So, armed with an animated trailer, a large banner, and some recently purchased Bluetooth speakers for his iPad, Trent would begin telling the world about Armello.Īrmello takes place in the land of, err, Armello. Staying at the Handlery Hotel in San Francisco, Trent had booked back-to-back appointments with press for pretty much the entirety of the conference.
Prior to this showing the only real funding that League of Geeks had applied for was for marketing purposes. The team had implemented a profit-share system best described as points-driven, where someone’s percentage was relative to their input.
What was being shown, although basic, was also made almost entirely out of pocket. Although a piece of background detail, the animated birds were one the first things added to the digital game. It had beautiful music, it had animated characters, and even had birds flying around the world.” That last bit in particular is telling - in a way, selling a vision is all about creating a specific type of atmosphere. “This was more about proving that we could bring a board game to life. But none of that was there in the demo,” Trent says. “We had a tabletop prototype where everything worked and had all the systems and depth in place. Now, you may be wondering if League of Geeks was jumping the gun a little bit, and should have waited until it had more to show. Everything else was on the long list of things that still needed to be added to the game. One where players could only really move around a rudimentary board and battle another character. At this point Armello was in a state best described as a tech demo. Plus, selling the vision kind of had to be the focal point. Armello was a board game where the background of a character was as important as the rule set. A grand fantasy, it had the high stakes political manoeuvring of something like Game of Thrones but did so with a cast of characters that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Disney animation. The world and setting wouldn’t be secondary, but instead, serve as the focal point for the pitch. Armello would be different, it would take the concept of a fun multiplayer experience where friends battle each other in the name of conquest and inject it with a sense of adventure, purpose, and character. And we hadn’t shown anything at this point, just an animated trailer.”Īt the time a digital board game for the popular Apple tablet was a static and all too cumbersome rendition of something like Monopoly. “No one externally had seen the build apart from a few close friends. “I was having a panic attack at 10,000 feet,” Trent recalls.
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