Virtualord at PLAY 2026, how it went

Last week I showcased my indie strategy game at "PLAY, the games festival", which is the biggest event dedicated to board and RPG games in Italy.

This was the first time I let people play it live. Before that, only a few members of my Discord server tried it and even if their feedback has been very useful so far, watching people playing it has been extremely helpful.

People played Virtualord, a lot

First of all I wanted to thank every single person that tried Virtualord.

Even if the indie games area was in a remote wing of the exhibition I still managed to get tens of people playing my game.

Guys played it, gals played it and surprisingly many kids played it too, some with their parents, but mostly on their own! One kid played it in the morning for a very long time and then he came back at the end of the day asking if he could play again!

Once again, thanks to each and every one of you.

The staff played it too!

Several members of the staff played Virtualord too, mostly when we were starting in the morning and there were only few visitors wandering around, especially in our wing.

One of them liked the game so much he played the whole first mission tutorial (15 minutes), plus the second mission on his own for over 35 minutes for a whopping total play time of over 50 minutes!

Watching someone playing my game for so long made me extremely happy and proud. I hope more and more people will do it when I release the first public version of the demo in 2 months.

I got a visitor from Reddit

Surprisingly someone saw a comment I left on Reddit, where I was mentioning that I was going to be at this event, and showed up at my booth.

We also took a picture together, which actually is my only picture from this event. At least I can prove I was there!

How this affected the development

Watching people playing my game made me immediately realize what the main pain point were and what needed to be changed or improved, especially in the tutorial.

I didn't push people for feedback and I tried to not stay close to them while they were playing, this is because I thought this was the best approach for the audience there. Nevertheless I resecived some useful feedback and I learned a lot from what I saw.

I am going to discuss all changes and new features in the next dev log, which you will find here on Steam next week, but in the meantime I can tell you that the next alpha release of Virtualord will be way better than the latest one I released earlier this month.

Wishlist & follow

Virtualord The Virtual Conqueror