Hi, I’m Adam “Gahlammon” Dachtera, team leader and main designer of the Bullet Waste, here to tell you about the event we’ve attended lately.

Let’s go!

The event I’ll be talking about is the ZTGK, 16th edition of it to be precise, in which we participated two weeks ago. It stands for Zespołowe Tworzenie Gier Komputerowych (Collaborative Development of Computer Games). It’s a competition in Łódź that takes place once a year at the end of June. Teams of students can submit their projects there, choosing one of several categories, like “Mobile Games” or “Virtual Environment”. After that, they are rated by people from the game industry to distinguish the ones that are truly special or have a feature that catches the eye.

The most important part for us was the exhibition. It’s where you can show your game on a stand, while experienced people (like jurors, gamedev specialists and organizers) are walking around, playing and giving feedback. What’s more, you can also show your project to people really similar to you: young developers creating one of their first games. For me, it’s a great advantage, as these people will most likely understand your project.

First time?

It was the second time we have shown our project this way. The first one was at the Kolejna Konferencja in Bydgoszcz, two months earlier. If you’re interested, here’s the blog post about our experience at that event and importance of showing your project in such places. In short, we were provided with a place to show our game to a wider audience. We received a lot of valuable feedback back then that helped us define the way of further development of Bullet Waste.

That’s why we’ve decided that we definetly have to do it again. And so we’ve signed up for the ZTGK, an event that we’ve heard about from someone at the Kolejna Konferencja. This one was set in Łódź, not so far away from our location (Poznań), but still a three-hour ride.

It’s not about the awards

We treated the ZTGK more like an opportunity to show our project than a competition. That’s because our game is being created by more than six people, so we could only join the “Show Your Project” category. This one, unlike the others, has no award for the first place. Project in that category can only be given a special award from one of the sponsors.

Later during the event people told us we should’ve tried to join the “Games Design” category anyway, as our core team consists of about six people, so it would be justified. Maybe they were right, but I found that a little unfair for the rest of the team to be excluded like that. Also, we’ve been looking for a place to show our project, not a competition - an award would be nice, but it was not the reason we went there. But I digress, let’s go back to the beginning of the event.

Excuse me sir, would you like to play?

So, when the day has come, we went there to setup our stand. As always, it took a little bit of improvisation…

We had three computers, two of which were for the people to play. One of these was recommended for the jurors, having a slightly higher fps count. Meanwhile, our third computer had the gameplay showcase video looped on it. It worked out great, drawing people’s attention and allowing us to show the gameplay to everyone who had no time to play or couldn’t do it because both computers were occupied. We also had some leaflets and more importantly - stickers to share with the people who were interested in our project, because we learned in Bydgoszcz that people really like them. It’s also a good way to be remembered after the event. For example we saw that someone put a Bullet Waste sticker on a wall, so yeah, I guess we left our mark in Łódź.

Old, not so great demo

The build we brought to the event was not fresh off the line. Actually, it was just a slightly patched version of the one we had shown in Bydgoszcz two months earlier (for more details, here is the changelog), so we knew that there were some issues with it. We’ve already taken care of some of them and others are being fixed right now, but we still haven’t completed the new demo and it’s all just work in progress. That’s why we had to go with the old one, and risk complains about the things we’ve already known require changing.

Funnily enough, our patches also backfired, creating an annoying bug: enemies were teleporting back to the nearest walkable surface instead of dying after falling into a chasm. It was probably caused by the fix of a bug where enemies weren’t attaching to the ground after landing in some places. I guess the patch we introduced went a little too far with helping them with their landings. It surely was pretty annoying for some of our players at the event. Our bad, we’re gonna fix it in the next update and break something else instead.

Anyway, we’ve gathered a lot of opinions. Some of them were similar to the ones we got before, but they weren’t useless, because they reminded us of what people like the most about our game. There were also some suggestions that we haven’t heard before. I think we’ll make some corrections to the direction we’re heading with our curent changes based on that information.

Grand finale

The presentation I was talking about was on the first day, followed by the afterparty. On the next day was the award ceremony. We slept that night in a small room consisted of nothing but beds and returned to the event the next day, hoping that maybe one of the sponsors will appreciate our project enough to give it an award.

But well, at the end, we didn’t get anything. A little shame that no company decided to support our game, but as I said, for us it wasn’t about any awards in the first place. If you’re interested in the results of the competition, you can view them here. Personally I think the best game I saw on the event - aside from Bullet Waste obviously ;) - was Guiding Light in “Games Development” category, so my congrats to the 11 prototypes studio who created it, you did an amazing job!

But of course, it’s not like they’re the only ones who deserve the praise. In fact, there were many interesting projects that caught my eye, so if you participated in the event, please accept my congratulations for the job you’ve done working on your game :) I know how much it takes to create something like that, so respect to you for delivering it to the event.

We’ll be back

The ZTGK was a great opportunity for us to show our project to the people from the game industry as well as young enthusiast like us. We’ll surely come back there in the next year, maybe with an improved version of Bullet Waste, maybe with some other project - who knows? A lot can happen in a year…

Thank you for reading. I’d like to write a new post soon, focused on the changes we’re working on right now, so stay tuned for it. You can also join our discord where we always inform about every post arriving on the page (well, maybe except the last one…).

Gahlammon