We last looked at Monaco: What's Your's is Mine shortly after it won an award at the Independent Games Festival. The game is a four player co-op crime caper title where players pick different classes of criminals and try to work together to steal some precious goods. Monaco has come a long way on its road to getting a full release, that includes revamped graphics, new character classes and tons of other tweaks. So it was time for developer Pocketwatch Games to show it to the unwashed masses. PAX seemed like a good place to do this, but one problem for the one man studio - it's quite the investment. Thankfully that's where another Indie developer stepped in.
Andy Schatz joined with Chris Hecker, creator of SpyParty, and together they bought a 10 by 20-foot booth at PAX next month in Seattle. So they decided to chronicle the whole process.
Given that neither of us has been to PAX, and this is our first time running a booth at a trade show, we basically have no idea what's going to happen.
The whole article is an extremely interesting read and it goes to show that most folks don't realize all the politics and logistics that go into something as simple as "getting a booth at PAX." There's a lot of careful planning on just how people are going to play the game in an environment with 60,000 other people. It's incredibly interesting to see that both guys are using this as a chance to get a ton of feedback directly from the community as well as basically have a hands on beta test. It's something that's rarely afforded to developers in such a large scale.
Finally over at Monaco's Facebook page, some of the PAX material can be seen in picture form - including the swag bags - bags of diamonds. To be fair they aren't real diamonds, they are cubic zirconia - and they aren't swag for anyone, you'll need to win one of the hourly tournaments to earn it.
So if you are hitting up PAX next week, be sure to stop by the booth and give both Monaco and Spy Party a play!