at a friend's booth. There was no big banner or fireworks display or anything, just me and a TV and two controllers. Sometimes I had a chair to sit down in!

I was fairly nervous about people playing the game but more confident than I ever have been. At this point the game is pretty far along and my real test was to see if people would understand what was going on without me interfering. My main goal for PAX was to see if I could in four days of constant play testing with new people playing the game all the time, and by that measurement it was a pretty big success.

I feel like I just got to Seattle a second ago, but it looks like PAX is already coming to close. Hard to believe that 3 days of insane exhaustion have already gone by. I thought I would just quick list off some games that I checked out that we're super neato:

Viking Squad: Co-op lane based brawler thing that has the procedural levels that all the kids love these days. Had a lot of fun playing with some folks.

Chasm: Procedural metroidvania (my favorite) that is feeling really good these days. I think I played a build one or two years ago that was kinda cool but didn't have a super solid feel yet, but now I think it does. I do wish for a few things with the movement, but I understand that not everyone wants to make a game with movement exploits.

Timespinner: Another metroidvania but this time not procedural. Freeze time as of right now feels like a Super Metroid ice beam that just captures the whole world instead of just enemies. Cool system with weapons that are orbs that float around the player.

Futuregrind: Kind of like a Trials game but with a crazy future bike that grinds of rails built with my favorite colors. Interesting and expressive controls and movement. Trying to get a high score on the tracks leads to some pretty interesting scenarios once you master the techniques. Really good feel, these guys know what they're doing.

Shovel Knight Plague Knight DLC: I liked Shovel Knight a lot and the new Plague Knight DLC really changes how the game is played entirely. Plague Knight's movement options are really interesting. Combining double jumps, bomb jumps, and hovering from tossing bombs leads to really expressive possibilities.

Shantae: The new one is looking really really nice and has a good mix of 3d world and 2d sprites and animation. This kind of look is really hard to pull off but I think they're doing a good job. They're using Spine to do sort of frame by frame but also transforming animations which look really smooth.

Freedom Planet: This game is totally insane to me because it was made in Multimedia Fusion (Clickteam Fusion) and I have no idea how it can possibly work. I'm saying it's a Sonic the Hedgehog like and it has the full platforming engine of a really good 2d Sonic game. There's three characters to play from, and it has awesome stages and art. It's just a good solid game. I actually bought it awhile ago, but haven't played it that much yet, but seeing at PAX leads me to believe I should get to it pretty soon.

The King's Bird: Never heard of this game until playing it at PAX but boy was it great. Momentum based platformer. I'm sold already. Very fluid controls and just all around excellent game feel. Has a cool flying mechanic and so far just the two demo levels are pretty fun, so I'm interested in seeing more.

I've played many many more games but at the time of writing this post I can't think of them all! Everything in the Indie Mega Booth and the Indie Mini Booth are worth checking out so go through those lists! Now to just survive the final day of PAX.

PAX has come and gone like a cool breeze on a mid-summer's day (not an Arizona mid-summer day, though.) It was as crazy as I expected it to be and a little bit more. Everyone was prepared for the madness to last four days this time, so every Indie Megabooth member had ample supplies of hand sanitizer, vitamin c powder, and various types of medicine in stock.

I was just at PAX floating around which was pretty fun. I filled in at the Aztez booth from time to time, and also helped out a little bit at TowerFall in the PAX10. My awesome laptop was used to demo Scale, but beyond that I had no real responsibilities, yay!

I stopped in for the Spelunky Video Armageddon challenge which turned out to be pretty awesome. Colin Northway destroyed all his competitors with a complete Hell run of Spelunky that actually went quite late since the Video Armageddon lived up to its name and started late after 30 minutes of struggling with laptop video out.

I made it safe and sound to Seattle after nearly losing my mind to the anxiety of flying and traveling in general. I usually like traveling when I'm actually in my new location, but the entire process of getting there makes me pretty crazy. The packing before the trip makes me freak out as if I forgot everything important, the airport security makes me freak out with the weird x ray scanners and pat downs, and the act of flying in a plane is probably the worst since I get pretty bad adrenaline rushes from the turbulence which causes me to panic...

But hey! Here I am in sunny Seattle, Washington getting ready for one of the craziest events of the year.

Behold the beautiful view from my friend James's apartment. We're only 10 to 15 minute walk from the actual convention center where PAX is, so it's a pretty good set up for 4 days of madness. I'm taking every precaution not to get sick, but it really does seem to come down to luck of the draw (but your odds of sickness increase based on how little sleep you get.)

If you're out at PAX then I hope I get to see you and or meet you! I'll be hanging around the indie mega booth or the PAX 10 for most of the time, so if you see some dude with blue and blonde hair you should totally say hello.

I hope everyone has an awesome and healthy PAX! LET'S DO THIS.

Oops! I totally meant to post this way earlier, but I got side tracked by some other things and totally lost track of time. Anyway, it's a little late, but here's the last post about PAX2012!

I scheduled my flight out of Seattle for 8:20pm since I didn’t want to feel rushed to get to the airport in the morning or afternoon. At least, I thought I wouldn’t feel rushed to get to the airport.

We had closed the windows the night before since the sounds of dentist drill birds, hell hounds, and yelling people usually has been waking us up at 6:30 in the morning. This tactic seemed to work, except for the fact that the room we were sleeping in was now pretty warm and that can sometimes cause additional sleep to happen… or standing around for 10 hours a day talking to people and demoing games can also do that.

I woke up at noon and I think I could barely hear the hell hounds barking outside of the closed windows. I was amazed at how tired I still felt for it being noon o’clock, and I looked around the room and nobody else was up yet. I ended up laying back down and falling back asleep for what I thought was maybe only a half hour or so. I ended up waking back up at 3:30pm, and nobody else in the apartment was awake still.

The dawn of the final day has arrived. I think I’ve forgotten to mention the unique sounds that emerge from the city surrounding the apartment I’ve been staying in. When I first arrived, Dave and Matt warned me about the construction that was going on right across the street. The construction supposedly began right as the clock struck 7am, but starting on the morning of my visit the construction stopped. It was Labor Day weekend, so that made sense.

However, it turns out that there are some other things that produce noise that don’t take breaks for Labor Day. The first thing I noticed was actually on the morning of the first day of PAX. At about 6:30 in the morning, I was still half asleep and I was hearing the strangest noise and I couldn’t make sense of it. It was super loud, and it just sounded like a chorus of horrific tones echoing through the alley. Eventually I fell back asleep for an hour or so. When I woke up again, the noise was still happening.

I was a little bit more conscious than before, so I could more easily decipher the sound. It sounded like fifty hounds of hell shouting out into the night, but it was actually just two dogs below the apartment that were barking and yelling into the alley. The sound bounced off the nearby walls so many times that it sounded like fifty different dogs yelling at different tones. When I was half asleep, I thought it was someone's alarm clock going off.

On top of the hell hounds, there was also one specific bird that would make its presence known at the crack of dawn with a loud shriek at a perfect 5 second interval that actually sounded like a drill at a dentist’s office. The bird wasn’t alone though, because for some reason on this particular day of PAX there were also two people outside in their back yard that were literally screaming and yelling about something. Not angry screaming and yelling, just pure excitement. What the hell they were so excited about at 6:30 in the morning I’ll never know, but how those two had that much energy at that hour of the morning is a god damn mystery to me.