2016 marks my third year attending SyndCon, a private gaming convention for members of the oldest online gaming guild – The Syndicate. Bryan Christian, Holoseat co-developer and Model B co-founder, was the person who invited me to join the Syndicate. Once I joined, Bryan urged me to attend my first SyndCon in 2014. I am so glad he did.
Slide from our 2014 Presentation
Bryan didn’t just invite me to come to SyndCon that year, he also insisted we bring Holoseat with us and get feedback from the attendees about it. After all, where better to take a new kind of gaming peripheral than a conference full of people who spend a good deal of time playing online games? Bryan ensured there was space for us to give live demos and that we were on the program schedule so we could share our project’s story with all of the attendees.
We walked away with some truly valuable feedback:
- the responsiveness needed to be improved
- we needed to add an option to buy Holoseat with a set of pedals included (most testers did not have an appropriate set at home)
- people were surprised by how the physical interaction through Holoseat made the games more immersive
- people were very interested in buying their own Holoseat
The plan after Holoseat’s first year at SyndCon was to update it and bring it back in 2015. Unfortunately, life had other plans and the project sat without substantial updates for the next year. Bryan and I still attended SyndCon in 2015, just without Holoseat…
Big mistake. Everywhere we went at SyndCon we got asked, “Where is Holoseat?” or “When can I buy Holoseat?” or “What happened to Holoseat?”, leading to the lesson of SyndCon 2015: Always bring Holoseat to SyndCon.
So, here we are in 2016 and we are on our way to SyndCon once more (this time with Holoseat). We have updated almost everything about Holoseat to address the feedback from our fellow Syndicate members, including the move from a hobby project to a business venture. Bryan has once again made arrangements for demos and presentations so we can get more great feedback from real players. I can’t wait to see what we learn this year.
LLTS!
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[…] a panel Friday afternoon where we presented the lessons learned over the past two years (see my previous post) and our plans to take Holoseat to version 1.0 (that’s another blog post). We also held […]
[…] Last year was all about migrating Holoseat from a hobby project to a commercial venture. We started the year by incorporating Model B, LLC and transferring the project to the Model B banner. We then began to formalize our development approach setting up an agile process to capture and track our work on Holoseat v0.3 (the first prototype designed for public demonstrations). The spring and summer were consumed by development work and preparations for SyndCon. […]