The plan this week was to conclude our series about how we decided to make a game about fighting boxes. The origins of the BoxFighter aesthetic are an interesting story, which we are excited to share. However, after debriefing from sharing our game at NorthWest Majors 8 last week, and discussing a calendar of upcoming events as a team, we’re dedicating this week’s post to talk about just how suddenly life can change when you’re chasing your dreams.
Playing Fighting games is an endless practice. Every player approaches the game with a different perspective, and every new challenger can teach something new even to the most seasoned veteran. We attend tournaments to expose ourselves new perspectives in an environment that demands we give our best. Each tournament only has one victor, everyone who gains knowledge and deeper connections to the community is a winner.
One year ago, we took BoxFighter to NorthWest Majors 7 with the vague realization that public exposure was important. It was our first exhibition outside of local meetups, and we had NO idea what we were doing regarding how to engage with social media or run an effective demo.
Throughout the 2015 tournament, about eight people played the game, and we picked up two twitter followers (shoutouts to http://www.keeponrock.in/ for seeing our potential and being our FIRST adopter). Despite the low turnout, we felt pretty good about the whole thing. We came, we did our best, and we learned a lot about how we needed to improve.
And improve we did.
NorthWest Majors 8 was a major milestone for us. In the past year we’ve made several major overhauls to the game’s visual effects, further refined our systems to promote intuitive, balanced gameplay, and with the recent addition of Marketing Director Heather Fulton our team, we have an excellent online presence. The past year of intensive training definitely paid off.
For those interested in statistics, Heather joined our team when we demo’d our game at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s event “Game Masters.” Previously mute on social media, we had no website and 8 twitter followers when we walked into that event mid-february. By the end of the night, we had 80.
By the time BoxFighter returned to NWM 8, we had nearly 600 followers with over 34,000 engagements/month on twitter, a website with character bios and tournament footage on Twitch and youtube. It’s amazing what happens when you hit the perfect combo of “Right person, right place, right time.” Thanks Heather!
Timepiece game’s presentation was on-point. The game’s heightened visuals backed up by Heather and Alex’s excellent engagement with the tournament attendees garnered excellent attention for BoxFighter all weekend. There was a constant stream of players, which included several prominent personalities in the Fighting Game community. Not only did the community play our game, they *liked* it.
Here is some of the feedback we received:
“… solid game, I look forward to seeing what you do with it.”
– @gcyoshi13
“[BoxFighter] is the future of Fighting Games!”
-Team Koga Cola
“Excellent presentation, we’re interested in collaborating with you at future events.”
– @khaos_gaming
-@Raptor_IIRC
A huge part of our training regimen over the past year has been to demo BoxFighter wherever possible and respond to community feedback. We started with events hosted by PIGSquad, and our local fighting game meetups. The momentum of these beginnings propelled us to pursue larger events like OMSI: After Dark, and Portland Design Week. We even received an art grant to present our game at SOAK, a four-day outdoor arts festival organized by the Oregon Burning Man community.
We were thrilled by the warm welcome we received at NWM 8, and with SUCH a huge difference between our reception over our 2015 debut, we realized that it is time for us to take the next step in the development process and take the plunge into true indie game development.
Throughout the entire history of developing BoxFighter, we encountered a single intractable issue: people want to play our game at home, and can’t.
For those unfamiliar with our lead developer Alex (@DigitalWatches) is a bit of a mad genius. A staunch supporter of open-source computing, Alex wrote the whole game to run in Unix, and built the engine himself before even starting development of BoxFighter. This gives us the benefit of absolute control and flexibility in our design in a game that unfortunately only runs on Linux platforms. This hindrance has complicated BoxFighter’s continued development, as we are unable to share our game beyond the face-to-face interaction of events.
However, we have prepared a solution to the growing request for BoxFighter distribution: we will port the game to Google’s “Native Client” API, which will allow BoxFighter to run within the Chrome Browser. To this end, we are launching an Indiegogo campaign to execute this crucial stage of BoxFighter’s development.
Surprised by the sudden coalescence of planning and community support, it’s been a bit of a scramble to formalize all of our plans so quickly. Kicking this campaign into gear has been a thrilling exercise, and we are taking great care to avoid the trap of over-promising on rewards. We always knew that we would need to take this step eventually, and have been quietly preparing for some time: writing a budget, reaching out to talented makers for funding rewards, and coordinating with local events to present our game.
As thanks for supporting our efforts, contributors to our campaign will receive both physical rewards and exclusive in-game content, which will be shared across a closed beta to which our funders will have access. We will be showing off our prototypes as they come in, and our event calendar is already booked throughout the course of our campaign, and even still we’re looking out for more.
Here’s a peek at what we have lined up:
Rewards:
- BoxFighter Stickers and T-shirts
- Patches by Oakthorn studios (http://www.oakthornstudios.com)
- Acrylic Jewelry by GeekStar Costuming (@geekstar1337)
- Mugs by Corvid Designworks (https://www.etsy.com/shop/CorvidDesignwerks)
- “Fightboxes” – BoxFighter arcade cabinets.
- Exclusive and custom BoxFighter content
Events Calendar:
- 5.15: Campaign launches
- 5.17: BoxFighter at Woosday
- 5.19-5.20: Power of Play Expo (Seattle)
- 5.26: Indie Game night at Ground Kontrol
- 5.26-5.30: SOAK
- 5.31: BoxFighter at Woosday
- 6.14: BoxFighter at Woosday
- 6.18: IndieGogo invitational tournament
- 6.26: Indie Game night at Ground Kontrol
- 6.27: Campaign ends
We have huge plans for this game, including several characters, dramatic improvements to the game’s visuals, customization options, procedureally generated audio, and a host of other projects that we’re keeping under our hat for now. (Hint: we’re in talks with local arcades about installing cabinets, but it doesn’t stop there.) Right now, we need your help to get moving.
We are thrilled for this opportunity to share our game with the world, and to join the ranks of game developers whose enterprises are built on the support of their communities. Stay tuned here or follow our twitter @timepiecegames for updates on our progress, and look out for our Indiegogo campaign to launch on May 15th.
Next week we will return to our regularly scheduled programming to discuss how the BoxFighter aesthetic evolved and cover some of the details of our campaign.
Thank you so much for your continued interest in BoxFighter. Are you excited yet? We are.
Timepiece Games 