As indie devs, not only do you simply make games in front of a computer, but you must also be out in the field promoting the game! Here is more a diary of all our adventures!
They say you’re only old when stop jamming!
Our 5th year Jamming together, this year under the theme “HOME”!
Took a whole 24 hours – to come up with an idea – and then only had 24 hours to make HUNGRY TOWNS,
A simple recreation of SNAKE with a modern twist!
Our 4th year Jamming together, this year under the theme “Transmit”!
We created a couch VS game called Transmogrify! Unfortunately our composer Pierre was away on a world trip, but his spirit was with us nevertheless!
in 48 hours, we essentially created a mini RTS game!
Injoylabs helped Day Dream – a team of students from AIT, publish their mobile game StarMatcher!
This was an exciting moment as we got to experience what it would be like to help publish games for others, by leveraging our Apple / Android license, plus our technical support and mentorship.
Really privileged to have well known artist Lärienne do some concept art for Hungry Pets.
We were totally melted away by her art style – and approached her for some commissions. Fortunately she said yes! And now we have 7 amazingly beautiful artworks of Aphelia’s Adventures
Only a few weeks after PAX, we previously booked a table already for International Games Day at Hurstville City Library!
Whilst not really in the mood for more expos, since we’re quite exhausted from PAX, but lets end the year strong with one last rodeo!
Fortunately this is a smaller expo, so its not as frantic, and a nice way to end it for the year.
Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is perhaps the biggest gaming expo in Australia! Whilst we “checked it out” last year as a spectator, we took the plunge and decided to exhibit this year!
It was a big decision, considering it was going to cost alot, from Expo booth tickets (more than $1000!) to flights and accomodation, and just bringing down all the expo material!
But rather than having paralysis by analysis, “just do it” and figure it out later was what led us to go ahead with it!
With Cell Surgeon released, expo season was in full gear, and we wanted to be exhibiting at every gaming expo possible, to market the game!
Whist SMASH isn’t really a gaming expo, but an COMIC / ANIME expo, fortunately our game had Anime like characters, that makes us a decent fit to the expo! It was also the first time SMASH was allowing indie games to be showcased.
Since it was an ANIME expo, merchandise was a big thing, and we prepared a whole range of merchandise to show for this expo, which was going to revolutionalise the way we do future trade shows.
We got accepted into the Casual Connect conference, and received sponsorship with a free both and accommodation! The only thing we need to do is decide to fly down all the way to Singapore!
Since we haven’t been to Singapore before, and having not really had much of a “holiday” from developing Cell Surgeon for 3-4 years, this was a perfect excuse to go!
We spent a whole week in Singapore, exhibiting at Casual Connect for 4 days. The best thing was seeing the quality of games on the international stage, and it was high!
Its a mobile developers dream to be featured by the Apple App store, and we were very lucky to get a feature for Cell Surgeon!
Which is awesome, because we’ve worked on the game for so long, getting recognition on all that hard work and paying off was really appreciated!
AppStore Features is truly as amazing as everyone says.
One Apple feature boosted our downloads 10x more than what we had through manual email marketing for the past 2 months.
GX expo is apparently a big thing in the U.S, and they are coming down to setup one in Sydney!
Funded through a Kickstarter campaign, we decided to back it, scoring extra cheap booth prices along with it, and decided to start promoting Cell Surgeon since it was the verge of release!
Jamming again this year, with what would be the ultimate 5 person game dev team formation: 2 Programmers, 2 artists and a composer!
A solid and experienced jamming team, along with experience in choosing the best working environment, this years 48 hour game jam was the most “smoothest” yet.
We finished our game on time, everything just went extremely well, and we created a really cool multiplayer vs game called ZUKACHENI!
Decided to get some playtesting done for Cell Surgeon in a bar!
Beer and Pixel is a monthly event where game developers get together to showcase work in progress, and just socialise in general.
It was good to see how people felt about Cell Surgeon, whether it was fun or not, and received alot of feedback on where the game needed to improve
We won an award for this years Game Jam!
Even though its not a competition, It is every jammers dream to hopefully win an award at the end of a game jam, and being the 3rd time jamming, we’ve finally won the elusive Game Jammie!
Our GGJ game Timeburn – a platformer with rewind time mechanics, won the award for best use of theme, which was “What do we do now”.
And the cool thing is, its actually a real edible jam!
So we got invited to be special guests on a special episode on Spawn Point, from the ABC channel, to talk about what its like to be a game developer!
Got to finally meet with the iconic Bajo and Hex for Good Games, along with fellow game devs Rebecca Fernandez and Justine Colla, and got a taste of what its like to be on a LIVE TV show!
Really privileged that Elly Awesome, a popular youtuber that reviewed mobile apps, decided to do a video for our game DRAW A BOX!
Its such a cool feeling to see someone talking about your game, and it also really spiked the downloads of Draw A Box as well!
After a huge regret of missing out on Game Jam 2013 due to “time better spent working on Cell Surgeon”, went back this year, to put some new skills to the test – Unity programming!
Previously we jammed in 2012 using an engine called Virtools, using a visual scripting language, but 2 years later, we’ve learnt a new game engine Unity, and was to see how proficient we were at using the new engine, in which we made a cool game called STRANDED.
The first EB EXPO started in 2013, and they offered a huge space for indies to show their games!
Taking the plunge, we exhibited at a big expo for the first time, showing Cell Surgeon, which have been in development for a year.
In hindsight, the game was only about 20% done, in which we claimed it was around 50-60% done at the time.
But was a really great experience, that put Injoylabs on the map amongst all the other cool game developers!
Got asked by a journalist to talk about what its like to make games, in which he was going to publish the article onto XBOX Mag!
Its crazy how you grow up reading gaming magazines, and one day end up being in one!
After many months in development, we took the plunge to expose Cell Surgeon to the world at IFEST – the indie game festival!
Everything is always scary for the first time, and it definitely scary for us to put ourselves out there for the first time! Fortunately its a very small expo, amongst fellow friendly game developers, so it was a very nice way to ease us into what would be the first of many game expos to come!