Insomnia The Gaming Festival

While there was a big push in the final week to get us ready, Insomnia was everything we could have hoped for and more. We had fantastic feedback, from developers, to kids and their parents and die hard roguelike fans. All of them saw the vision for what we had brought and were very excited to chat to us about where we were going with the game.

One of the unforeseen highlights was the number of people who had friends or relatives from the narrowboat community who told us various stories and loved the representation in the game, even with the comedic zombies. When we explained about how we envisioned crafting, someone told us of a smith who has their own forge on a small boat behind their narrowboat. And when someone else who works on the Oxford canal says we’ve done a good job, we feel we must have done alright.

We ended the weekend having 48 physical play-testers as well as a mountain of feedback and praise. The elements that needed fixing were clear and both David and I had a real drive to continue onwards with developing this mad zombie boat game.