MAGWest is a 24-hour music and gaming festival run by the non-profit MAGFest, Inc. which features a gaming hall, planned concerts, and community-run panels. This year, it took place from 2025-08-08 to 2025-08-10 and it was the first MAGFest event that I’ve attended.
Now that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was pretty cheap and easy for me to attend. The only problem I had to solve was arranging transportation. Thankfully, I was able to catch a free ride with another indie game developer that was exhibiting there. The local game developer community here is pretty nice.
Normally, I would be telling people that the game was going to come out soon. But, since the game had come out a few weeks before the event, I could just tell them that the game was out right now. This felt a little strange. A little bit like – well, that’s it. I’m finally done. And I kept telling people that for three days straight.
This time, I let players play as much of the full game as they wanted to instead of limiting them to just the demo, allowing players to stop whenever they wanted to. I expected this to mean that I would have less players than previous events, but I actually ended up with more players instead. During the event, I logged a total of 51 plays across all three days:
day
plays
2025-08-08
15
2025-08-09
22
2025-08-10
14
This actually ends up being more than any other in-person event I’ve been to (per day averages are rounded down):
event
plays
per day
STAPLE! Austin
19
9
Delta H Con
3
3
2D Con
39
13
San Japan
44
14
Steam Next Fest
434
62
Fantastic Arcade
33
33
Toronto Game Expo
17
17
ATX Game Makers Showcase
26
13
GodotCon Boston
43
21
MAGWest
51
17
However, it’s still less than the per-day averages of GodotCon Boston and Fantastic Arcade. I think MAGWest was still really great though; clearly, the audience is interested in checking out indie games and there was a lot of attention from potential players.
I enjoyed watching people play the game together. A moment I remember is a kid backseating an older player (who was going along with it) telling them what to do in order to solve the mystery of where the coffee stains may have come from. So cute!
One player even got to the activity room in one hour, which was the fastest that I had ever seen for a casual first-time playthrough. Another player returned the next day to continue playing.
The indie game showcase was in the same room as the 24-hour arcade (I’m looking at you, Delta H Con). This meant that there were always attendees coming in and out of the room, which was great! …but it was also quite noisy, which left me really stressed out after three long consecutive days on the floor. Thankfully, event staff had volunteers helping us out and local devs helped each other out – one of them even organized and delivered lunch orders on one of the days. Overall, I felt supported at the event.
Since then, no signal got to 50 reviews on 2025-09-08, 45 days after the game was released. Since the game only has one negative review, Steam now classifies the game as having a “Very Positive” reception instead of just “Positive”. I only need 50 more to qualify to apply for the Godot front page! I would be very happy to be able to do this.
The bug reports have also largely simmered down and now I’m left with mostly cryptic bugs that I don’t know how to resolve like black screens after starting a new game. I think it might be related to AMD graphics card driver issues, so if you are running AMD and have any information about that I would love to know – even if it’s just that you can’t replicate the bug. Contact me with your CPU, GPU, and Graphics driver version to help me narrow down the scope of the issue.
The setup I had for the convention was pretty spartan; most of my stuff is still packed up in storage since my decision to move to California. I still live in a temporary housing situation and I miss having all of my stuff and I miss my cat. I have also been looking for a job, but as you may expect it’s quite hard for anyone to find work right now. As you can probably tell – MAGWest was a month ago! – I’ve been really stressed.
I’ve been struggling a lot with depression, in part due to these stressors, but for now I’ll continue looking for a job, trying to feel better, and finding the energy to work on the next game.