A story about being indie at Gamescom

We just wanted to recap some of the stuff we’ve been working on lately. Most of our time (like 97%) is spent working hard on developing the game - when you’re only two developers on a game like this, you must make that your top priority. No one will build that game mechanic or squash that bug for you.

But in the last couple of months, we have also taken the time to plan our launch (apparently, you have to do that as well!). This included visiting Gamescom back in August to show off a slice of the game to journalists and start planning on how to localize our game, so we also met with agencies that specifically work with making our game accessible outside of the languages we master. And there’s a lot of text in VICE Undercover (a lot). We’ll touch more on localization later because it’s a post in itself for a game like this.

Steam post image (Click the image to read The Gamer's article by fantastic Meg Pelliccio, who came by to play VICE Undercover at Gamescom!)

Let’s focus on Gamescom. We’ll give you a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to be at the show as an indie game studio.

Arriving in Cologne, Germany - where Gamescom takes place - we realized our hotel was way the fuck out of the center of Cologne (ah, that’s why it wasn´t priced $$$$$ like all central hotels during Gamescom!). Gamescom gives you a train ticket included in the price to attend the show, so you can use that to travel to and from the show for free - fabulous!

First off, you need merchandise. For yourself, and if you have some spare money after that - to give to people you meet at the show. We walked around the city and found local businesses that helped us print t-shirts and coffee mugs (RARE - they were so expensive to print!).

We were proud, so we photographed them and sent them to our friends.

After all of that, we had some drinks and German food (we might get back to THAT later) to plan our upcoming days.

We had a big day tomorrow, so we called it a day early— well, kind of early. The best part of Gamescom is meeting all the other developers from around the world and hanging out at bars and restaurants. So deciding to go to your hotel is always hard, but we did eventually.

Here, we’re carrying the merch through multiple security checks. It felt like five security checks.

Gamescom is a frigging maze. Finding our booth took a while, but all our brains merged - we managed.

If you’ve visited the show or seen pictures, you visualize the mega booths of the AAA studios, right? This was our “booth” or meeting room for the week:

Real shit.

And we’re not complaining. Thanks to UBER Strategist for giving us an indie-friendly price that made this possible. It was small, but we made it work. Worth noting here is that there is an indie area at Gamescom that’s possibly cheaper, but you often get an open-air booth and not your own room. We had to get our own space for a game like VICE Undercover, which requires concentration and the possibility of enjoying the fantastic soundtrack without disturbance.

In this room, we spent all our days (luckily, we had some short moments where we could visit the indie arena, which was awesome) meeting with journalists to show off a slice of VICE Undercover.

But first, some last-minute technical problems to solve. Always.

Nervous but excited, we could start showing off the game. And we have to say thank you to all the journalists who came by. Everyone was so friendly and genuinely interested in the game. It humbled us.

Unfortunately, you need to eat to regain energy. Why we say “unfortunately” is because this is usually the Gamescom diet:

This is a $10 hotdog. And what’s up with German mustard? Dear God.

Eat this disgusting thing, then go back to our small meeting room to grind more meetings.

This is repeated from the first day to the last. And you’re pretty much running on fumes the last day.

Literally.

And that’s how you get coverage for your game. You must be out there, showing it off and hoping someone thinks it’s interesting enough to write or talk about. And from the reactions we got from everyone who took the time to meet with us and play, VICE Undercover seems to scratch an itch that few other games do.

Stay tuned for more frequent posts on our Steam page in the upcoming time, with the next ones focusing more solely on the game than this post did. But we hope this was an interesting behind-the-scenes of a small indie studio at Gamescom, and don’t forget to follow us on X for more frequent updates!

P.S. Thanks again to every journalist who took the time to meet us. We’re humbled!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1953850/VICE_Undercover/