This was a very nice year for Fiery Squirrel, Cosmos Defenders was presented in three great events in Japan: Tokyo Sandbox, Bitsummit and Tokyo Game Show. Thanks to the participation in these events, the game has been improving and transforming from what was the core idea when development begun to what we have at the moment.
We had the opportunity to put the game in front of an amazing audience that provided us with feedback and comments; the game was covered by Nintendo related media, websites, Youtube, Twitch and we were able to meet great people from the industry, including fellow developers, publishers and people from the press.
Tokyo Sandbox
This year, Tokyo Sandbox was held during the Cherry Blossom season in Asakusa, a place with a great traditional Japanese feeling in Tokyo. This event is for indie game developers, it accepts studios or individuals from all over the world.
We were lucky enough to be accepted for exhibiting at the Tokyo Sandbox this year and also to be selected as one of the featured games during their Mixer Party, which was a great opportunity to show Cosmos Defenders and give a first taste of it to players and media in Japan.
In addition, Twitch organized some interviews with developers during the show and we were invited to talk a little bit about Cosmos Defenders there.
It definetely was a great first step to get players to try the game, gather some feedback and comments from them and also give it some exposure to the Japanese press.
Bitsummit
During spring time, there is a big event called Bitsummit that welcomes indie games from Japan and all over the world, it’s a well known event, not only in Japan but also overseas. The event is held in Kyoto, a city that involves a lot of historical places and evokes a traditional feeling.
Cosmos Defenders was selected to present at the event this year too and it was a great opportunity to meet people from different areas of the industry, including indies, AAA companies, media, etc. A lot of players came by our booth and tried the game, which was really helpful to test new features that we included after Tokyo Sandbox, some improvements and to receive feedback that keeps helping us to develop a better game.
The game was also played and commented in real time by the amazing twitchers: Japanglish and Mai Mai that enjoyed almost the whole demo we had for the event that day.
Tokyo Game Show
Finally, Tokyo Game Show was the last event in which we showed Cosmos Defenders this year. This event is held in a convention center called Makuhari Messe (Chiba, Tokyo), during September. This is probably the most popular event among the three I mention in this post; it gathers people from the AAA industry, involving important announcements such as well known game series releases, new consoles or improvements, etc.
It was a great surpsise to know that Cosmos was going to be presented at the show. We prepared a lot of things for the event, including some new promotional images and a new poster that was used in the upper part of the booth.
We were also very lucky to have a spot in the corner of all booths that presented in our area, which gave us the chance to use the same banner that we created for the other two events.
The Tokyo Game Show lasts three days, which makes it quite a challenge because the amount of people increases and also the amount of tasks that we have to handle. However, this has more pros than cons, a lot of people could try the game, the presence of media at the event is huge and business opportunities that helped us increase exposure at that time.
With more people playing, the amount of feedback, reactions, comments also increased, Something really helpful for improving, changing and considering things that we didn’t think about before in the first design.
For the three events, we made some stuff to give away during the shows, T-shirts, some badges and my personal favorite, puzzels. We will probably give them away next year too, if you are reading this post and would like to own any of these,please send us an email.
As you know, Cosmos Defenders is still in development and there is no release date yet, however, the game will be out for Nintendo Switch next year for sure. In our plans for 2019, there are a couple of prototypes we would like to polish and test to evaluate if there is a chance to have full, commercial versions of them. As soon as I have more details about them, I’ll share them here.
Before I close this post, I would like to thank all the amazing people that supported Fiery Squirrel, people who attended the shows and played Cosmos Defenders, organizers, our collaborators, who made the events and game possible and all of you, people reading this post. This year has been great and we hope that 2019 is even better, with interesting challenges to overcome, surprises and hopefully… success.
Enjoy your holidays and have a wonderful 2019, see you next year!