Interview

Guy posted this interview with me on both his own Geekorner and Figure.FM. Awesome! The first part is all about Panty Explosion, what the game is about, why we chose that name and how Matt and I work. The second part, which I guess will get posted at some point, is all about Classroom Deathmatch and The Magical Land of Yeld. Thanks Guy!

Podcasts and minitaures

The Pulp Gamer podcast had a nice review of Sea Dracula in their September episode. They also said some nice things about Ocean and Panty Explosion.*

You can hear the whole thing here. They start talking about sea Dracula and the other games around 18:05.

The Screaming Alpha did a nice review on Left Hand Miniatures fantastic Japanese school girl figures. Remember those? The ones that were made to go with Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch. It’s a very flattering review (which is good, becausethese are really great figures), and they say some nice things about Panty explosion and Classroom deathmatch toward the end of the article. Cool!

*Something that did bother me about the podcast, one of the participants (the female one) compared Panty Explosions Japanese school girl subject matter to a game about necrophilia that they had talked about at some earlier point. One of the participants clearly new what the game was about and defended it, but the others were pretty obviously just taken by the name (which I’m used to, and is somewhat forgivable I think). Still, the comment was less about the game (which, again,  I’m used to) and more  “Japanese school girls, eh? Nudge, nudge. wink, wink”.  I’m starting to feel bad for Japanese high school students. They haven’t  done anything to deserve this awful reputation they’ve gotten. Overall, I think the comment reflected poorly on the person who said it.

New Classroom Deathmatch game on Myth-Weavers.com

Here’s a link to a new online Classroom Deathmatch game that is just getting started. this is pretty much the best organized and presented CDM game I’ve ever seen, and it looks like the GM is still looking for players. So check it out, even if all you want to do is watch or read the GMs excellent write up!

kumoricon wrap-up

Here we go.

Matt, Nick, Ben, Alexis and I were invited to come to Kumoricon and run our games, as well as Maid RPG. This was a very last minute thing, and we barely had any communication with anyone at  the con prior to showing up on Saturday. Kumoricon is huge, crowded, messy and exhausting. It SEEMS to be much more disorganized then other large shows I’ve been to over the last few years, but there also seems to be a greater willingness among the attendees to just hang out and try whatever was in front of them. We ended up being stationed in a small room for the entire weekend, where we ran 7 or 8 packed games.  We were the only people to use the room for most of the weekend, so traffic was largely limited to people coming in to see what we were doing. There were a lot of neat things that happened:

- The ONLY advertising we had was a single sheet schedule posted to the door of the room we were using. Still, we had to turn away players from every game we ran, and most games were full with 7-9 players (Yeld was lightest at just 6, but that was because we put a cap on it early).

- People wanted to play our games. As Ben said over at his blog, we didn’t experience the normal reaction we get at game cons where people get weirded out by what our games are. Instead, people were ready to sit down and play our games without any kind of reassurances or convincing! Panty Explosion, Maid and Bliss Stage were all big hits BECAUSE of their sexiness, implied weirdness and appeal to a niche market, not despite of these things!

- Most of the people who played with us signed on for multiple games, and a few hung out for almost every game we ran. We had to sneak out of the hotel on Sunday night to avoid running even more games!

- Unfortunately we didn’t have any books to sell, but if we had we could have sold quite a bit. After every single game we ran players were asking to buy our books, often with cash in hand. We all came away feeling like we could have sold 5-10 copies of anything we ran just at the table. The dealers room was as packed as any I’ve ever seen, and the attendees seemed willing to buy anything. Next year I’ll plan to have a table, and expect to sell 20 copies of any game I care to bring. As a sales venue for MY games, I feel like Kumoricon trumps any con I’ve ever been to, including Gencon.

- The number of missed opportunities were staggering. We were invited to the show pretty late, but if we had been on board earlier we would have been able to organize many more games and a dealers booth. I feel like that would have just been the beginning of what we could do. Next year I’d like to host a panel, sponsor a contest, participate in the art show and the creative studio and take a whole lot more pictures.

- I think there are two notable differences between the attendees of Kumoricon and the game and comic cons I’ve been to, and that’s enthusiasm and age. Every single person I talked to at the show, whether painfully shy or aggressively friendly, was super excited to be there and very enthusiastic about trying… anything. The average age of attendees seemed to be much, much lower then most game and comic cons. Closer to 18.

- The main thing I walked away from ( and I think Nick, Matt, Ben and Alexis all agree) was a certainty that we had found our target audience, and that they were as enthusiastic and eager as we had always suspected they would be. I’ll be seriously reconsidering my interest in traditional gaming cons as a sales and promotion venue in the future.

So we’ll be going back next year, bigger and better.

Jake