Slashware at Colombia 4.0 2022

The early 2000s were witness to the birth and first steps of the Colombian video game industry. A handful of indie game developers, packing more passion than knowledge, decided to venture into the unknown and laid the groundwork for the studios that came after them.

COVA is a group of Colombian video game companies seeking to provide an environment for collaboration in order for the industry to advance as a whole. As a member of COVA, last week we had the chance to have a booth in Colombia 4.0, the biggest tech conference in Colombia and one of the biggest in Latin America.

There, we had hundreds of people play NovaMundi and Ananias, providing us with a lot of feedback to improve them. There were many students that we hopefully inspired to follow their dreams to create their own games.

I also had a chance to finally meet Jose Manuel, the linguist with whom we have worked for many months in NovaMundi, and have a coffee with him and QuietGecko, an important part of the NovaMundi team (and who also helped out a lot in the event.

We were also interviewed by Canal13 Colombia (local TV channel) and Frecuencia Gamer, hopefully that helps more people know about our games and the things that are currently being produced in Colombia.

As always it was also a great chance to meet people from the game dev industry and build connections and friendships, even if this time I couldn’t attend any talks (and didn’t submit one this time, too busy!) or many social events, since I had to instead spend my time in the booth and the logistics associated with it. I got to at least spend some time with fellow indie dev 0xAFBF and part of the Indie Level Studio team in Bogotá.

However, I had the chance for some of the top speakers on the videogames track (including Mauricio Navajas, president of ADVA) to try out NovaMundi and give me their feedback on the pitch decks for upcoming projects. Carlos Rocha (dev of Cris Tales) also played for a bit and gave me some good ideas to improve the flow of the first minutes of the game.

And that’s it for Colombia 4.0, 2022 edition! maybe next time I’ll submit a talk and have a more relaxed time 🙂