Convention Time! news - Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox

We were very excited a while back to be invited to fly to Sydney Australia and present our game to a huge audience at the GAME On Festival! Naturally, we said yes, packed our bags and flew down!

They weren't really expecting us to make the trip, but hell, we were to excited to have our little indie title invited along to a proper gig like this! When we turned up, we were ushered through the buildings by security while all the attendees waited outside looking very jealous that we were getting in before them and we were shown to our booth. We were lucky enough to have been allocated a booth right at the bottom of the entrance stairwell to the huge room where the indie dev teams were setting up. They must have liked the look of our game!

I (Alex) was there pretty early with Rachel (our lead artist) so we had about an hour to set up. Our booth was outfitted with posters of game art, concept work and screenshots, a large pullup banner (which you might remember us getting printed up a while back) and a giant LCD screen for us to show off our work on. I was ready with my Alienware m17x so that I could crank the game up to its maximum graphics settings and really show people how pretty our game could be!

By that stage the rest of the team had made it there, and I finally got to meet two of our team members in the flesh! Catching up with David "Aussieroth" Doyle in person was quite an experience. You may recognize him as the voice of the celtic warrior hero pack and also the lizardman, but hearing his voice in person was quite awe inspiring! I gave him his branded t-shirt and we awaited the thronging masses!

Then the doors opened and the waves came down! Right away I could tell it was going to be a busy day! It was amazing. Everyone wanted to learn more about Malevolence! We must have played the trailer about 30 times and while no-one was playing the game real-time on the big screen, we had gameplay footage rolling (which was more often than not since I was regularly being asked questions).

While we were playing and talking, we had Rachel and Angus (two of our artists) having a bit of a free-drawing session of some concept work live on the stand while people watched, and it was incredible watching people's amazement and awe as the drawings came to life! Rachel in particular was churning out masterpieces like these:

So everyone was amazed. We also got to meet some other indie game devs who were very friendly and supportive of our project. We wanted to go and check out their games too, but we were just swamped with people! I had to man the stand constantly and let the others take turns going off to eat/drink/etc because as one group of fans left another would arrive! It was great to see. We gave out lots of flyers and promotional magnets for people, which was awesome to see, and hopefully we'll get a few more people tracking the project out of it!

So all around it was an incredible experience. We had been dreading our first convention after reading stories from our idols doing it in the past, but the guys at GAME On and all the people who came to say hi made it a simply wonderful experience for us! We hope that there are many more like it! And soon!

From left to right: David "Aussieroth" Doyle (voice actor), Nyssa "Sarzee" Norton (Lead writor and supplemental artist), Alex "CumQuaT" Norton (Creative Director, Lead Developer and 3D Art Lead), Angus Olsen (Matte Painter and Concept Artist) and Rachel Birchnoff (Lead Content Artist and Designer)