A few days after PAX East, the dust is finally settling down. Last weekend, the city of Boston was invaded by thousands of avid gamers from all around the world. It was our second year at East, and this time around, we were prepared for the ”Horde” of fanatics. Here’s a recap of our 5 days in Boston!
Problem at the Border
Boston is only a 6-hours drive from Quebec City. As we had done in the past, we decided to travel by car once again. For this edition of PAX, only two of us were attending. This allowed us enough free space to bring the entire booth equipment in the car. We had the two 48-inches TVs, our laptops, the Light Fall banners, an extra table for the press, etc. David and I left on Wednesday morning, at around 8:00 AM. The weather was nice and everything pointed to a safe travel to Boston. But sometimes… things don’t go as planned. This was one of these times.
We arrived at the border at 11:30 AM, the ride had been smooth thus far. The border agents asked us the typical questions: ”Where are you going? For what purpose?”. Then, they saw the two TVs on the back seat. They thought we were bringing them to resell them across the border and asked if we had our paperwork in order for these commercial goods. They called it a TBI. We had no clue what a TBI was, and as you can guess, that clearly didn’t help our case. The agents asked us to go inside to talk with their superior. After several minutes of us explaining why we had brand-new TVs, it became obvious they wouldn’t let us cross the border without this TBI-thing.
They gave us phone numbers of US customs brokers. The only one who could set up a TBI quickly required a 900$ entry-fee. Yes, you read that right. 900$ to bring two TVs that were probably worth less than that. We obviously declined. But then, what were our other options? We could either leave the TVs in the snow or go back to Canada. Luckily for us, David had the idea to check for the closest storage unit. We found one within 30-minutes of the border. We went back to the agents, told them we were going back home and went back to Canada. We dropped our TVs there for the week and drove back to the border… We would rent the TVs at the convention, we had no other choice.
In hindsight, we can’t be mad at the border agents. They were simply doing their jobs. However, we had wasted 3 hours on this whole thing and, worst of all, it made our arrival in Boston right into traffic hours. The 6-hours drive became a painful 11-hours one… Quite the way to start our PAX East adventure!
New Build… New Bugs
After a long and tiresome day, a good night of sleep was much welcomed. On Thursday, it was time to set up our booth and test everything before PAX debuted. This time around, we had a demo version with our brand-new sounds and in-game physic system for the character. We were excited about the new changes, but also worried about potential bugs that might have escaped our internal testing. I won’t lie… we did have a few bugs in there. I counted 29 different ones, to be exact.
Nevertheless, nothing game-breaking happened throughout the weekend and the game ran smoothly in general. Better to find these bugs now than two weeks prior to release! Now that we’re back at the studio, we can easily fix them.
Despite some issues here and there, PAX East 2017 was a blast. We had a lot of fun meeting everyone and the comments on Light Fall were very positive! We can’t wait to go back for another edition of PAX East and we want to thank everyone who showed up at our booth during the event.
Update on Light Fall
With all that said, we know it’s been roughly two months since our last update on the game. Rest assured that everything is going according to plan. It’s just that we were working on so many things at once that we had nothing truly groundbreaking to show in these two months. We have an update coming up next week where we will showcase the new audio of Light Fall, as well as some environment changes we’ve made to make the game feel more immersive and reactive to the player. Stay tuned!
-BEN