Curse of the Cards at Game Access 2022

This weekend, I am at Game Access 2022 in Brno, Czech Republic to showcase my game Curse of the Cards at the Indie Showcase. It has been a while since I last showed one of my games at a conference, so I was quite excited for this one.

The game is still quite work in progress, but I managed to put together a build that runs well enough on the iPad. I thought it would be nice to write a small post about the experience.

I stayed at Quality Hotel Brno Exhibition Centre. The hotel was quite close to the venue, which was very convenient. The room was nice and sunny, and the view outside was quite pretty.

Of course, I did not really use the room to rest properly. The night before the conference was spent fixing a few bugs and preparing the build. It always happens this way somehow. No matter how much time I have, the final few hours before an event are always spent in panic mode.

Thankfully, the build worked fine in the end.

The event was at Brno Exhibition Center. The place looked huge from outside. I reached there in the morning with my laptop, iPad and a backpack full of random cables and other things that one thinks might be useful.

Inside, the venue looked pretty good. There were lots of booths, talks, games, and people moving around. It felt nice to be at a game conference again after a long time.

Curse of the Cards was also listed on the Game Access website along with the other indie games. It is a small thing, but it still felt nice to see the game there.

My booth was near an escalator. I had a table, two chairs, a small sign and the iPad with the game running on it. Nothing fancy, but enough for showing a small card game.

It was useful to watch people play the game. When you work on something for a long time, everything feels obvious because you know how it works. But when someone else plays it, they get stuck at places you did not expect. Some people understood the game quite quickly, and some places clearly need more work.

From my booth, I could see the indie showcase area. There were a lot of interesting games around. I could not check out everything properly because I had to stay at my table most of the time, but I did walk around a little when I got the chance.

There was also a retro games area at the conference. It was quite fun to see the old computers and games running there. I wish I had spent more time there.

The food was not so great though. I had this for lunch and it looked more exciting in my head than it did on the plate.

But food aside, it was a good day. I met some nice people, saw some cool games, and got some useful feedback on Curse of the Cards.

Showcasing Curse of the Cards at Game Access was a small milestone for the game. It made the game feel a bit more real, and also made it clear what parts need more work.

I came back with some notes, some tiredness, and some motivation to continue working on it.

Until next time...

~fleon