Over the past week, I found myself at not one, but two local tech conventions running booths and showing off what our industry has to offer (Victoria’s famous Gottacon, and UVic’s emerging Ideafest).
Gottacon opened their doors to the public last Friday, and right from the get go Kano/Apps had a team running full force at our booth. Demoing our latest web game, Free Rider HD, brought all kinds of individuals over to chat, ranging anywhere from 8 to 40 year olds, male and female. Free Rider, being an immensely difficult bike simulator game, was an absolute blast to be able to show off to the masses. To fully capture our cross-platform compatibility, we had both desktop and mobile devices on display for interested gamers to try out. This was a very cool experience, as we were able to cater to both the casual mobile gamers, as well as some of the people who were attending the ‘con for more hardcore games such as League of Legends or Starcraft. Seeing the enthusiasm for tech in Victoria doesn’t ever get old. Our booth was packed with attendees cycling through over the course of the weekend, right up until closing on Sunday. Events like this really go to show how booming Victoria’s tech industry is, which is fantastic news for people like us.
On Tuesday, I ran my own booth at Ideafest for a web application I’m developing, named GitTalk. The base platform for my website is to provide an all-in-one communication solution for collaborative teams in software development. Attempting to avoid the need for simple communication applications such as Google Hangout, GitTalk takes a highly developer-oriented approach to chat, and brings a feature set to allow this. Being able to present my application’s current state to a swarm of people whom I’ve never met was a large stepping stone for me. In past, I have always been fairly introverted with software releases, publishing my last game to the Windows store under a made up company alias (in fear of having a broken product directly linking back to myself). Having an event to showcase smaller projects, such as my own, to a rather friendly, open environment provides a fantastic opportunity for indie developers, and creative thinkers alike. Not very often is one able to show their work-in-progress to an academic community for critique and praise, without prior research and publication.
Ideafest, along with Gottacon show how far Victoria’s tech sector road map spans. With a bright future ahead, technology in Victoria shows no sign of slowing, especially when awesome events like these keep popping up!