2007 Independent Games Festival

[BasiliskWrangler]

Well, we've entered Eschalon: Book I into the 2007 Independent Games Festival! We've worked our asses off to get a beta version of the demo ready in time for the submission deadline. You can read more about the festival here.

Finalists won't be announced until December, so we've got a long time to wait to see how we did against the record number of entries. There looks like a lot of great games in the competition this year so we've got our work cut out for us!

Does this mean the demo is almost ready to be released?!?! Not necessarily. The demo is part of the main game which can be unlocked, so we can't release the demo before the rest of the game is finished. We'll have more updates on this soon.

Keep your fingers crossed for us! Even one tiny nomination in one category would be great publicity!

[dteowner]

Best of luck, obviously. The sign of concrete progress is also very encouraging in this age of indie games that never quite get done (not that I had much worry in this case, but still...). Of course, that gives you some new pressure--would be awful nice to have the game ready to sell to cash in on the publicity when you become a finalist in December, eh?

[Dragonlady]

Well my fingers are crossed whenever I'm not typing posts in these forums!

Good luck, from what I've seen so far, you deserve it.

[focus]

Does this mean the demo is almost ready to be released?!?! Not necessarily. The demo is part of the main game which can be unlocked, so we can't release the demo before the rest of the game is finished. We'll have more updates on this soon.
!

Does this mean that we will be able to play the demo, decide to buy and then continue on using the same character/savegames etc?

With many demos because they are based on earlier versions of the games you have to restart the game from the beginning again and lose any progress you have made.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Focus: Yes! That is very important to us- that you can play the demo for a couple hours and then buy the full version to continue your game. That is why it's so important for the demo to be "in sync" with the full version.

[Sanctus]

I think u'r game will definitley be on one of the 5 places (maybe eve the 1st)
Btw can we vote? (its just that I think there will be lots of ppl from this forum who will vote for Eschalon)

[BasiliskWrangler]

Thanks Sanctus. All the judging is done by industry insiders except for the Audience Award which the general public is able to vote on. However, we must have a playable public demo available by the time the voting begins to be included in this category. We're working very hard to try and make that happen...

[Sanctus]

Hehe well if we CAN vote i will use my super hacking tehnicues to be shure u'r game is on the 1st place(or mine if I get to finish it till then)

[BasiliskWrangler]

The IGF nominations were announced this past weekend. With 141 entries and only 5 awards to be given, we knew the competition was going to be really tough, especially since we were only able to submit an early beta version and we were competing against many complete games. Unfortunately we didn't receive a nomination.

However, we did receive anonymous feedback from some of the judges with most of it being very positive. Here's one example:

Finally, FINALLY, a real RPG!! This is a really well-made “classic-style” RPG; you've obviously spent a lot of time on polish and interface, and it shows. Terrific, it's great to see indie devs catering to niche markets - that's what we're best at.

Not too bad for the first real showing of Eschalon: Book I outside The Lair.

[dteowner]

You were ROBBED! Robbed, I tell you!

[BasiliskWrangler]

That's what we thought too! Ha!

Throwing the game into the IGF wasn't about competing; we just wanted to attract a little more attention our way. It seemed to work as we've had several hundred hits from the IGF site itself, so we're happy.