Protoplay 2010 and awards

Phil, Amila, Tom, Stefan and Mark collecting their award

Well it's all over and Bears with Jetpacks have come away from Dare to be Digital 2010 as award winners!

We won the new [Adult Swim] award for creativity and unique game play! A fantastic award to take home as all competition we have prided ourselves on having a very distinct game in respects to both looks and gameplay.

Protoplay itself was a fantastic experience, although exhausting. From 10 till 5 every day we were constantly busy with people wanting to play the game, and the vast, vast majority seemed to really enjoy it. Over the course of the weekend we had loads of people come back to play again because they had enjoyed themselves so much the first time round, and quite a lot of grudge matches and ad-hoc tournaments sprung up. We also had people asking when the game was going to be released and where they could get it, which was incredible for the team and really made all our hard work worth it.
While it did get wearing teaching hundreds of people the same controls it was hilarious to see dads annihilate their 10 year old sons and dance around fist pumping, only for their sons to demand a rematch and destroy them.

We learned a lot about the game and how to teach it, and found that if people didn't pick it up straight away, after two or three rounds they could give anyone a good match, which is a real triumph for our simple control system. Also every character seemed to have their fans, and there was a fairly even split between people's favorite maps as well, which we again feel is a great testament to how much time we put into designing them all.

Overall we're all really pleased with how the game came out, and can be really proud of what we've accomplished. After speaking to mentors and the public about our game we are sure that if we continued to work on it, we could release fairly soon and it would be a relative success. Whether we get to do that or not mainly depends on how people find themselves after we've finished university. While we'd all love to continue working on Grrr! I'm sure none of us will want to turn down a job at a major studio, so we'll see how things go in the next few months.