Dev Diary_OLD - Page 5 of 7

Happyland in Athens Games Festival 2017

November 20, 2017

First Games Festival in Athens 😀

The 1st international game dev conference in Greece, Athens Games Festival 2017 opened its gates on 28th October 2017 to welcome in Athens the gaming industry for the 1st time. A 2 days festival with opportunities, advice, ideas, brainstorming, tips, feedback. In a summary what a team needs to learn to become a successful company.

Who was there? What kind of games?

In Athens Games Festival participated indie game developers, students Greek and Cypriots game developers, musicians, indies, sound designers, artists, programmers, coders, game designers, lore writers, indie game dev teams and people who are dealing with games in Greece. The visitors were Publishers, Stores Evangelists, Experts, Google, Unity, iOS, Investors and Nordic Game Discovery Contest from Sweden

Happyland in Athens Games Festival

Our team was exhibiting and we patricipated in two competitions, the N.G.D.C. ’17 contest and H.A.M.A.C ’17. A new experience for us since we had to pitche for the first time ever for our game Go Heroes: Prometheus. We managed to win both Nordic Discovery Games Contest and H.A.M.A.C! We also had a small contribution in the festival having developed a mini promo game named Heroes Of Athens. You are welcomed to download and enjoy the 5 minutes gameplay 🙂 It was also a surprise for us when we saw the characters of the game on our badges 😀

What's next?

We will continue our journey with the Nordics in Sweden on May 2018 and in MWC Barcelona 2018 with H.A.M.A.C. We also need to note that Sons Of Icarus managed to get the 2nd place in H.A.M.A.C. It was overwhelming having succeeded in all of our goals and we couldn’t have done it without the valuable assistance and work of our friend and partner Alex Koxaras of Origins of Audio. “The Fall and Rise of Resonance” was Alex’s theme which was selected and presented in #AthensGamesFest. Congratulations Alex!

Lesson learned, Vol.3:
Live the moment, even if you are worried to do the best for your team. Unfortunately the amount of stress I experienced affected those days and I am not saying I didn’t enjoy #AGF17 but the stress was exhausting.

We “borrowed” photos from: Io Kalogiannakou, Includints, Ιek Omiros

Vasiliki Tsiftsian
vasiliki@happyland-ent.com

Prometheus Game Jam ’17

July 10, 2017

Prometheus and the Flames of Life

On July 7-8-9 we participated in the Prometheus Game Jam which was a competition-jam organized by the N.T.U.A. for its 180 anniversary and was held at Lavrion Technological Cultural Park. We Teamed up with Alex Koxaras of Origins of Audio & Theo O’ Neill Linakis who helped us with the sound. We developed a voxel art, puzzle adventure game, PROMETHEUS & the Flames of Life which was honored with the 1st Prize & a distinction for synthesis of elements.

Where the park is today used to be the mines of Lavrion and were reconstructed only recently, to be used for science, art and cultural events. People there, took really good care of us, making our stay comfortable. We stayed and worked inside the old buildings alongside 20 incredible teams on “Prometheus”. Our idea was based on the most famous Titan’s myth; the steal of fire from the Gods.

Marinos still working on the particles...

Thank you guys for taking such a good care of us!

Vasiliki is reeeally happy :) — Vasiliki is reeeally happy 🙂

Happy... Happylanders ;) — Happy... Happylanders 😉

Lesson Learned vol.1:
Sometimes the obvious path is the correct pat. In the beginning we struggled to find an “impressive” approach of the theme but that was misleading us. Another lesson was that the third day of the Jam is always crazy, so please everyone remember to be nice to each other 🙂 We also experienced how it feels when people like your game (and it rocks!!!)

(Also thanks to everyone for the beautiful photos!)
Vasiliki Tsiftsian
hp.land.ent@gmail.com