Yo! Zac and Josh here and we’re here to give a spicy recap of what went down at PixelPop Festival. PixelPop Festival is a two-day independent game conference and expo in St. Louis, Missouri, that celebrates unique games and the people who make them possible. As last year’s Festival Selection, we had the amazing opportunity to showcase again this year!
PixelPop Festival features independent tabletop, digital, and experimental games produced by local and national game creators. Two full days of diverse conference sessions from industry professionals are curated to equip attendees with creative tools and resources to make remarkable work that pushes the boundaries the game industry.
During our time at PixelPop, we showcased Sashimi Slammers, Gaze, and a compilation of all the games developed during the game jams we hosted during summer. Each project can be available online on our itch.io website. Participants were having the time of their lives which made us super stoked to attend.
Sadly we were originally supposed to showcase Foolville, an augmented reality experience, but our Hololens was still with our supervisor abroad. We were able to improvise with an amazing booth of games, jokes, books, and fun. Sometimes people were more interested in our books than actually our games! We decided to raffle them off again since we had such a positive feedback from the event.
Past showcasing our own games we got to run around and play a bunch of really cool games and meet some really awesome developers. A ton were St. Louis locally made and the others from the Midwest. Regardless there are so many cool projects happening and people are missing out on a great city of community of developers.
We felt so inspired that every hour we wanted to meet a new developer! There were so many cool booths and exhibitors this year that we almost didn’t get to meet everyone. We were surprised that there were some high school students as well! They had some magnificent projects they’ve been working on that it showed us how special this community was.
On top of trying out games and meeting the St. Louis Game Development Scene, we also attended a few intriguing panels. Some ranged from Experimental Aesthetics to Accessibility in Game Design and all the way to creating an Indie Horror Game. Each hour was full of countless wisdom that any game developer or creator can reference in the future. We really took away some helpful tips for upcoming projects on our side.
Overall! St. Louis has such a cool culture of what a community is for game developers. It blew our minds away on how many cool opportunities these creators has to offer. They’re even doing an Arcade Jam for their Science Museum, super cool! Overall we had a blast during our time in St. Louis because of the warm welcome everyone gave us. We hope to be back soon!
Junior Development Experience (JDE) 