The image above is a group shot of those of us who spent time and energy setting up the booth to sell our aggregate of products under the IGDN (Independent Game Developer’s Network) banner at Origins.

  
I’m pleased as anything to be part of something like this because it supports us all and shares the workload around. This is great because it gives me the opportunity to spend more time making games, and also have a booth presence at conventions like Origins. So, thank you all who are contributing to things like this. It’s a lot of work to be an independent game developer and this makes all our lives easier.

I’ll board my plane to Columbus in about 5 minutes. This will be my first trip to Origins Game Fair and I’m really excited for a variety of reasons — the first is that it’s the public release of Backstory Cards, since the very successful Kickstarter campaign. The second is that it will be my big convention for the year, since I opted out of Gen Con for logistical overhead reasons. Plus, all reports I hear is that it’s a much more relaxed convention and promises more time to visit with friends and play games.

If you’ll be there, I’ll be spending a lot of time at the IGDN booth. Stop by and say hi!

And now the plane is packing up, so I’ll sign off here. Next stop, Columbus.

Dreamation was huge this year. Seriously. They sold out the hotel. As big as Dexcon. Big enough to viscerally feel the difference. It’s not your little tiny close-knot convention any more, and I feel good about this although it was hard to experience that on the fly. It certainly didn’t help that many of my closest friends who I really look forward to seeing in particular weren’t able to be there.

The larp tracks have exploded. They’re enormous now. The tabletop RPGs were filling up shortly after the schedules were released. The presence of Nordic-style larps have been growing at an astounding rate and show no signs of slowing down. Hell, even the organized play folks were out in force unlike any in the years since I’ve been going. And the Krista-Con events are THE games-not-to-be-scheduled-against.

It’s a surfeit of riches. New games and game designers are putting out wonderful new ideas and the convention is drawing people from further and further away each new iteration.

And it’s hard as an attendee to be in the midst of this change from the smallish weird indie con to a full force of nature.

I played John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings, a one-page scifi game that takes its name from the Doubleclicks song. I ran an OmegaZone heist. I played a Nordic larp called Before and After Silence, Nathan D. Paoletta’s new release World Wide Wrestling, Mark Richardson’s new cyberpunk game Headspace, and Puppetland. Four new-to-me games!

I got to spend time with friends from Up and down the northeast corridor, Minnesota, several different parts of Canada, New Mexico, California, Texas; it’s almost absurd the distance people are traveling to what I have in my head as this little local con. Everything changes…

This last weekend I hit up IndieCade East, an “international festival of independent games.” Held at Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, there’s an unspoken focus on video games — partially because of videogames’ better organization and industry cashflow, and partially because NYC is a booming center of videogame development, particularly mobile games. Organizations like Playcrafting NYC and the NYU Gamecenter also bolster this local community.

As a tabletop creator, first and foremost, I went in a little tentatively, despite having a significant number of friends within the videogame community (I consider myself tangent, rather than part of the community). This turned out to be almost entirely unnecessary. I went to interesting panels on teaching game design and coding to kids, on creating diversity in games, on cool free tools to make random digital things, and on breaking into voice acting. I played single and multi-player video games, board games, and some games that were at least as much technology experiments (One used an oculus rift with a leap motion controller glued to the outside).

Some of the tools for making things that really interested me (all discovered via Robert Yang’s clickbait titled talk, “We are Drugs”:

• Alchemy
• Doodal
• SculptGL
• Bosca Ceoil
• Fract OSC
• Imitone

Some of the exhibited games that really caught my attention:

• Pry (iOS)
• Consentacle (Tabletop)
• Intergalactic Rescue Squad (Tabletop), pictured above
• Beta, the game

Despite an overwhelming leaning towards video games, the presence of NYU Game Center and their tabletop experiments being showcased and played there suggests to me that there’s a lot of space to help promote tabletop and live action games, and that we should endeavor to make games that push boundaries and show them off in these professional/academic settings and not limit ourselves to small-press publishing to sell at local conventions or on the internet. There’s a big games world out there that’s always itching for more.