We recently had a chance to show off our latest demo in Germany on August 20-24 in Germany. Team Liquid had a large booth with multiple gaming stations set up for people to try our game (and a few others) for the first time.
Our CEO Adam was there to answer questions and bring the crowd up to speed on our history, the team, and our vision for Warped Universe. The traffic was constant from morning to night, with conference attendees waiting patiently for their turn to go through the portal. Adam gave a big update to the community in the Warped Games Discord.
“This was our first real play test of the game loop outside our team testing, and we were nervously excited to see how it would go.
Happy to report that the game was incredibly stable on the computers we were on and we had no issues in terms of performance there. Team Liquid and many others said they were really impressed considering its in Pre-Beta state.”
Many of the players took the opportunity to try out missions in both action and turn-based, noting that it was a unique and ambitious feature.
“People would come up and ask ‘What game is this?’ I’d say Warped Universe and then they’d ask ‘What about this one?’
‘Same game.’
‘Same game?! Whoa.‘"
Adam went on to describe more of the variety.
“Space and ground combat was also a fun thing to see side by side. When given a choice, people really leaned into certain modes and loved having that option.”
At some points play session time was limited due to the line, but when their turn was over the most interested players simply got back in line to play again, even returning for more on day 2!
Our team had a blast watching people try different strategies. Showing off a demo is also a perfect time to let the conference attendees be game testers.
“I met and sat with one streamer who I connected with on the gamescom app for half an hour talking and playing the game and he was really liking Sparks and the Artifractal Core upgrade systems. After first saying he’s not into that stuff, he got addicted to it. He wants to test when we do closed beta. Really great guy.
He was laughing and having a blast and said I owe him $5 for finding a Void (enemy) stuck in the wall. (Fixed that night by our devs)” Speaking of devs, one of our code wizards was also on hand to keep things running smoothly. He prefers laboring in anonymity, but suffice it to say more than Warped Universe benefited from his skills that day.
There’s something really special about having gamers with no prior knowledge of Warped Universe sit down and immediately lock in to the world we’ve worked so hard to create. And this is just the first group of Warped Universe Pioneers, Champions of the Oracle who are willing to step through the portal and into history!
The conference was absolute mayhem and crowds were insane, but it was the best experience we could have had for our corner of the event!