The awesomeness that was Pixelpop Festival 2015!

At Webster University's East Academic Building this past weekend, game developers, designers, programmers, artists, composers, content creators, and more both locally and around the nation flocked for the second annual Pixelpop Festival, courtesy of a joint operation between Anime St. Louis and Happy Badger Studio, a local independent developer here in St. Louis.

Unlike last year's event, this year's Pixelpop was two days long, officially beginning at 10 am and lasting until 5 pm. Plenty of festivities went on, such as demos of indie game developer titles like Hive Jump, SmuggleCraft, Iggy's Egg Adventure, Master Spy, Cards and Castles, Flip Hue, Feesh, Bloxels, and yeah, even my game, Super Push Adventure, this year in finished form. However, I decided against demoing both days and just did Saturday. This year I wanted a chance to see the show floor myself, something I wasn't able to do last year at all, regrettably.

Alongside demos and a full game room with every game you could possibly think of-- okay, that's an exaggeration-- but there were plenty of good games, such as Nintendo demoing Super Mario Maker for people in the main commons, and tournaments of games like Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Tetris, and Mario Kart 8 in the game room.

Anyway, as I was saying, alongside the demos and the game room were a myriad of half-hour to an hour panels and talks for a whole variety of topics and subjects. You had talks on being a student and getting into making games, talks about composing music for video games, starting one's own games studio, post-mortems, and much more. I was on three panels myself this past weekend. I talked on a panel about reviewing games for profit and for fun (which I obviously do on my other site, www.superphillipcentral.com), led by the awesome Josh Boykin of Gotgame.com, among other pursuits. I was the inexperienced part of the music for games panel which discussed a whole range of subjects regarding making music for the video game medium. Finally, on Sunday, Ryan Dampf of Living the Nerd Life led a discussion on content creation, such as blogging, vlogging, podcasts, and things of that nature.

It was overall a fantastic showing for the St. Louis gaming development community. I don't think I've ever been more proud of what I saw our people doing and showing, and that's not hyperbole in the slightest. Check out some photos I took from both days of the event.

I felt a little awkward at first having such a low-tech demo station compared to everyone else seemingly, but that feeling quickly came to pass as people started coming up to play Super Push Adventure.

As you can tell, I obviously spared no expense on this demo setup!

My first and very satisfied demo-er of the day!

This duo of brothers worked on this puzzle together.
One started the level while the other finished it. I'll allow it!

My friend Garrett here was not having any "tutorial levels." No, it was go big or go home!

Seeing people like my friend Scott enjoying themselves as they ponder
 the solution(s) to a given level is such an awesome sight!

I met this man, Corey, at Pixelpop when he demoed my game. When I received a ticket to The Legend of Zelda symphony concert here in St. Louis that Saturday night out of nowhere, he graciously took me to the concert. We quickly became friends on the ride there. Very nice guy.

This comes from TeamPixel. It's Excelsior! Rob Santos and his coworker and most likely friend, Dave (see? I finally remembered your name!), ran this demo booth.

This giant Jenga tower was part of a subscription service that delivers board games regularly to subscribers. When this sumbitch of a tower fell, everyone in the building heard it! You can be sure of that!

My friend Jen Patton was showing off the successful card game Flip Hue.

Donned in awesome lab coats, fully devoting themselves to their craft, these guys from Ginger Twins showed off the reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country 2D platformer Iggy's Egg Adventure. It's available now on Steam, and it's highly recommended. I hope to get them on SuperPhillip Central for an interview some time soon.

We had some celebrities in the building, too! Not just voice actress Danielle McRae either! No, the official Nindie developer Graphite Labs, based right here in St. Louis demoed the awesome Hive Jump, coming to Wii U next year!

Matt Siegel is on the right, and he worked on Cards and Castles, a highly successful digital collectible card game and tactical title. Sitting down at the table on the left is his lovely (and soon to be expecting) wife, Cora!

The team at Happy Badger Studio was showing off SmuggleCraft, coming to the PlayStation 4 , among other digital storefronts, early next year. My friend Dana on the left couldn't help but smile. To be fair, she has a lovely smile.

Finally, we have Bloxels, a PixelPress project where players place cubes in holes on a black board. They then use their smartphone or tablet to scan it, thus making a level for others or themselves to play. Very cool tech being displayed here. Blew me away.

So, as you can probably tell, there was a lot going on at Pixelpop Festival this year, and that was just the demos. I'll later be sharing some panels and talks, particularly ones with me in them since I know you're DYING to see those (you can't see it, but I'm rolling my eyes right now). Stay tuned to my blog for even more content coming soon!