IWOCon 2021

It's a great idea in theory but in practice the experience is a mess. The app/game is very poorly optimised, and even on a PC with decent specs, I had a terrible frame-rate. The audio sliders don't work, so everything was incredibly loud, and impossible to adjust. Parts of the world would appear and disappear at random, and the overall game play is just broken. Hopefully next year they plan in advance and actually make the experience worthwhile.

Disappointing is the best word to describe this. I sat through this because I love indie games, I actively go through twitter every Saturday night looking at new ones to add to my wishlist/follow on twitter/ or just watch the development of. To any normal person they would have stopped 5 mins into this and said "well this is an ugly ♥♥♥♥ show" and then uninstall but I'm willing to wade through lots of ♥♥♥♥ to find a diamond in the rough but this broke me. TLDR; Just go on to twitter and look up the hashtag #ScreenShotSaturday if you wanna find indie games instead of wrestling with this this. 1st. It runs poorly and is seemingly very optimized. I do not have a great PC I have a MID TIER PC from a couple years ago that never had any problem running an indie tittle. Their decision to use Unreal Engine 4 for this makes absolutely no sense to me, why would a game to show off indie games (you know the games that aren't about looking the best or being the prettiest but plays well and doesn't require a better than mid tier PC to play) use a new very pretty but not all that easy to run engine to create this? They seemingly chose to severely limit their audience so they can make it look pretty while forgetting people need to be able to actually play the game/see the videos you guys are supposed to be "selling" to us. 2nd. The videos for the games them selves are linked through Youtube, so if you don't have internet access but want to look at indie games you're ♥♥♥♥ out of luck, or if the video gets taken down for some reason, or if you have slow internet and need to let something buffer/load then it sucks to be you, I also had 1 video(maybe more its hard to tell sometimes) not be available in my country (USA) 2.5 There is no volume options for the videos besides mute and un-mute. Tower Unite has the ability to do this, so its 100% possible I'm guessing the Devs just didn't know how to implement this "feature" (I'm going to use that term very lightly) and instead of reaching out for help to the community or other Devs from other projects/games they just decided to throw a warning up on the screen. 3rd. It starts the game in 3rd person and it's not immediately obvious how to/if you can change it. There's a keyboard layout that pops up sometimes (like 50% of loading screens for me) that shows off the controls BUTITSABITHARDTOREADWHENEVERYTHINGISPACKEDTOGETHER (but its a bit hard to read when everything is packed together) just like what I just typed out its not easy to read and then once you figure out the tiny, tightly packed words they wrote on it you press the button and nothing happens, but no you have to HOLD it but it doesn't tell you to hold it so I played through for an 1.5 hours in 3rd person thinking why the ♥♥♥♥ would I wanna watch a video in 3rd person where my character blocks the screen and I have to watch a weird angles to negate this before I realized there was an option to change it. 4th. The open world idea is a neat approach but its not executed well enough. The open world is nice but there few landmarks that you can use to guide your self, which you have to do because the map doesn't have a marker for the player on it. You have a check list of all the booths you went to but it doesn't save in between sessions or at least it didn't for me. 5th. Achievements don't work for everyone. I don't see the point of adding them if they don't work 100% of the time, this literally is a product used to sell other products it doesn't need to try to be a game and be cute about it. The achievements that meant to be nice little things for people to get to remember are now just another bug fix on the board. To the Devs if you're reading this, I'm not trying to say you guys are ♥♥♥♥ or are lazy if that's how this comes off I am very sorry and I don't mean for it, I rewrite all of it if it needs to be done. Video games are hard to make, they're expensive, and they're time consuming and sometimes people make the wrong decisions and it costs the company or Devs a lot of money or even sometimes they're jobs or careers. I very much want you guys to try again, there is so much gold here that you guys have, you just need people to help clean it up and show it off in all it's glory. What I would do to fix/negate these issues 1st. Poor optimization/better performance. I wouldn't use Unreal 4 its a new very pretty engine but that's about all it has going for it from the players perspective (which is the priority for stuff like this) but if the engine decision was based on contracts and the such then I would just have the "game" come out later and add more sponsorships/indie Devs to the line up to help off set the time/money spent on this part of the development cycle. 2nd. The trailers/videos are linked through Youtube. This isn't a bad idea but the problem comes from there are so many variables that go into whether or not this will end up as a positive experience for the player, Youtube could go down, internet could go down, the videos could not be viewed in your country (which happened to me at least 1 time), the videos can be taken down to stuff out of the Devs or producers control. I would instead just add the videos directly to the files, yes it would mean a bigger download however, it would 100% avoid multiple issues with the current system. 3rd. The game starts in 3rd person and its not immediately obvious if you can change the perspective. Just have the game open with a black screen before character select and choose your default option and have a prompt telling the player how to change it later on. 4th. I would just scrap the open world idea, its a nice idea on paper but in actuality its much harder to pull off successfully than it looks and as well it would most likely help with performance in the long run. 5th. Achievements don't work. Just have like 5 or 6 instead and make them super easy ones like visit every booth, start the game, wear a hat, wear a parrot, etc. Some of you are probably wondering why I wrote some long ass over detailed review for something like this and well the reality is, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love video games. They fascinate me in every way, the way they're sold, the way they're marketed,made, produced,shipped, all of it and when I see a group of people come together and promote/celebrate indie titles it makes me smile. I want digital conventions to be the norm, it allows so many more people get their games out there to the public without having to take out a $10,000+ loan to afford a tiny ass booth at E3 that ends up not helping their game at all. I want video games to be come better than ever and the Devs who made this are the architects laying the base work for hopefully more people to get into video games in many different ways. PS if you made it this far and read all this thank you for taking your time to do so I hope you have a nice day and if the Devs are still reading, You guys gave it a good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ try and I wanna see what you guys can do in the future. <3

A great first shot, and a noble cause. While there are a few clunkier elements too it, the charm of the pirate theme is really something you couldn't do in a physical space near as well. Here's hoping for even bigger and better things for IWO in the future!

Conceptually not a bad idea... but it's not enough to make it worth the time. Basically there's a bunch of islands with booths you can visit, and when you get there you can either watch their trailer played on a TV at the booth, or press 1/2/3 to be re-directed to the Steam page/social media account/more information about the booth on your web browser. Few booths also have a link to a giveaway. That's pretty much the bulk of it. There's a pirate-adventure theme going where you can occasionally find hats and parrots to wear, shoot/slash at obstacles in the way, and a few other small interactions (ie. roller coaster)...but it's just kind of ehhh. The beauty of real conventions that its missing are activities you can't do anywhere else (demos and prizes), the community, and the merch booths. But here you're basically all by yourself, running around to look at shiny booths for information and trailers you can just find online... So why download it in the first place? You're likely not there for the small pirate adventure aspect. Might as well save the disc space and just get the list of featured games online and go from there: https://www.indiegamelover.com/event/IWOCon2020 (the link says 2020 but it's updated for this year's). IMO what could really make this kind of thing work is making it an online experience. Maybe merch booths that redirect you to a website that requires proof you're using IWOCon, or some way to incorporate activities exclusive to those using IWOCon.

Интересный формат презентации. Сделано на коленке и впопыхах, но с любовью.

Great marketing game for indies, made with love. There is lots to see and do. Here a short impression: https://youtu.be/HTUPEfy-a7k

For this to be the first year of the Con, I feel that the game does look very nice. Yes, there are some bugs but what game doesn't have bugs nowadays, and there are patches that do come out for the game, so it is being worked on. I enjoyed being able to go around to the different booths and it does say at the beginning of the game that the trailer volumes cannot be adjusted, so I turned the game down via Windows Sound Mixer and that does seem to help. The Con app will be available after the con ends so you will be able to still check out all of the game's features, so hopefully, this will continue to let them work out the kinks for next year. I do hope that for next year it will have an MMO aspect so you can interact with other con-goers, but again this is only the first attempt and can only get better from here.

Nice little game which enables You to take part in a game convention. Did not get much useful information or overwhelming gaming experience myself but still rate as positive - good to see such type of games / apps coming. + Look for information about different companies and games, moving around as a pirate and sailing with Your ship to different booth islands. + Total 9 islands, possible to use fast travel. - Only game booths which contains some links for browser and some trailers. No actual gameplay or similar mini game related to current booth. + Good that some are direct links to Steam app game pages. + Some progression is saved like count of collected coins. - Some progression is not saved like visited booths status or Your last island. - Achievements were not working correctly and developer removed all. This is unfortunate because then is hard to find the cause to check more than one-two islands.

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