By Arka Ray — President and Technical Director, Popularium
1. Two-part Execution Plan for Chaos Agents at Gen Con
We had a two part plan for the Gen Con event and World Championship:
First, we would introduce Gen Con attendees to Chaos Agents through hands-on tutorial matches at the Gen Con show floor. Those who enjoyed the experience would then be able to sign up to play in a World Championship Qualifier Tournament. Those who won a Qualifier Tournament would be qualified for the Gold Finals of the Championship, which would crown the first Chaos World Champions.
Second, we would host the Gold Finals of the World Championship at Sandbox VR in the Bottleworks District of Indianapolis. Players qualifying from Gen Con will attend the Gold Finals in person at Sandbox. Playtesters qualifying online will join the Gold Finals virtually and compete against each other and the new players at Gen Con.
So, the Gold Finals Tournament would feature a mix of new players who learned the game at Gen Con and experienced playtesters.
2. The Road to Gen Con
The Popularium team had to get ourselves to Indianapolis for the August 1st kickoff at Gen Con.
Our team was coming from different parts of the world: Jon and Sirtaj were flying in from Southern California, Kyle was coming in from the Fresno area, and I (Arka) was flying in from Mumbai, India, at the end of a long trip.
With some last-minute planning, our marketing partner Corvian Marketing was able to send someone to meet us at Gen Con by driving to Indianapolis from Chicago.
It wasn’t enough to get ourselves to Gen Con; we also needed to ensure that the equipment and promotional materials made it out to Gen Con as well.
Jon and Kyle put in a heroic effort to arrange for 16 high-performance laptops to be shipped to the Gen Con convention location at the Indiana Convention Center. Not just that, but Jon and Kyle also ensured that a Chaos Agents floor banner got designed and shipped to Gen Con, along with flyers and stickers introducing Chaos Agents and the World Championship. A special thanks to Popularium Board Director Jennifer Hinkel for her help in designing the Gen Con flyers.
The team assembled in Hall C of the Indiana Convention Center on Thursday August 1st to scope out the space and plan out the set up for the next day. We got familiarized with our space as well as the Convention Center, and planned out how to maximize the number of people whom we could bring over to our table.
There was some mild tension among our crew as the laptops and promotional banners had not yet arrived at the shipping center of the Indiana Convention Center. However, patience paid off; the laptops and banner arrived just before the close of business.
3. Setting up at Gen Con
The Popularium team arrived bright and early on Friday August 2nd at Hall C of the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis.
We had 3 tables set up for Chaos Agents: Two of the tables had laptops setup with Chaos Agents ready to run, for a total of about 15 computers, while the third table was set up with promotional materials introducing Chaos Agents and the World Championship.
Our plan for introducing Gen Con attendees to the game was as follows:
Arka would greet attendees as they passed by the tables with stickers and flyers and invite them to check out Chaos Agents.
Arka would lead those who showed interest in the game to one of the available laptops, and collect a “Gen Con Ticket” — this got the player access to the Chaos Agents alpha and perpetual access to the retail version of Chaos Agents. We had created an automated account creation experience that let new players easily sign up for Chaos Agents using these laptops.
Arka would hand the new player off to one of the “Chaos Teachers” — Sirtaj, Jon, Gem, or Kyle. The “Chaos Teacher” would guide the player through account setup and into their first Tutorial Match.
The teacher would then explain the details of how to play Chaos Agents as the new player played through the initial set of tutorial matches.
Those players who made it through the tutorial or otherwise showed promise were invited to participate in Bronze and Silver Tournaments to try and qualify for the Gold Finals of the World Championship.
4. The Response from Gen Con Attendees
Friday, August 2nd - The Opening Day As 10 am ET approached on Friday, we were still in the thick of setting the tables up. The laptops were mostly set up and ready to run Chaos Agents, as was the banner, but there were plenty of setup tasks remaining, including getting handounts printed with details of the Tournament.
Even with an avalanche of tasks to be completed on Friday morning, half of our team started greeting Gen Con attendees at the table and getting them into their teaching sessions, while the other half drove over most of Indianapolis collecting the materials.
By about 11 am, Gen Con was in full flow, with the lane next to our tables jam-packed with people. By about 12 pm, we started realizing that the next two days were going to be very, very busy for our team.
We had expected about half of the laptops at the tables to be occupied on average. To our team’s delight, from about noon on Friday August 2nd, all 16 laptops were occupied almost the entire time. As new players would learn the game and get into their second, third, and fourth Tutorial matches, they would just sit at their station for an hour, sometimes over 2 hours.
To keep up with demand, we had to bring our personal laptops into service and set new players up with them. We thought that 16 laptops would be plenty, but it turned out that we had vastly underestimated how many attendees at Gen Con would want to play Chaos Agents — and for how long!
After a while, by about 2 pm ET, the number of new attendees interested in trying Chaos Agents outpaced the number of people leaving — we had no space available and had to start a waitlist.
In fact, many new players would come back after checking out other parts of Gen Con to continue playing, prompting us to remind them that they could, in fact, play from anywhere, including their own laptops!
Saturday, August 3rd: The Chaos Continues and the Silver Tournament
The trend from Friday continued well into Saturday, as after an initial hour of relatively-peaceful teaching sessions, we saw a wave of returning players from the day before, many of whom brought their friends along.
Saturday was a blur for us all, with wave after wave of new players coming in to try the game. As word spread, friends and family of players who tried the game at an earlier time queued up to learn the game and play against their friends.
Several multiplayer matches got spun up as a number of Bronze-tier Tournaments were held to sort the best of the newcomers into Silver Tier Tournaments — effectively two Semi-Finals to get the final batch of players into the Gold Finals.
All the excitement from Friday and Saturday came to a head at 6 pm ET on Saturday August 3rd, as the top new players from Gen Con who had won themselves a Silver Ticket went up against experienced veterans of the playtest for a chance to get into the World Championship Gold Finals.
The Chaos Agents tables at Hall C were overflowing with returning players for the Silver Tournament and their friends and families. Even new players who hadn’t made it to the Silver Tournament showed up to cheer on their favorite Agents and players, as several new players such as Rylar, IAMDAN, and Dlion99 earned their golden tickets (with Dlion99 earning the “Best Commentary” award and Rylar earning the “President’s Bounty Award” for eliminating Raventhon).
Sunday, August 4th: The Gold Finals at Sandbox VR and crowning of the First Chaos World Champions
While half the team was wrapping up the last Silver Qualifiers at Gen Con, the other half headed to set up the Sandbox VR location to host the Gold Finals.
Our partners at Sandbox VR had done a great job of setting up the space for us, with a spread out “hangout” space with food, drinks, and photo-ops with the super-cool Chaos Agents banner. There was even a large screen where we could stream the games live!
The main event was to be held in a room with a U-shaped table and dark table cloth and walls, creating an appropriately weighty and tense setting for the Gold Finals.
Added Engineering Excitement! To add to the excitement, our engineering team decided to roll some Chaos dice and release a significant (but thoroughly-tested) update that added the much-requested terrain deformation and pathfinding collision features, which causes Agents be aware of and avoid obstacles on the map through our implementation of collision detection, as well as implementation of features such as water bodies slowing Agents down.
Though this 1.9.21 update was brand new, our team felt that the improvement in experience that players would have from collision detection and terrain-based pathfinding was worth taking the late change.
And kudos to our engineering team for making a good decision here: the Finals were no doubt heightened by terrain-based pathfinding, but all matches went off without a hitch.
Also a special mention to the engineering and community teams, especially Ben for quarterbacking the management of the Gold Tournament online using brand-new tools and to the community team for masterfully managing matches that involved Pods of players mixed between those at Sandbox VR in Indianapolis and those joining virtually from around the world.
The Gold Tournament ended with a nail-biting Finals match featuring 8 of the very best Chaos Agents and their players, many of whom were new players who had just learned to play Chaos Agents a day or two ago at Gen Con.
I’ll conveniently skip recounting the details of what went down in the Gold Finals as I would ask you to check out my very own World Championship Report instead, summarizing by saying that two Win Conditions — Brawlmaster and Survivalist — were won in the Finals of the Gold Tournament by the legendary Hamfist (directed by Andrew_Gross), with newcomer MasterTyler taking the Shardmaster win condition.
Simultaneously, 8 players who just missed the cut for the Finals played in the Consolation Round, with newly-minted stars such as Rylar and Ponyupbuttercup showing off their blossoming Chaos Broker skills.
5. Glory to the First Chaos World Champions: Andrew_Gross and MasterTyler!
This gives us 2 World Champions from the first ever Chaos World Invitational Championship: sage veteran Andrew_Gross and promising newcomer MasterTyler.
A callout to NWArkGuy of our veteran Playtesters and JayDee from our new friends at Gen Con for brilliant performances at the Gold Finals.
A huge thank you to our partners at Gen Con, Gen Con TV, and Sandbox VR for making the Chaos Agents Championship event possible and a tremendous success.