Good Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen of fine taste and attitude. We are Pillow Castle, and we are freaking out because we have to board a plane in 8 hours.
No. Wait. It’s good. We’re good.
She packed my bags last night, pre-flight
Zero hour, nine a.m.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight
And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time
‘til touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no, no, no, I’m a rocket man
Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone…
I don’t know why I’m quoting Elton John on a Pillow Castle newsletter. Most of our team wasn’t born when that song was a hit. I’m not going to look that up to verify it, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Anyway, we’re ready. Bags are packed. We’ve got T-shirts, 200 business cards, 200 stickers, a banging poster, a bunch of wires and laptops and cameras and fears, and a lot of hope.
We also created this little teaser trailer just posted to youtube. It’s got some attitude. Cause we’re fun and stuff!
Lets go, GDC.
This last week was good for the team. We ironed out the last few issues we had with the show floor demo, practiced some presentations we would have to give, and tried to make sure we didn’t forget our deodorant. The team feels good about talking to random strangers for days on end, and we hope that there’s some cool new other games to check out when we have time. We’ll be meeting up with our external advisor Kyle Gray at some point, as well as our fellow ETCers out on the West Coast. Rumor has it there is some serious partying that goes on after hours. I have a feeling we’ll be too tired for any of that (but I could be wrong?)
None of us have ever been to anything like GDC. There’s a lot of excitement in our camp about getting to show the game to so many people. We’ve but an incredible amount of time into playtesting and iterating on our floor demo that we’re sick of the damn thing, but at least we know it’s rock solid and we won’t be bug fixing on the floor.
As students, it’s been an interesting ride trying to prepare for this as well as remain up-to-date in our classes and fulfilling all of our requirements the ETC has for our project. We’ve expressed before the sometimes polar opposite pull that occurs here, and although there is a strategy for dealing with it (make stuff that works for both) we realize our concerns right now aren’t related to education, necessarily, and that it’s up to us to turn these events into teachable moments.
First step: get everyone to the airport on time tomorrow. 7am Take-off. This could be one of the larger challenges facing us on the next 8 days. Wish us luck.
