The highly anticipated Essen Spiel '22 has come to an end. We can not even find words to describe how much love and support we felt from this amazing community.
Let's rewind from the first day we arrived at Essen on the 5th of October. when we saw the Essenspiel welcome sign at the side of the road, reality hit us.
ARE WE HERE AS EXHIBITORS FOR REAL????? WHAT?! THREE NEWBIES??
So you heard the theory that you can never prepare enough, right?
Initially, we planned to stick the two posters on the wall and that's it. But after looking around other booths when we were done, we were like......yeah no way this is going to draw people's attention. It is too empty, nobody is going to come.
After a short panicking Echo came up with the idea that since we printed 5000 postcards as free giveaways, we can just use them as decoration on the wall, to create an art wall, additionally Julian went to copy shop and printed 15 A3 posters, so we can fill up the spaces above the art wall.
Doesn't look so bad, isn't it?
After we converted that Emergency, we were on the way to hunt down the games we wanted buy ( yes, totally taking advantage of early entry to the hall :))
.....also "Stalking" Dicetower I suppose.....
Echo was wandering around the Dicetower booth, being too shy to go up and talk to them.
The most stressful Day 1
Do you know the feeling when you are way too excited and nervous than your body can take? Do you feel nauseous?
Yeah, the whole way walking from the parking lot to the hall 5 was full of "What ifs...."
"What if nobody passes by?"
"What if nobody likes our game?"
"What if we forgot the rules while explaining?"
Once 10 am hit, all of our self-doubts were gone when the first two tables of players sat down and wanted to test the game.
Then the Convention just went so smoothly from there.
Well actually super well. Both of the tables were taken all the time, we barely had any time to eat or have coffee. Isn't it the greatest problem you can ever have?
We received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback regarding the game design and illustration of Wanderlust. The game is easy to understand but has lots of strategies in it for you to explore. Feedbacks are not just coming from consumers, but also from Industry professionals, one may or may not said that our prototype is the best they have seen/tested so far in Essen.
It was just SURREAL!
Not going to lie, preparing for a campaign or an exhibition is a test of team spirit, especially when each single of us has a day job to maintain, and a deadline to meet at work. The feedback we received is just what we needed to realize once again, we have a fantastic team that is passionate and talented.
Alright, alright....
I know it is time to stop bragging that our game is amazing, and our team is amazing. Deep in our hearts, we do want to give the biggest shout-out to every single one of you, who followed us on the socials, who take the time to drop by our booth, to teach us about your industry experience, to actually sit down and play a game with us even when you just have 2 days in Essen, to the people came back and back to tell us the game is amazing.
Here are some of them:
Needless to say, Essen was a great success and we had a blast.
Before the happy tears came out again,
we will have to end the post with what is the future of Pektis Studio.
We received a fair amount of interest from bigger publishers and localizers from different countries.
Nextstep for us will be to sort out a list of reviewers to send our prototype and to organize all the contacts we received from Essenspiel, as soon as we know the future we will for sure inform everyone.
while we are waiting on a more definite answer we are still aiming to have the Kickstarter campaign in March/April time.
So if you like Pektis Studio, if you like Wanderlust, Please subscribe to our newsletter and spread the word for us.
Until next time.:-)
-Echo