IsoClinous in Madrid, again

During July 14th and 15th took place iDeame, III junior game developers meeting in Madrid. During this event a lot of speeches are given by experienced developers and people from the game industry. This year the organization decided to celebrate a competition called iDeame++ which wants to bring up the attention of professionals against aspirants’ talent. All this inspired by the Independent Games Festival’s Student Showcase. We participated with IsoClinous and we were finalists so we had to go to Madrid to show it. The new took us by surprise 4 days before the event so we had to prepare all within a few days (booking the hostel, buying tickets to Madrid,…)! We also made some business cards to give!

We took the first AVE train from Barcelona at 5:45 and we reached Madrid at 9:00. We went to UCM’s Computer Science Faculty and they led us to a room where we had a table to put our laptops in order to run the game. As we brought two laptops we were able to show the demo reel with this year’s work too. iDeame’s attendees played IsoClinous and had a good time! We got a lot of feedback from them and we learnt a lot watching them playing.

There were moments with a lot of people watching our work and crowding the room. In it were also 3 more teams showing their projects: Wyverns Attack, project from the UPC master of videogames (we saw them on their presentation in barcelona so it was nice meeting them there (despite just one of them went to iDeame)); Project A.S.S. with an interesing puzzle game and The Plan from UCM master of videogames, a game Splinter Cellish shown in a very big screen (as you can see in the photo). But these weren’t all the finalists.

There was another room with the rest of them (all these are final projects from UCM master of videogames): ‘El farol pirata‘, ‘Defenders of mankind‘, ‘Picaro 8‘, ‘Metal monster‘ and ‘Fruitopia‘.

At noon we had time to lunch and try some of the playable games brought by Nintendo. But before lunch, we were able to attend a conference loosely translated as ‘Finance. Looking for money under other stones’ where different financial models were discussed and professionals gave their experience on this topic.

Afternoon was time for the jury to play iDeame++ finalists’ games. We had the opportunity to have Alex Neuse from Gaijin Games developers of Bit.Trip Saga; Tyrone Rodríguez from Nicalis that have worked in the remake version of Cave Story and La mulana for WiiWare and have also self-published NightSky; Roberto Álvarez de Lara, Over the Top Games founder that have produced Nyx Quest and recently have worked in The Fancy pants adventures for EA2D and finally Carlos Fernández Moonbite Games’ director and My fireplace creators.

The showcase lasted until first day end so we couldn’t attend any other lecture. But we don’t complain because we had the opportunity to meet so much people from the game industry that we thank iDeame for the given chance.

We went directly to our hostel because we all were exhausted. The reason to choose it will be understood once we tell its name: ORLY (low price and location were reasons too).

For dinner we ordered pizzas and got them in front of the hostel at the entrance of Telefonica’s Gran Via Shop. While we were waiting, a crowd surrounded the entrance because Telefonica was celebrating the 3rd aniversary of its opening. A violinist and a ballerina enlivened the event. We thought we would end the day without our pizzas but finally the crowd scattered and we could get them.

Next day we had free time to joy iDeame ourselves. We decided to attend all conferences. We highlight the round table leaded by Alex Neuse and Tyrone explaining their history and experience in game industry and also it was very interesting a lecture with distribution as main topic where the Cave Story‘s original creator, Daisuke Amaya ‘Pixel’, gave his reasons to publish Cave Story free of charge.

During the free time we tried out 3DS available games: the new Mario, Mario Kart, Luigi’s Mansion, Resident Evil, Cave Story 3d to mention some of them. We were able to finish The Legend of Zelda : Skyward Sword demo (there were a limited time to play it and first day we weren’t able to finish it)

The day ended with iDeame++ awards. There were two awards: on the one hand jury award and on the other audience award. Jury’s award consisted in tickets for the european GDC and the audience’s one gave the opportunity to appear in Lanzanos (crowdfunding web). We got third audience award. First awards were for ‘El farol pirata‘ and ‘The plan‘ respectively. Congratulations!