The second day of the Gotland Game Conference was the final day where all of our preparation and work would be shown.  We all were present for the entire day to make sure the showing of our game went as smooth as possible.  It also was a holiday which meant we would have more people attending than the previous day.  More Jury members played our game and some even returned to refresh their memory about the game as there are so many showing at the conference this year.

Our Virtual Reality spectator version of the game still had some strange bugs that would affect other matches that it wasn't spectating.  Rather than keep this option we decided to opt for the more stable version so that it would allow more people to consistently experience the game in it's current form.  This was particularly disappointing because it was something we really enjoyed showing off and quite frankly it was amazing to actually be INSIDE our map during the match.  It was a whole other level of spectating which we hadn't experienced before.  We hope to work on this some more in the near future.

When you work for two months to develop something for a two-day conference it can be draining.  It starts to hit you at the end of the day when you start to pack up that the conference is finally over.  The only thing that is left to do is to make sure that everything is cleaned up and get ready for the award ceremony.

There are a host of awards for the games that are presented at the conference and it is an honor to win any of them.  Some of the awards tend to lean towards the more student-side of things which, although can be interesting, doesn't tend to lend itself to the bigger picture for us as we are publishing this game.  This becomes important when people that are not familiar this conference have no context from which to understand an award.  After a small rest period the award's ceremony began and we patiently waited the results of each award as they were presented.

We were very honored to be presented with the award we felt best represented our efforts.  The Innovation Award is given to the game that meets the following criteria:A game that tries to pus at the boundaries of convention. A game that experiments in new areas:  be that mechanics, game play, audience type, genre, storytelling or character design.

This goes beyond mere interface and input device: it looks at the experience of the game - what you do as well as how you do it. Is the mechanic refreshing or new?

This is exactly what we wanted to achieve with our game.  We use the First Person Shooter genre as our base and add in the replay mechanic with a 1 vs. 1 competitive environment.  This validated our work as a beginning and provided us a framework from which to continue.  Thank you to Uppsala University and the Jury members of the Gotland Game Conference.